Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal by Jameson S

THE NEW MIDDLE AGES

Chaucer and the Death

of the Political Animal

Jameson S. Workman THE NEW MIDDLE AGES

BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor

The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender anal- yses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Patronage, and Piety Medieval European and Heian Japanese edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On and Cynthia Ho Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Later Middle Ages Literati Tradition by Laurel Amtower edited by Sherry J. Mou Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Investiture Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century edited by Stewart Gordon France by Constant J. Mews Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault edited by Elizabeth Robertson and by Philipp W. Rosemann Christine M. Rose

For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in Burgh the Middle Ages by Frances A. Underhill edited by Francesca Canad é Sautman and Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Pamela Sheingorn Middle Ages Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Ocular Desires Jane Weisl by Suzannah Biernoff Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon Listen, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and England the Formation of Religious Women in the by Mary Dockray-Miller Middle Ages Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth- edited by Constant J. Mews Century Woman Science, the Singular, and the Question of edited by Bonnie Wheeler Theology The Postcolonial Middle Ages by Richard A. Lee, Jr. edited by Jeff rey Jerome Cohen Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies Ages to the Renaissance of Discourse edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare by Robert S. Sturges A. Lees Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Joan of Arc and Spirituality Arthurian Tradition edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler by Catherine Batt The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Southern Low Countries Religious Literature edited by Ellen E. Kittell and edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Mary A. Suydam Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Clusters of a Dark Age Image Worship and Idolatry in England by Paul Edward Dutton 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and edited by Emma Campbell and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England Robert Mills by Elizabeth Scala Queering Medieval Genres Creating Community with Food and Drink in by Tison Pugh Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Eff ros Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire The Middle Ages at Work by Anne McClanan edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images Chaucer’s Jobs edited by D é sir é e G. Koslin and by David R. Carlson Janet Snyder Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John by John M. Ganim Carmi Parsons Queer Love in the Middle Ages Isabel La Cat ó lica, Queen of Castile: by Anna Klosowska Critical Essays Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, edited by David A. Boruchoff Gender, and the Iberian Lyric Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male by Denise K. Filios Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in by Richard E. Zeikowitz Medieval England Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, by David Gary Shaw and Politics in England 1225–1350 Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages by Linda E. Mitchell edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc Wenzel by Maud Burnett McInerney Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative duQuesnay Adams, Volumes 1 and 2 Adventures in Contemporary Culture edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy by Angela Jane Weisl False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Capetian Women Middle English Literature edited by Kathleen D. Nolan by Elizabeth Allen Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval in the Middle Ages English Nunneries by Michael Uebel by Anne Bagnall Yardley

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Modern Cultures: New Essays Ovid to Chaucer edited by Lawrence Besserman by Robert R. Edwards Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk Siewers edited by Bonnie Wheeler Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, Medieval England and Other Cultural Imaginings by Frank Grady edited by E. Jane Burns

Byzantine Dress: Representations of Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France? The Secular Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Case for St. Florent of Saumur Painting by George Beech by Jennifer L. Ball Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the Middle Ages “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, by Erin L. Jordan 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Diffi cult Middles The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500: by Jeff rey Jerome Cohen Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, by Gretchen Mieszkowski and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen C. Sweeney The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in by Patricia Ranft the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson On the Purifi cation of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 Erotic Discourse and Early English by Paula M. Rieder Religious Writing by Lara Farina Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in edited by Michael Goodich Medieval Literature by Sachi Shimomura Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays On Farting: Language and Laughter in the edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Middle Ages Meecham-Jones by Valerie Allen Lonesome Words: The Vocal Poetics of the Old Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and English Lament and the African-American the Limits of Epic Masculinity Blues Song edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. by M.G. McGeachy Schulman Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: by Noah D. Guynn An Edition, Translation, and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th-15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Medieval Romance and the Construction of Political Exchanges Heterosexuality edited by Mar í a Bull ó n-Fern á ndez by Louise M. Sylvester The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Process Rape in the Later Middle Ages by Albrecht Classen by Jeremy Goldberg Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in Medieval Literature the Fifteenth Century by Cary Howie edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle by Heather Blurton English Literature by Tison Pugh The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in Fourteenth- by Christina M. Fitzgerald Century Spain: Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Louise M. Haywood by Holly A. Crocker The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women in the Late Middle Ages by Jane Chance edited by Catherine E. L é glu and Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Stephen J. Milner Literature Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and by Scott Lightsey Identity in the Chinese Middle Period American Chaucers edited by Don J. Wyatt by Candace Barrington Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Modern Hispanic Literature Literature by Emily C. Francomano by Michelle M. Hamilton Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna Studies by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, Lifshitz and the Relevance of the Past The King and the Whore: King Roderick edited by Simon R. Doubleday and and La Cava David Coleman, foreword by Giles by Elizabeth Drayson Tremlett Langland’s Early Modern Identities Chaucerian Aesthetics by Sarah A. Kelen by Peggy A. Knapp Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art Christi Drama edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, by Theodore K. Lerud and John K. Downey

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Archipelago, Island, England Medieval Landscape edited by Jeff rey Jerome Cohen by Alfred K. Siewers Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics Political Women in the High Middle Ages by Susan Signe Morrison by Miriam Shadis

Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism Medieval Wales and Post-Medieval Reception edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon edited by Sarah Salih and Meecham-Jones Denise N. Baker The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance by Mary Catherine Davidson by Seeta Chaganti The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle of Their Collected Correspondence and Related Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade Writings edited by Matthew Gabriele and Jace translated and edited by Mary Martin Stuckey McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler

The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe English Translation of the Complete Works edited by Theresa Earenfi ght (1376/77–1445) by Albrecht Classen Visual Power and Fame in Ren é d’Anjou, Geoff rey Chaucer, and the Black Prince Women and Experience in Later Medieval by SunHee Kim Gertz Writing: Reading the Book of Life edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Geoff rey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Liz Herbert McAvoy Medieval Studies and New Media by Brantley L. Bryant Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature: Singular Fortunes Margaret Paston’s Piety by J. Allan Mitchell by Joel T. Rosenthal Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis English Literature by Theresa Tinkle by Kathleen E. Kennedy Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English The Post-Historical Middle Ages Literature edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia by Roger A. Ladd Federico Magnifi cence and the Sublime in Medieval Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofi ction in Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music the Critical Tradition edited by C. Stephen Jaeger by Geoff rey W. Gust Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a in Global Perspective: Translations of the Sacred Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France edited by Elizabeth Robertson and by Kathleen Nolan Jennifer Jahner Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Beyond Talking Birds edited by Carmen Caballero-Navas and by Lesley Kordecki Esperanza Alfonso Contextualizing the Muslim Other in Outlawry in Medieval Literature Medieval Christian Discourse by Timothy S. Jones edited by Jerold C. Frakes

Women and Disability in Medieval Literature Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New by Tory Vandeventer Pearman Discussion in Interarts Theory by Claire Barbetti The Lesbian Premodern edited by Noreen Giff ney, The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt Literature and Culture: Ninth-Twelfth Century AD Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: by Nizar F. Hermes Legally Absent, Virtually Present by Miriamne Ara Krummel Reading Memory and Identity in the Texts of Medieval European Holy Women Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and edited by Margaret Cotter-Lynch and Performance Brad Herzog by Sharon Aronson-Lehavi Market Power: Lordship, Society, and Economy Women and Economic Activities in Late in Medieval Catalonia (1276–1313) Medieval Ghent by Gregory B. Milton by Shennan Hutton Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of by Sally A. Livingston Medieval England: Collected Essays edited by Leo Carruthers, Raeleen The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec Provocative Work of Terry Jones edited by R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Takamiya Literature: Power, Anxiety, Subversion by Mary Hayes Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the by Michaela Paasche Grudin and Muslim Other in Medieval Germany Robert Grudin by Jerold C. Frakes Studies in the Medieval Atlantic Fairies in Medieval Romance edited by Benjamin Hudson by James Wade Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects: Figures Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the of Desire in The Canterbury Tales Perle -poet, and the Cloud-author: Seeing from by John A. Pitcher the Center Writing Medieval Women’s Lives by Linda Tarte Holley edited by Charlotte Newman Goldy and The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Amy Livingstone Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocris y The Mediterranean World of Alfonso II and edited by Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman Peter II of Aragon (1162–1213) Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and by Ernest E. Jenkins Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman Women in the Military Orders of the Crusades by M. C. Bodden by Myra Miranda Bom Icons of Irishness from the Middle Ages to the Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages Modern World edited by John M. Ganim and Shayne by Maggie M. Williams Aaron Legassie

The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Reading Skin in Medieval Literature Identity, 1300–1600 and Culture edited by Mark P. Bruce and edited by Katie L. Walter Katherine H. Terrell The Medieval Fold: Power, Repression, Shame and Guilt in Chaucer and the Emergence of the Individual in the by Anne McTaggart Middle Ages by Suzanne Verderber Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: The Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the Received Medievalisms: A Cognitive Geography Sefer Yetsirah of Viennese Women’s Convents by Marla Segol by Cynthia J. Cyrus

Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts The King’s Bishops: The Politics of Patronage in edited by Carolynn Van Dyke England and Normandy, 1066–1216 by Everett U. Crosby The Genre of Medieval Patience Literature: Development, Duplication, and Gender Perilous Passages: The Book of Margery by Robin Waugh Kempe , 1534–1934 by Julie A. Chappell The Carolingian Debate over Sacred Space by Samuel W. Collins Francis of Assisi and His “Canticle of Brother Sun” Reassessed The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and by Brian Moloney Fantasy Past edited by Tison Pugh and Susan The Footprints of Michael the Archangel: Aronstein The Formation and Diff usion of a Saintly Cult, c. 300-c. 800 Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture by John Charles Arnold edited by Gail Ashton and Dan Kline Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots: Poet Heroines in Medieval French Narrative: A Life in Perspective Gender and Fictions of Literary Creation by Catherine Keene by Brooke Heidenreich Findley Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval edited by Sarah Sheehan and Literary Texts Ann Dooley edited by Jennifer N. Brown and Marla Segol Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination Music and Performance in the Later by Angela Florschuetz Middle Ages by Elizabeth Randell Upton The Medieval Motion Picture: The Politics of Adaptation Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community in Late edited by Andrew James Johnston, Medieval Marseille Margitta Rouse, and Philipp Hinz by Susan Alice McDonough Wales and the Medieval Colonial Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the and Power Twelfth Century by J ó hanna Katr í n Fri ð riksd ó ttir by Michael A. Faletra Power and Sainthood: The Case of Consolation in Medieval Narrative: Augustinian Birgitta of Sweden Authority and Open Form by P ä ivi Salmesvuori by Chad D. Schrock

The Repentant Abelard: Family, Gender, Women, Enjoyment, and the Defense of and Ethics in Peter Abelard’s Carmen ad Virtue in Boccaccio’s Decameron Astralabium and Planctus by Valerio Ferme by Juanita Feros Ruys Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Political Allegory Cross-Cultural Encounters by Amanda J. Gerber edited by Karina F. Attar and Lynn Shutters Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature Religion, Power, and Resistance from the edited by Serina Patterson Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries: Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne Playing the Heresy Card of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience edited by Karen Bollermann, Thomas by Alfred Thomas M. Izbicki, and Cary J. Nederman Narratives of the Islamic Conquest from Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist: Medieval Spain Old English and Old Norse in His Life and by Geraldine Hazbun Work by M.J. Toswell Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, Race, Caste, and Indigeneity in Medieval and the Medieval Imagination Spanish Travel Literature by Alexander N. Gabrovsky by Michael Harney Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe The Gnostic Paradigm: Forms of Knowing in edited by Irit Ruth Kleiman English Literature of the Late Middle Ages by Natanela Elias Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal by Jameson S. Workman Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-Century France Heloise and the Paraclete: A Twelfth-Century edited by Elisheva Baumgarten and Quest (forthcoming) Judah D. Galinsky by Mary Martin McLaughlin CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF THE POLITICAL ANIMAL

Jameson S. Workman

Palgrave macmillan CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF THE POLITICAL ANIMAL Copyright © Jameson S. Workman 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-45651-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission. In accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN The author has asserted their right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc., One New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

ISBN 978-1-349-55561-1 E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–44864–4 DOI: 10.1057/9781137448644

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Workman, Jameson S. (Jameson Samuel), 1983– author. Chaucer and the death of the political animal / Jameson S. Workman. pages cm.—(The New Middle Ages) Summary: “A radical departure from mainstream historicist criticism, Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal builds a Chaucerian metapoetics from the perspective of the classical Platonic and medieval Neoplatonic traditions. Workman identifies a genealogy of poetry in which history and eternity represent warring epistemologies, each desiring to subdue the other and become the dominant knowledge condition in Art”-- Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, –1400—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR1924.W68 2015 8219.1—dc23 2015011859 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. To Mom and Pop. This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xv

1 Poetry’s Old War 1 2 The Broken Flood of the Miller’s Tale 21 3 The Runaway Gods of the Manciple’s Tale 51 4 The Lost World of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale 83

Notes 209 Works Cited 247 Index 267 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

esides a grade-A childhood, the only other way to endure something B truly excruciating like writing a doctoral thesis, packing it away in the memory box, and then digging it up again to turn into a book as you stumble wraithlike through the door after work is with a long arc of intellectual support. It can’t be episodic support either—the kind of support that comes in fits and starts. It has to stretch like Clotho’s chord from the early days of consciousness and continue right up until the afternoon you finally cross your fingers and write, “The End.” This book is dedicated to my parents. We go on all sorts of adventures. I dropped out of preschool when I realized it was cutting into my quality time with Mom. And Pop and I are probably going to work in a broken- down bistro one day. Nothing too fancy, just somewhere we can practice French and make a few new friends. I’ve had the best teachers. Mr. Dennison and Miss Brunolli at Nelson Elementary. “Mr. D.” isn’t with us anymore and I feel bad for anybody who didn’t meet him. He used to call “Tuesdays” “Tues-dees.” Then came Miss Shintaku in junior high. She loved the unlovable. In high school it was Mr. Stobbe. He’d stand on his head for art. He’s done more good than he knows. The American University of Paris looms large. This book is something like a love letter to my time there. Or a unified theory of those semes- ters where I had classes on Euripides, the Commune, one on Descartes and Hume, and another on Baudelaire all in the same day. Marc Pelen is the last of his kind. A one-man secret society. A real cosmic myth and a hero of mine. His influence is all over this. But then again, so is J ér ô me Game’s. J ér ô me Game sees the connections in everything. He taught me philosophy and gave me Rimbaud. Must be hard for professors to know when they’ve hit the deep nerve, changed the way you think about the world. Petermichael von Bawey, Oliver Feltham, Geoff Gilbert, Christine Baltay, Randall Blatt. I always meant to write and say thank you. xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At the University of Oxford my thesis supervisor was Vincent Gillespie, a crucial figure in my life. Vincent has been there for me since this was all just loose electricity. People say things like, “I couldn’t have done it without you” to make some other spongy point. When I say, “I couldn’t have done it without Vincent Gillespie,” I mean it in its incor- ruptible sense—I would be bootlegging or just plain causing a nuisance if he hadn’t shepherded me through this. Vincent is family. Also at Oxford is Kantik Ghosh, whose pediatric burden is to wake up every morning and singlehandedly resupply the aquatint of that place. Dartmouth’s Peter Travis is one of the world’s most nimble and exciting Chaucerians, a fact that I’ve confirmed over and over since our first conversation at the White Horse on Broad Street. And I’ve never met Louis Fehrenbacher. But I’m a fan. I’d like to implicate the following for showing me some grace: Charlie Finch, Zach Stone, Alan Moore, John Seitzer, Peter Wolf, Barbara Erskine, Charles Laurence, Chris Reeve, Sensei Halliburton, Will and Franny Robson, “Deet,” Sandwich, Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin for the pichets du rouge maison , J ér ô me Cornec and the ghosts of Bouquet “The Green Café ” Saint Paul, Monsieur Patrick and the Bar Du March é, Becca, Tom, Jordan, Hops, and all the holy fools of 53 Lexington Street, and the true innocents like Lucy and Blue. Chris Compton is the only person alive who can look death in the eye and offer it a drink. No one knows what we’ve been through, but that’s how you get a best friend. The gentlemen of the Oriel College Porter’s Lodge are all mystics and that place is an exotic bird sanctuary. And there is The Bear Inn and Stuart Scott. We all miss Stuart Scott. Stuart was the glue. An Oxford icon and a dear friend. I know I speak for Andy, Dennis and Christine, James, Captain America, the young men of the Frewen Club, and other agitators of the revolutionary entity simply known as “The Office.” As for Doc, Catherine, and Jonny: things can get crazy but I sure dig your family. You might be surprised to learn that Doc once sang tenor. Ask him sometime. Linds, Steph: I tried to think of an inside joke or some gigantic secret to put here. But I think we are the inside joke. All siblings are an inside joke. What’s deadly serious is the following list of people I’ve always liked: Uncle Greg, Aunt Sue, Granny Audrey, Grandma Timm. And I think Jamie, Elmer, Tony, and The Colonel would have gotten a kick out of this. Thanks to everyone at Palgrave Macmillan and the New Middle Ages for taking a chance on this. Bonnie Wheeler, Brigitte Shull, Ryan Jenkins. You’ve been wonderful. I’m very grateful. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii

Finally, Julia. There’s really nothing better than Julia. Julia’s the last rare thing. There is, of course, “the Moon.” But it’s such a remote second that it may as well be your last name: “Julia Moon.” I’ve had a crush on you since I was nineteen. We should get married once a day. Then we’ll get old and gray and we can travel back in time and meet in the same place and do it all over again. People will ask, “Hey, what’d you two do all the time?” and we’ll say, “Just got married once a day, mostly.” Jameson Workman 18 July 2015 Washington Square Park, New York City

CHAPTER 1

POETRY’S OLD WAR

t’s probably a crime against storytelling to begin a book with a list but, I generally speaking, so is literary criticism. So I’ll also acknowledge as a plain fact that the following list should be much longer and its simple ‘trajectory’ more indebted to the complex migratory dynamism of the “Lobster-Quadrille” 1 than the honest eschatology of the arrow. And I evoke that particular dance not just because it was more or less free in form and encumbered by empiricism but also because it was an international sensation that attracted dancers of wildly divergent talents and temperaments. Its only stipulations were to “partner up with a lobster,” toss it “as far out to sea as you can,” “swim after it,” “turn a somersault in the sea,” and that, “we can do it without lobsters, you know.” It appears to have been the creation of “the Classical master . . . an old crab, he was,” who “taught Laughing and Grief.” 2 How it survived from one generation to the next is a subtle question. “‘Would you like to see a little of it?’ said the Mock Turtle. ‘Very much, indeed,’ said Alice. ‘Which shall sing?’ . . . The two creatures, who had been jumping about like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly . . . ‘Oh you sing,’ said the Gryphon. ‘I’ve forgotten the words.’” 3 Which brings us to the list. The shadows in Plato’s cave were the first systematized whispers of a tradition that lived on in classical writers like Cicero, Ovid, Apuleius, and Horace. Transmitted by baptism through Augustine and Boethius, the tradition took on a cross-shape and spent a happy century or two in France under the watch of Alain de Lille, Chr é tien, and the Roman de la Rose . It seems to have had quite a lot to do with a “twelfth-century Renaissance” in Chartres but achieved greater temporary fame when it helped kindle a fourteenth-century one in Italy. There, it elevated Boccaccio’s ordinary ten-day-long d é jeuner sur l’herbe during the choke of plague into one of the great pillars of human literature. In Dante, it descended into hell and returned with the map. The strange old secret 2 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL didn’t cause much of a stir when it arrived safely in England. It might have gone entirely undetected had we not found its giant footprints on the road to Canterbury. According to D.W. Robertson,

Chaucer’s obvious admiration for Ovid, for Boethius and for Jean de Meun places him firmly in that tradition of “poetic philosophy” which extends from early glosses on Homer through the fathers of the Church and down to the more sincerely Christian humanists of the Renaissance. If he sought, like Ficino’s Plato, to “joke seriously and to play most studi- ously,” he was only fulfilling the potentialities of the tradition in which he worked. 4

In the same spirit Yasunari Takada argues,

There are notable references in Chaucer to the Neoplatonic auctores such as Martianus Capella, Boethius, Macrobius, and Alain de Lille. They stand us in good stead in showing Chaucer working not in insular seclusion but in an active dialogue with the great continental tradition of Neoplatonism. The image of Chaucer as a cosmopolitan poet is indeed familiar enough, particularly to the reader of Troilus and Criseyde , where is suggested in a Dantesque manner the author’s ambition to affiliate himself with the great European Tradition of “poesye,” i.e. Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. The transcultural negotiation here is in a sense simple and straightforward and even austere. 5

It also dropped anchor through Christianity. Plato’s collision with soteriology 6 was one of the friendliest treaties in the history of ideas. They were finishing each other’s sentences by Augustine’s time. Around the year ad 386, Augustine described the contours of a life-project. Though “resolved not to depart from the authority of Christ on any score whatsoever . . . as for what is to be sought out by the most subtle reasoning . . . I’m still confident I’m going to find it with the Platonists.”7 It was a bold alchemy of ideas and a journey he wouldn’t complete until around four years later when he speculated, “If Plato and the rest of them, in whose name we glory, were to come to life again . . . with the change of a few words and sentiments, they would have become Christians.” 8 In the Confessions ,

Since you first of all desired to show me . . . that your “word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” you provided for me through some certain man, swollen with the most monstrous pride, some of the books of the Platonists translated from Greek into Latin. There it was that I read, not indeed the POETRY’S OLD WAR 3

very words, but to the same purpose, and reinforced by manifold reasons, that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”9

According to Peter King, Augustine’s discoveries, like most great ones, had been previously discovered.

His apparently extravagant claims for Platonism were largely in keeping with a philosophical consensus that was already a century old, for philosophical inquiry over the ages had reached the conclusion that Platonism—especially of the sort defended by Plotinus—was the correct view. (Philosophical thought in Augustine’s day was “post-Plotinian” much as that of our own day is “post Freudian.”) That is why Augustine does not draw a sharp distinction between philosophy in general and Platonist philosophy in particular. 10

That said, I’m less concerned with how the philosophy arrived than how it worked. Chaucer’s intuitive contact with this heritage speaks to something deeper and broader than its own genealogy. Behind his poetry is a basic and pervasive epistemological perspective toward language and reality. At its very fundamental level it suggested the veiled existence of a superior order of meaning in the universe that couldn’t be accessed by empirical knowledge and our life lived in time —in looser terms—that the Fall cleaves the world in two and symbol abandons speech. “Storms of sad confusion” 11 gather and the exile of human history begins. Brief slivers of light shine through prior to the day when it is all reversed, light from a coming world where John tells us “the city had no need of the sun.” 12 In the tradition of medieval Neoplatonism, one of these families of ‘sun- less slivers’ is Art, which reunites within itself a lost human inheritance and brings back into being the time prior when we were whole and our reference was direct. Poetry becomes, to use Wordsworth’s phrase, “The language of my former heart.” 13 Like so much of the vertical “battle- beauty” 14 of cathedral High Gothic, this kind of poetry tries to trespass upper heaven and “rise out of human sight.” 15 After Philosophy’s jailbreak from the cave, Socrates thins the plot for “dear Glaucon”: “[For] this entire allegory, you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world.” 16 Because, “souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell.” 17 Cicero echoes:

Soar upwards to this place, which is its [the soul’s] proper habitation and home. And its flight will be all the more rapid if already during the period 4 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

of its confinement within the body it has ranged freely abroad, and, by contemplating what lies outside itself, has contrived to detach itself from the body to the greatest possible degree. 18

That “upper world” where the soul “ranges freely abroad” is, quite literally, a world apart from naturalistic and monistic traditions to which poets of the euhemerist19 temperament belong, poets for whom “myth is history in disguise.”20 As we’ll see, it’s also a world apart from the medieval view that literature is a branch of moral science. In this epistemological story of the universe, poetry and philosophy lead an insurgency by lament against material history. The civil war in language began as a territorial dispute over Eden. Chaucer’s poetry participates in a particular thread or current in the history of ideas, one in which poetry attempts through “Laughing and Grief” 21 to divest itself of phenomenal conditions—the complete range of passive and active historical affects—in order to, according to Paul Ricoeur, “reach the mythic level where its function of discovery is set free.” 22 There, on the crowded staircase of art’s ancestral heroes, “poesye,” “subjit . . . to alle poesye,” locates its sense of species being.

Go, litel boke, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! But litel book, no makyng thow n’envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace. (Troilus and Criseyde , V: 1786–1792) 23

Marc Pelen’s Latin Poetic Irony in the Roman de la Rose is an under-discovered treasure that speaks well to Chaucer’s poetry. “At this point, a discussion of the ironic unity of the Roman can, I think, best be conducted from the memory of a contiguous Latin culture.”24 The long horizon of “the memory of a contiguous Latin culture” is more than a textual tradition. It is a tradition of mind and of literary spirit. And if anamnesis 25 is a working philosophy, that “contiguous Latin culture” is the memory of a memory. It was born into a literature whose life purpose was to nour- ish and protect it as a paradox—to always remember forgetting. “Oh you sing, “ said the Gryphon. “I’ve forgotten the words.” 26 To that effect, the great achievements of Chaucer’s imagery, the dialectical traditions from which he draws so much vital life, can frustrate any generation’s theory of art.27 Oftentimes his next-door neighbors seem more foreign to the POETRY’S OLD WAR 5

Canterbury mood than writers that lived centuries before or after. Here, literary proximity will wield more power and context than chronological. Gower was a friend but Ovid was a hero and an archetype. So we turn to philosophical taxonomy and discover great mystery in Chaucer’s writing, riddles with long inheritance, and specters upon which even the most powerful interventions of social criticism cannot hang f lesh. Squint hard enough, perhaps, and see a political message. Many have, I couldn’t. Suspend it as poetry, let it feed on the ether a moment, and confront something stranger: a Neoplatonic Dadaist, a grand format hallucination, and a stubborn fantasy’s “vast exercise in linguistic nostalgia.” 28

Terminology and Methodology I employ these terms consistently: “occasion,” “content,” and “form.” They occur on a sliding scale. Historical meaning stands at one end and a historical meaning at the other. By “occasion” I understand a literal cause for a poem: the death of Scipio—the historical death of the historical Scipio that occasions the writing of Cicero’s De Amicitia . Next comes the poetic “content” of Scipio: the warrior of the Punic Wars, the scourge of Carthage. “Not everyone can be a Scipio . . . and call to mind the cities he has taken, the battles he has fought on land and sea.” 29 Scipio, friend and companion, “with whom I shared my public and private cares . . . a friend such, I believe, as I shall never have again.” 30 Then a bizarre metamorphosis: Scipio becomes an oracle. Literature carries him away. He returns to haunt human dreams as an emissary of immortality. Cicero inaugurates the “form” of Scipio.

Human souls were of God; upon their departure from the body a return to heaven lay open to them . . . Scipio held this same view, for only a few days before his death . . . he . . . devoted almost all of the conclusions of his discussion to the immortality of the soul, making use of arguments which he had heard, he said, from Africanus the Elder through a vision in his sleep. 31

Centuries later, Macrobius’s Scipio “treats the same subjects” as Plato: “the conditions of souls liberated from their bodies,” “but as revelations which came to him in a dream.” 32 This is the shadow Scipio who arrives by dream to the Parliament of Fowls in full Neoplatonic ascent. The human epoch is “but a kind of death”: “‘Ye, withoute drede,’ / And that our present worldes lyves space, / Nis but a maner deth, what wey we trace.’” (53–55). History will end before it began. The constellations will take 6 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL their old shape: “In certeyn yeres space, That every sterre shulde come into his place, / Ther it was first.” (67–69). By “content” I understand the entire phenomenology of experience both as it obtains under the banner of historical being and the representation of historical being in art. It is a category to which the various schools of historicism speak so powerfully: the poem as manifest through interlocutory 33 rhetoric, tropological ethics and their subversion, the tectonics of social satire and political voice—each subsequent literal evocation that stands distinct and prior to its kidnapping by poetic metaphor and reversal by irony into Scipio’s ‘phantom state.’ Finally, by “form” I understand the aporetic34 architecture of that phantom state—an unspoken order of metaphorical abstraction that antagonizes and reinterprets the previous two, one whose substantial identity belongs to a Platonic epistemology of ideas. It is this third category to which Chaucer’s favorite philosophers speak so powerfully. The transfer of meaning from “occasion” to “content” is analog. It is the unified upward sweep of an air raid siren: the Scipio of history becomes the Scipio of heroic meter and part of the literature of empire. The transfer to “form” is aporetic. It is the sound of an orchestra tuning—next comes music. Scipio prophesies in reverse that human history was the false eyewitness to its own meaning. One continues. In the other, something ends so something else can begin. The medieval Platonic ascensus does not take steady steps from life to art and from time to eternity. Form actualizes through the symbolic frustration and ultimate destruction of the previous two categories. Poetic eternity occurs on the ruins of time rather than as the apotheosis of time. We apprehend poetic form as ‘metapoetics,’ the high-climbing process of abstraction where metaphors take themselves as objects of enquiry. A poem becomes object to itself . Next it gathers everything of its species within reach. At this point, the great assembly of poetry becomes the means of a poem’s self-exegesis. “But subgit be to alle poesye” (Troilus and Criseyde , V: 1790–1792). That poetry is the private arena of its self- exegesis is not a new notion, but it has made less of an impact in Chaucer studies than certain strands of philosophy 35 or in classical scholarship guided by Platonic introspection. 36 Even so, poetry’s “self-exegesis” is a paradox. It offers no key to its interpretation while providing the precedent for its interpretation. The uncooperative “precedent” poetry provides is what Peter Travis describes: “The premise upon which every metaphorical construct is grounded is, simply, another metaphor.” 37 At one level of theory and language, poems beget poems, and part of the unenviable job of the literary critic is to consider according to a limited linguistic perspective infinite regressions of a symbolic order. Even if the history of poetry is a house of mirrors, nevertheless, one manner of POETRY’S OLD WAR 7 reading declares that ‘poetry about poetry is our foremost concern’ and then discovers meanings produced within a poem’s metaphorical sched- ule that self-reflexively constitute a philosophy of itself. In achieving disembarrassment from the literal sequence of “occasion” and “content,” by ending the outward movement of symbols toward history and collapsing them inward, metapoetic literature achieves “form,” achieves the means to self-generate without reference to its in substantial phenomenality. It is in this manner that the idea of a ‘poetic eternity’ obtains. It begins at the level of language when this ‘insubstantial phenomenality’ gives way to autotelism, to a tautological world of symbols that can’t be seized at a moment of literal predication. Next it occurs according to the particular power of the medieval mind to posit the Mind of God as the inacces- sible telos of all teleologies. This is not the end of referentiality or some pure solipsism. It’s not art for art’s sake. To the medieval Neoplatonist it is an epistemic mode. It could be R.J. Tarrant’s sangfroid: “Virgil seems to have found Plato’s view of the physical world as a mere shadow of a purer world a useful structure of thought.” 38 But the medieval mood certainly feels more like what Travis describes: “Augustine’s heart-wrenching difficulties derive in a large part from a host of metaphysical complexities . . . [that] meet at the precise point of the world’s beginning.” 39 “God” as category or reality is a brute fact of linguistic reference. Even if you drop the theology, the idea is that there’s something limitless closing in around the limits of language. Which is to say, for those who argue that severing language from its literal referent, from its historical being, is a ‘loss’ of meaning, this type of poetry says the opposite. For those who argue that the insertion or detec- tion of historical being imparts ‘more’ meaning to art, this type of art says that doing so makes it non-art. What the medieval Neoplatonist tries to express is that the loss of meaning began the day language found a literal referent and spoke history into being. In the medieval exegetical tradition, this is the Friday of the Fall. “And on a Friday fil al this meschaunce” ( Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 3341). In Chaucer’s poetry, we first testified to the blue-ruin of historical being in the clicks, whistles, “Cokkow!”40 and “Cok Cok!”41 of onomatopoeia. Over time, grammar’s natural powers of definition increased. Still, Augustine argued, language is foreign to itself. “We don’t learn anything by these signs called words.” “They remind us to look for things,” “the signification hidden in the sound.” 42 Instead, the negation of historical being in language is the meaning of language. The end of history is prophetic metapoetry. It describes the coming day when the noetic Fall reverses and language takes back its prelinguistic powers. When Dante approaches God in the Paradiso , he is a self-contained circle. 8 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

O Light that aye sole in thyself dost bide, sole understand’st thyself, and being self-known, self-knowing, lov’st thyself, self-gratified! . . . so I, before that marvel strange and new, wished to discover how the image lay within the circle. 43

When in the metapoetry of the medieval Neoplatonist we sense the movement toward something that “sole understand’st thyself” and “in thyself dost bide,” even that which “lov’st thyself, self-gratified,” we understand a new mimesis. Alien and unnatural, it is the imitation of divine being, the ventriloquism of supernature. So much of the mood of this imitation is wistful and religious. It is the story of something lost. When Chaucer’s medieval metapoetry imagines itself without reference to anything but itself, it suspends the Fall, places itself “before that marvel strange and new,” and disappears into the apophatic protest against decay. There is such a thing as ‘historical ahistoricity.’ Put another way, a poem’s denial of language and history, the surpassing bid for ahistoricity, can be the historical context through which criticism responsibly manages a poem and other poems like it. “Historicism” is not history. No one, I believe, ever said it was. It is a school of thought and a theory of art. It promotes “history” as the cognitive setting of poetry. There is an historical tradition of literature, an older ars poetica , which posits a systematic logic of ahistoricity. That logic deserves to be confronted before saying, ‘Nevertheless, history’. And as we’ll see, that logic played fair. It woke up every morning for a few thousand years and took an honest fight to natural theories of art. Every mode of reading brings us a new Chaucer. The resounding success and domination of historicist criticism brought us its own Chaucer, one more politically and socially subtle than others before him. What went missing is Chaucer the theorist, Chaucer the mystic, and Chaucer the Platonic comedian of austere poetic practices and influences, “a man on intimate terms with the invisible”44 whose philosophical mentors didn’t take for fact what the historicist does—that all writing is a political activity. If there is a ‘why’ to a Chaucerian metapoetics, it is that another ‘new’ Chaucer is hiding in plain sight, even if we have to travel backward to the strangest moments of literary prehistory to find him. And it’s not for novelty’s sake that a metapoetic Chaucer is desirable. It is because every positive critical choice produces a negative. Every time a critic depicts all uses of human language as historically inscribed, the vacant space opposite fills with the suspicion that perhaps some human uses of language are not, or at least that some tried not to be. Over the span of many years and many reimaginings of that historicist principle, the POETRY’S OLD WAR 9 vacant space has grown to bursting size. There is an entire world inside that space now and in order to recognize its shape, like recognizing the shape of anything so immense, we need to look down from above—see poetry from the perspective of metapoetry. When we do, we find that we are not alone at the sinewy ends of new philosophies but plumb in the middle of an historical art form that flowered into one of its highest expressions in the later Middle Ages. The idea of the metapoetic is so tangled within the poetic that it is difficult to describe apart from the medium in which it occurs. Metapoetics is a mode of cognition, a point of view, and as is often the case in the Platonic tradition, something like an inside joke for the writers who practice it. Even those treatises we regard as outright ars poetica are woven into the normal processes of ironic literature. Horace’s Ars Poetica is written in a voice. It plays in misappropriation, prays to the Sosii 45 and Parcae with equal fear and trembling. Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods requires us to tease theory from mythography. Alain de Lille’s Good and Perfect Man tells the story of language’s resurrection from death as much as man’s. Chaucer’s most sophisticated artistic mission statement is a poem about chickens. For this reason, the metapoetic must be observed in action. It has less to do with applying a set of principles, beyond its baldest definitions, than it does witnessing self-constituting principles emerge from unexpected places and collecting them into a transhistorical curio. Arrange it by peccadillo like Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, 46 that mad hobbyist’s bonfire of “age” and “geography” for theme , and we begin to recognize an ironic unity. The poems and poets we will consider seem to always attempt the following things: to kiss the superlunary steps of “alle poesye,” to reassert language as visionary prelingualism, to intermingle ridicule and bonhomie while dismissing this world for a better one, to deny that there is a knowledge of the body, to depict sexual bliss as the cure to metaphysics—to lament the passing of the Golden Age. The principal object of this study is to demonstrate that loose unity in its own language. It attempts to clear away some of the phenomenal brush that may have accumulated under the historical critic’s watch in order to appreciate from within Chaucer’s poems the philosophical and mythological rather than the purely social fabric of his very medieval performance. However extreme the literary worldview, it belongs to a mood and a moment, part of the pantomimic pre-psychology of Literature. In the effort to understand its power and possibility and, generally speaking, ‘see where it leads,’ I find it more useful to accept and expand rather than deny the premises. What follows is probably a very bad way to read Hemingway, even if it proceeds with plodding sobriety on the subject of talking chickens who can’t agree if 10 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL dreams are echoes of pure knowledge or the ordinary effects of constipation (Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 2961–2962). In that spirit, I pursue the architecture of Chaucerian metapoetics in four stages. This first stage is a sketch. The next chapters take focused readings of a single poem in order to prefigure philosophies that culminate in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. For clarity it is structured something like a story. It begins and ends at a tree. It begins at a tree where an Old Man hoards the metals that were mined to bring down the Golden Age and ends at a tree where a rooster heroically reinstates a Golden Age that has yet to lapse. In between, one chapter ponders Nicholas’s scream for a Flood to drown a fallen world for the second time and another covers its eyes and looks through its fingers at Phoebus’s bloody attempt to bring heaven crashing down to earth in a pulp romance with “wyf.” Each of these shorter studies meets up with the longer concluding chapter in order to answer questions of first principle: What is art? Did it fall along with human history?

Chilled by the length of years The first story that ends at a tree begins millennia prior to the unfortu- nate sunrise pub session during which the Pardoner’s Tale takes place.47 The antinomies that live inside the Pardoner’s Old Man and the unresolved questions of time and eternity will eventually come to a somewhat happy perch on Chauntecleer’s branch. Until then we must understand how an Old Man knows something we don’t: why he knows death is a tree; why he sends others in his place. Perhaps the least obvious way starts here: What sort of cicada is he? By tracing the question as myth from the Greek classical age to the Pardoner, we’re able to appreciate the poem’s fluency with a long intellectual and symbolic heritage. There is a particular dex- terity with which Chaucer straddles the houses of Fame and Rumour to reanimate primordial problems of Parnassus from a fourteenth-century fireside. In this general approach are the beginnings of a methodology. Chaucer’s poetry actively and ironically asserts itself as poetic philosophy or metapoetics. It is neither purely the product of its time nor a poetic vision of its time, but a poetic vision of itself and of poetry, writ large. Like many Chaucerian tales, the Pardoner’s Tale begins its comedic descent at “prime,” the “morwe tyde” and the canonical hour during which the Parson tells us it “is moost covenable a man to seye his prey- eres, and for to thynken on God, and for to honoure God” ( Parson’s Tale , 707). Instead, “Thise riotoures thre of which I telle, / Longe erst er prime rong of any belle, / Were set hem in a taverne to drynke” ( Pardoner’s Tale , 661–663). Flanders is sick with plague. Death roams freely through the POETRY’S OLD WAR 11 countryside, but he lives “Henne over a mile, withinne a greet village” (687) where “he hath slayn this yeer” (686) “bothe man and womman, child, and hyne, and page” (688) “his habitacioun be there” (689). The rioters swear in drunken polyptotons to “sleen this false traytour Deeth / He shal be sleyn, he that so manye sleeth” (699–700). The narrator echoes, “Deeth shal be deed, if that they may hym hente!” (710). But the figure of Death, something of a Macguffin 48 in the poem, is not the only twisted thing wandering the nearby woods. “Whan they han goon nat fully half a mile, / Right as they wolde han troden over a stile, / An oold man and a povre with hem mette” (712–713). “Body” is confusion in the Pardoner’s Tale , especially an old man’s. The Host tells the Physician, “I pray to God so save thy gentil cors. / And eek thyne urinals and thy jurdones” ( Pardoner’s Prologue , 304–305). Indulgences guard the Pardoner’s body. “Oure lige lordes seel on my pat- ente, / That shewe I first, my body to warente” ( Pardoner’s Prologue , 337– 338). The broken body of Christ figures twice, unresurrected. “Oure blissed Lordes body they totere— / Hem thoughte that Jewes rente hym noght ynough” (474–475). “And Cristes blessed body they torente” (710). The rioters decide to ‘have a drink and think about it’ and toast a hellscape Eucharist next to a murdered friend. “Now lat us sitte and drynke, and make us merie, / And afterward we wol his body berie” (883–884). In a final confused turn the poem suggests a Platonic exit from flesh: “Whan that the soule shal fro the body passe” (940). At the center of this confusion is an Old Man who cannot leave his body behind. “Why livestow so longe in so greet age?” (719). The question is not ‘why are you so old?’ The question is how the man is so old for so long, how he lives at all, a walking, talking corpse in funeral dress. “Why artow al forwrapped save thy face?” (718), “as if he were an offence to their youth and vigour: ‘How can someone as old as you . . . possibly go one living?’” 49 For Derek Pearsall, “The whole tale has a weird and slightly surrealistic flavor—the lack of background, the alienation from ordinary reality.” 50 And of course the correct answer for old men who aren’t this Old Man would be something simpler: ‘Just old, I guess.’ His answer is strange. The Old Man tells us he cannot die. He’s not allowed to. “Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my lyf” (727). “For I ne kan nat fynde / A man, though that I walked into Ynde, / Neither in citee ne in no village, / That wolde chaunge his youthe for myn age; / And therfore moot I han myn age stille” (721–725). He’s gone to India and back looking for someone who would change youth for his years. No man wants to die. Here, no one wants to live like a dead man. So he pushes on, living on the “hint of an obscured memory.”51 “Thus walke I, lyk a rest- elees kaityf” (728). He cries out to the ground, his “moodres gate” (729) 12 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

“Leeve mooder, leet me in!” (731). But it is a ruse. Some other power sustains him; his grasp on life is tenacious. He wants to do it all over again, live again as a young man, auction off his old age like a counterfeit masterpiece to the West Egg arrivistes of this story. For this, he says he would “chaunge my cheste, / that in my chambre longe tyme hath be” (735–736). What the Old Man doesn’t tell the rioters is that he cannot reenter his “chambre” without youth. He was locked in that room for half an eternity by the Dawn. By the time he drifts through this poem he’s already escaped and fallen from classical heaven, wandered the whole earth on foot foraging for human bloom like a cat “sucking the breath of young children.” 52 He was not always like this, but a long time ago the gods played him a trick. The earliest version of the myth is the seventh century bc Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite . 53

So again Tithonus was seized by the golden-throned dawn from your family, a man like the immortals. She went to ask the dark-cloud son of Kronos for him to be immortal and live forever, and Zeus assented and fulfilled her wish—foolish lady dawn, she did not think to ask youth for him, and the stripping away of baneful old age. So long as lovely youth possessed him, he took his delight in Dawn of the golden throne, the early-born, and dwelt by the waters of the Ocean at the ends of the earth; but when the first scattering of gray hairs came forth from his handsome head and his noble chin, the lady Dawn stayed away from his bed, but kept him in her mansion and nurtured him with food and ambrosia, and gave him fine clothing. And when repulsive old age pressed fully upon him, and he could not move or lift any of his limbs, this is what she decided was the best course: she laid him away in a chamber, and shut its shining doors. His voice still runs on unceasing, but there is none of the strength that there used to be in his bent limbs.54

Translator Martin West’s footnote states, “This account seems to hint at the myth, first attested in Hellanicus . . . that Tithonus became a cicada. Cicadas begin to be noisy around dawn.” 55 Other histories take us in closer to this voice that “still runs on unceasing.” In the fragmentary version fifth century bc version of Hellanicus, the story ends: “Day fell in love with Tithonus, the son of Laomedon and brother of Priam, and had by him a son Memnon. When he (i.e., Tithonus) had become spent by a long life, the goddess turned him into a cicada. This is why the poet (i.e., Homer) compares the councillors, his relatives, to cicadas.” 56 The symbolic relationship of the cicada to tired rhetoric, old age, and even risking heaven and hell for a pretty girl was common myth in Homer’s time. POETRY’S OLD WAR 13

The two sages, Ucalegon and Antenor, elders of the people, were seated by the Sc æ n gates, with Priam, Pantho üs, Thym œ tes, Lampus, Clytius, and Hiketaon of the race of Mars. These were too old to fight, but they were fluent orators, and sat on the tower like cicales that chirrup delicately from the boughs of some high tree in a wood. When they saw Helen coming towards the tower, they said softly to one another, “Small wonder the Trojans and the Achæ ns should endure so much for so long, for the sake of a woman so marvelously and divinely lovely.” 57

The tradition exhibits distinct symbolic associations and philosophical dilemmas. Tithonus attempts to experience eternity, to enjoy the Dawn physically as a human lover. He lives ‘forever’ in comic cruelty. He is cast out in his never-ending old age, an old age that never “ranges freely abroad” 58 across the Ciceronian metonymy where it learns to negotiate the power of the soul and prophesy its impending release. 59 His rhetoric is trapped, suspended in history—bound to the single task of renewing his youth. “Tithonus [is] an example of what can go wrong when mortals challenge the limits of their meager span of life.” 60 In the context of Chaucer the dream poet, Tithonus is a nightmare in reverse: a waking life from which he can’t march by fantastic hibernation “unto the welle of Grace,” where “grene and lusty May shal ever endure” (Parliament of Fowls , 129–130). But not all transformations into a cicada are an epistemological dead- end in classical literature. Rory B. Egan argues that classical Greeks held “a related belief that by shedding its skin and sprouting wings on its fresh white body it could realize perpetual youth.” 61 Likewise, according to Janko, “Even if it is a lowly insect, the cicada was believed to have an immortality of a sort, since it was thought to feed on nothing but dew and to be able to rejuvenate itself by shedding its skin periodically, like a snake.” 62 However, the pickled wrecking of Tithonus’s old body and speech into a cicada’s is not immortality. Even a bug that can last as long as the world endures cannot last beyond it. When Tithonus is absent his problem persists in poetic discussions of the cicada: physical perpetuation, the incessant crying that falls upon Eos’s deaf ears, the Sisyphean shedding of old age for youth. Some form of antiphrasis must overcome the inability of perpetuity to reconstitute itself as eternity in poetry. In the Aetia , Callimachus writes,

For we sing among those who love the shrill voice of the cicada and not the noise of the asses. Let others bray just like the long-eared brute, but let me be the dainty, the winged one. Oh yes indeed! that I may sing living on dew-drops, free sustenance from the divine air; that I may then shed old age, which weighs upon me like the three-cornered island upon deadly 14 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Enceladus. But never mind! For if the Muses have not looked askance at one in his childhood, they do not cast him from their friendship when he is grey. 63

What Callimachus suggests very imperfectly is that a spectral negative exists to the tradition. Eternity can rescue him when the Muses do not “look askance” and “cast him from their friendship when he is grey.” If the entomological cicada carries the common sense telos of regeneration, the Aetia aims at something more resounding. What it aims at is this: the figure of the cicada is a double tradition, like Venus. In the Homeric Hymn, Eos locks away a shriveled Tithonus. He becomes a prisoner in his own house, quarantined to the former site of naturalism’s victory in the arts. Such is the nature of poetic failure and the experimental depiction of divine failure, both things perfected in Chaucer’s poetry. First the failed poet of love misappropriates the gods and imagines a world in which he becomes physically immortal by the uninterrupted seduction of the Dawn. Next, a negligent goddess cannot linger long in the bed of men and returns to her proper function as an agent of eternity. She resumes her “early-born” nature “by the waters of the Ocean at the ends of the earth.” 64 When she does, the bodily rhetoric of Tithonus loses its power to define her and begins a deathless rot. Speech reduces to sound and finally loses all meaning. So Tithonus becomes a cicada, physically enduring. We hear the breathless noise of his complaint every morning while Eos—young as she’ll always be—carries out another newborn sunrise on her hips. Callimachus imagines an exit from the poetic failure of Tithonus, charter member of ‘natural immortality’ and author of the perpetual cicadian dawn song. The Phaedrus names the exit. By the grace of the Muses a cicada crosses over from “the realm of the perishable.” 65

It is most unfitting that a lover of the Muses should be ignorant of such a matter. The story is that once, before the birth of the Muses, cicadas were human beings. When the Muses were born and song came into the world some of the men of that age were so ravished by its sweetness that in their devotion to singing they took no thought to eat and drink, and actually died before they knew what was happening to them. From them sprang thereafter the race of the cicadas, to whom the Muses granted the privilege that they should need no food, but should sing from the moment of birth till death without eating and drinking, and after that go to the Muses and tell how each of them is honoured on earth and by whom.66

Plato effortlessly elides Philosophy with the Muses: POETRY’S OLD WAR 15

But to Calliope the eldest of the Muses and her next sister Urania they (the cicadas) make report of those who spend their lives in philosophy and honour the pursuit which owes its inspiration to these goddesses; among the Muses it is these that concern themselves with the heavens and the whole story of existence, divine and human, and their theme is the finest of them all. 67

In the Phaedrus the central predicament is not whether poetry has a place at Philosophy’s table but how it too, like all rhetorical modes, can self- resurrect as a human activity in pursuit of form rather than one mired in epistemological instability. Socrates concludes, “Then we must examine the question we propounded just now, what constitutes excellence and its opposite in speaking and writing.” 68 Plato’s answer is simple enough: in order to generate “excellence . . . in speaking and writing,” language must appeal to the authority of poetry’s Muses and “concern [itself] with heavens and the whole story of existence . . . the finest theme of all.” 69 In a double tradition, the cicadas are a race of Tithonii, failed poets of experience, cursed like Echo to a sepulchral linguistic performance and a broken-record chorus of voices in search of a body. The story of an Old Man who cannot die is the story of what happens when a poem’s center of gravity shifts to material being. Here, quite literally, a body the size of a bug blots out the sun. But the cicada is also the ironic double suggested in Plato and Callimachus. “Before the birth of the Muses, cicadas were human beings.” 70 In the Phaedrus, transfiguration is a reward for the moonstruck praise of poetry. These day-old monstrosities become unin- hibited by natural concern—food, sleep, time. They drink in eternity and it sustains them. The lapsed Dawn of the Homeric Hymn kept Tithonus “in her mansion and nurtured him with food and ambrosia.” 71 Plato’s “sing from the moment of birth till death without eating and drinking.” 72 In an otherwise problematic speech, Socrates identifies what would artistically constitute eternity for the cicada. Their proper activity in poetry is ceaseless singing to the Muses, at whose birth “song came into the world”73 rather than ceaseless chirping to the sunrise of nature. It is a hermeneutic. Platonic philosophy seeks to overcome deciduous ontological orders in pursuit of an infinite formal epistemology. Poetry’s mission is to overcome language, its natural order—its empirical and social mode of expression— and become a new unbounded semiotic epistemology, capable of communicating realities beyond the reach of a physical system of signs. T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday calls it “the burden of the grasshopper,”74 to find the right song in this “time of tension between dying and birth.”75 In a Platonic conception of literature, poetry is the activity that releases language from literal referentiality in pursuit of a new anamnestic 16 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL symbolism. The self-conscious metapoetry of the passage is part of the bloodline of Plato’s wider philosophy. It is the beginning of a literary tradition to which Chaucer later lends his considerable talents. G.R.F. Ferrari writes that Socrates’s “philosophic art . . . investigates (among other things) the conditions of art in general, including its own.” 76 The Phaedrus is a mythographic reformer. It reduces the story to a simple opposition: cicadas exist in nature, they chirp at sunrise; they shed their old skin. Their silent kin exist in the Empyrean, “spend their lives in philosophy,” 77 sing the Muses’ song to Eos, and have shed years altogether. Entomology absent, these cicadas are not the cicadas in nature. They are participants in a symbolic order, relieved of their historical duties. Failed cicadas in art are natural cicadas. Failed rhetoricians in art invest a natural order of language with the power to deliver them from death. G.M.A. Grube writes of Plato’s Republic , “Plato is not laying down the rule that artists should hold the mirror up to nature, but blaming them because that is, in fact, all they do.” 78 Tithonus becomes a bug, nothing more. He makes Arachne’s mistake. Tithonus imagines Eos as a human lover. Arachne imagines the gods as animals. It is the opposite poetic tradition, a tradition perfected by Lucretius: “Let us allow ‘Neptune’ and ‘Ceres’ for ‘sea’ and ‘grain,’ ‘Bacchus’ for the proper word ‘wine,’ ‘mother of the gods’ for ‘earth,’ provided that he does not in fact allow his mind to be touched by base superstition.”79 Tithonus takes euhemerism further. His rhetoric does not say that an “Eos” is just a “sunrise.” It says, like any good Chaucerian anti- poet, that divinity is just another notch on the bedpost. It is an argument he marshals by his very being, an argument that ultimately serves a range of meanings antiphrastic to his life’s wilted opus in the silent and opposite movement of irony against the language in which it occurs. That cicadas could offer a symbolic escape from the failed rhetoric of death seems to be widely desired. The Phaedrus steps in to satisfy one of the secret wishes of poetry. In the Aetia “we sing among those who love the shrill voice of the cicada and not the noise of the asses.” 80 Of course, the mood of Callimachus lacks Chaucer’s mastery of the medi- ocre. Asses remain classical poetry’s whipping boy. In Metamorphoses XI , Ovid’s punishment for “dull-witted” Midas whose “foolish mind was destined . . . to hurt its owner” was to sprout the “ears of a slow-moving ass.” 81 Chaucer’s poems draw upon another literature in which eternity saturates the mundane and makes it easier to spot Eos’s unloved husband strolling through the bubonic fourteenth century. In Fitzgerald’s most Chaucerian moment:

Let’s join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let’s persuade our more erotic poets to write about POETRY’S OLD WAR 17

the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We’ll include all the most preposterous old wives’ tales now current . . . We’ll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he’ll become a byword for laughter the world over. 82

In his introduction to Walden , John Updike called Thoreau, “so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.” 83 Pan down to the desk of Chaucer, another “revered and unread” “perfect crank” and you’ll find that collection of “preposterous old wives’ tales”—blockbuster hogwash about voices from the deep working blue-collar jobs in Nazareth, Plato’s Demiurge sleeping on park benches in Gethsemane, speaking in “humble and homely parables.” 84 For Callimachus and Ovid an ass is a blunt object, poetically bankrupt. “Let others bray like the long-eared brute, but let me be the dainty winged one.” 85 For Chaucer, no “dainty winged one” by any measure, the world of myth has become a scruffier place. An ass prophesied to Balaam 86 and one of its progeny kept the dirt off God’s feet on the first Palm Sunday as he entered Jerusalem on the march to execution. Still, in poetry there are doubles to failed images. For every Tithonian cicada there is a Socratic messenger to the Muses. For every Old Brother Ass there is Balaam’s. And for every Old Man there is a New Man. 87 In Chaucer’s apophatic poetic, antipoetry is poetry.

Become old early if you would be old long88 We return to Flanders under the plague. These young rioters don’t meet Death itself, but they do meet a dead man walking. They meet a Tithonus who was like them a very long time ago: young and looking for a way inside a poem to do away with the life beyond death, to live in a world without it, collapse the sunrise into human form—negotiate the everlasting hiding behind the cover of time. Gudrun Richardson writes, “These are all labels, attempts to elucidate the Old Man by ascribing to him the characteristics of some other figure. As with any stereotyping, this inevitably narrows the perspective, preventing an analysis of the true scope of this complex figure.” 89 Fair enough, to each his own Old Man. But he doesn’t feel terribly narrow to me when the blood of Tithonus runs through his veins. Hunter H. Garder calls Tithonus “one of the para- digmatic figures of old age.” 90 David Lawton said it “takes a wise and learned critic,” like “J.M. Steadman, to sift through conflicting theories and tell us what we should have always known: that the old man is not 18 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL quite any old man but a typical, or prototypical, or archetypal old man.” 91 And if that’s the case, I’ve never met an old man who couldn’t die. They always seem to find a way, whether like Dickens’s “old lady with a hand- basket” who “died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two,” 92 or like Plato, who Cicero reports, “died pen in hand in his eighty-first year.” 93 The only one that couldn’t was once named “Tithonus.” And even as distant literary relatives, the philosophy of an entire poetic history speaks through him. “Why livestow so longe in so greet age?” (719). “Foolish lady dawn, she did not think to ask youth for him, and the stripping away of baneful old age.” 94 It was said, “His voice still runs on unceasing.” 95 Listen to his never-ending racket outside the gates of eternity. “I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late . . . leet me in!” (730–731). There, at “the ground, which is my moodres gate” (729) the heliophile turns bur- rower. Hear him try and return some unnamed gift. “Mooder, with yow wolde I chaunge my cheste. / That in my chambre longe tyme hath be” (734–735). But too much time has passed since “she laid him away in a chamber, and shut its shining doors.” 96 No answer from the silent sunrise of infinity: “But yet to me she wol nat do that grace, / For which ful pale and welked is my face” (737–738). Neglected since the Homeric Hymn ’s “first scattering gray hairs” 97 of perpetual decay, the Pardoner’s “oold man, hoor upon his heed” (743) circles the earth as the new Cain. And he looks the worse for wear by the time he wanders through the Pardoner’s Tale. He is nameless and without origin, even relieved of the scant description from the medieval analogues that called him “hermit,” “wizard,” or “philosopher.” 97 It is like the Phaedrus ’ cicada, a tradition in bare elements—the propping up of age and death to a universal artistic enquiry. The Old Man wants a new body. But the body is a prison. Macrobius writes, “Thus you see that Cicero, by the words ‘those who have flown from the bonds of their bodies, as if from prison,’ means both that the body serves as fetters and that it is a tomb, being the prison of the entombed.” 98 The Old Man thinks old age is a disease. But Old Age for Cicero is something to be desired young. He writes in De senectute , “For just as I approve of the young man in whom there is a touch of old age, so I approve of the old man in whom there is some flavour of youth. He who strives thus to mingle youthfulness and age may grow old in body, but old in spirit he will never be.” 99 Tithonus’s predicament is “Tullius kindenesse.” 100 Old age becomes a metonym for the soul prepared for its new life: “Become old early if you would be old long,” 101 because, “Is it not apparent to you that it is because the soul of the one, having a keener and wider vision, sees that it is setting out for a better country . . . ?” 102 Finally, there is the Old Man’s song, his chirping at the dawn—for the Pardoner’s Tale takes place at “prime” (662). The record is still broken and POETRY’S OLD WAR 19 his song is the same. It is the aubade of body in linear time, haunted for as long as he can remember by an ageless chorus and the world of the Muses. “The men of that age were so ravished by its sweetness that in their devotion to singing died before they knew what was happening to them.” 103 For the Pardoner’s Old Man, the nineteenth-century news we received of him by Tennyson was more of the same. A “gray shadow, once a man” roaming “the ever-silent spaces of the East.” 104 “For I ne kan nat fynde / A man, though that I walked into Ynde, / Neither in citee ne in no village, / That wolde chaunge his youthe for myn age; / And therefore moot I han myn age stille” (721–725). Even so, in Chaucer’s hands something changed in the Old Man. The formal garden of Classical infinity gave way to a more theologically and culturally demanding Christian infinity. The Old Man survived two eras of human appreciation for the power of life beyond the grave. He outlived the one less severely conceived, if we agree with the general proposition that the medieval idea of Satan constitutes a worse possible future than an eternity with Pluto and Proserpina. The Tithonus of the Homeric Hymn is shaped like a man whose youth keeps him in the good life. The Pardoner’s Tithonus is shaped like a man whose youth keeps him out of the afterlife. “‘Now sires,’ quod he, ‘if that yow be so leef / To fynde Deeth, turne up this croked wey, / For in that grove I lafte hym, by my fey, / Under a tree, and there he wol abyde’” (760–763). When the Old Man tells the rioters to take a short walk to the grove he tells them to walk to the end of the world. If Tennyson is right, it’s a place he knows well. “Here at the quiet limit of the world, / A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream.” 105 What they find there is something very much like the tree that stood at the end of the world that ours replaced, with the Golden Age pressed into florins. “Til he cam to that tree, and ther they founde, / Of florins fyne of gold ycoyned rounde” (769–770). But it’s simply the gold of nature rather than poetry’s lost ‘golden nature.’ It’s the tree at the end of Frost’s poem rather than the beginning: “Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold.” Time enters. The otherness twists into the tree we know. “Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief.” 106 There is a new way to cheat death in the Church Age. If the Old Man cannot have the young rioters’ youth, he can at least send them in his place to do what his crippled old age cannot. It was the same in Homer, “These were too old to fight, but they were fluent orators, and sat on the tower like cicales that chirrup delicately from the boughs of some high tree in a wood.”107 If any young rioter he sends after Death manages to land a lucky punch, then there is no eternity to bookend his vagabond life. Eos becomes human, like he always said she would. Perhaps then she’ll take him back. In the words of Orson Wells, “The only way to stay 20 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess I’ll concentrate on that. Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her. Maybe I’ll die trying.” 108 To bring this small portrait to a close and to draw our eye to a point later in the Tales : the tree in this poem is a liminal symbol, one that stands between two worlds, concealing its meaning from the Old Man like another tree will when a blue-blooded bird clings to its braches for dear life. Blake proverbed, “A fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.” 109 In that sense, it is like every symbol in art, visible for what it is not and invisible for what it is. Inside the Old Man’s corrupted natural philosophy is the muddy and malnourished intuition that a tree is more than a tree. We observe traces in his rhetoric that somehow poems do “sleen Deeth.” So he sends the rioters to destroy a symbolic order to which he is responsible but has not yet confronted. It’s a new Tithonus but the same long prevarication. But instead of calling in sick to miss his inevitable appointment with Death, now it’s the philosophically desperate gamble to eliminate the appointment altogether. It’s as though he has grown bolder in his wanderings. He has certainly grown less romantic, even in the short time since he passed through Troilus’s complaint: “And ek the sonne, Titan, gan he chide, / And seyde, ‘O fool, wel may men the dispise, / That hast the dawyng al nyght by thi side’” ( Troilus and Criseyde , III: 1464–1466). But there are things he hasn’t done according to the philosophy of the De Senectute : he’s yet to grow Old, yet to write a poem about “setting out” for that “better country,” 110 and has spent the last thousand years misinterpreting his own age. From this point forward, the principal aim of this study will be to observe Chaucer’s poetry as it reverses the Old Man’s gold under a tree into a rooster’s tree under the Golden Age. In between, things get much worse for The Art of Poetry. CHAPTER 2

THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE

hristianity inherits the poetic imbalance of classical literature’s C Old Man, his “natural immortality,” which—to my knowledge—remains peerless in the catalogue of Platonic oxymoron. The ambrosial plunderbund of Olympus merges into a more brooding and self-sacrificial singularity. A harder, incarnate deathlessness joins the contest to describe the aporetic divergence of eternity and perpetuity. Chaucer seems to have adapted without much fuss to this dual genealogy in the history of ideas: “And forthi yif we wollen putten worthi names to thinges and folwen Plato, lat us seyen thanne sothly that God is ‘eterne’, and that the world is ‘perpetuel’” ( Boece , V pr. vi, 96–98). From a different vista, the Miller’s Tale magnifies the same debate: Does poetry belong to the current “perpetuel” world where Tithonus exists by sheer tenacity or the delayed “eterne” one where he exists by sheer inevitability? Here, the attempt to empty the Flood of its religious meaning ignites a war of epistemologies. “Deerne love” and “Goddes pryvetee” are two universes set on a collision course. Human secrets will scale the wall to unseat God’s. The dust settles and the corroded theology of this New Flood opens on to a barren landscape. It is religious metapoetry, “the mighty, and the terrible God”1 cut loose from its mission and witness. Theology splinters into a chilly science of art rather than doctrine and “the rock of my strength, and my refuge” 2 gives way to Fame’s “roche of yse.” 3 It is one matter for religion to hover as medieval tropology, place Nicholas’s pagan spree in the crosshairs, and stump from our shores that “pride goeth before the destruction.” 4 It is another for religion to become the world-weary irony that exploits his shortcomings as a poet and mythographer. 22 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

The Miller’s Lost Life Story For both the Miller’s Tale and this book, a few obstacles need clearing before the story begins. The best backdrop for that steady and non- partisan purpose is the Miller’s Prologue and its magisterial torching of so many sacred cows. And this is how an ungrateful Prologue sketches the disembodied “Founder of the Feast”: 5 “The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this” (3182). Now, it must be said (and it must be qualified) that this absentee churl, this “impolite and mean spirited person of low birth,” 6 is something of an intellectual and is aware of the anagogical 7 forces in the poem, but wishes to convert them into a literal experience. The qualification has less to do with what the sentence means than the potential problem of attributing to the Miller a ‘will’ to do anything. I do not mean to reanimate psychology as a guiding light in Chaucerian criticism and locate a web of desire for the ‘Miller- as-character.’ I would however like to describe rhetorical effects and modes of voice and action that move through a prologue and poem his name sponsors. The sentence could read: The collected philosophy of a major species of narrative voice in the Miller’s Tale “resonates ironically with dispa- rate literary and academic discourses,” 8 and enacts a strategy to convert anagogical forces into a literal experience. But it would be as David Lawton describes:

The language in which criticism is conducted may unintentionally foster what . . . we may call the “psychological heresy.” I have not avoided constructions like “the Pardoner sets out” or “the Pardoner says.” It would be too clumsy to keep emphasizing that Chaucer has given us the name of a fictitious narrator and there seems no harm in using it. But we should not mistake the name for the thing itself. When I use such shorthand I am not psychoanalyzing the Pardoner but evaluating the literary content and effect of certain lines attributed to him. 9

For the special purposes of this discussion, we will detect rhetorical perspectives whose momentum belongs to the logical defense of mind and body, to buoyant Epicureanisms, and bleaker Physicalisms. Observations of this sort will set in motion philosophical architectures independent of character-motivation. Without reference to his innermost hopes and dreams, a young scholar’s bedding of a married woman by devastation of the Biblical Deluge quite usefully elides with the larger smoke and silence of the poem’s competitive epistemologies. Any interlocutor, “Nicholas” might just be in the market for some “deerne love.” It could be opposite. He could love Alisoun “like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.” 10 Neither would be THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 23 a very remarkable contribution to the fact that he moonlights as a useful and oblivious second premise toward a working definition of poetic nihilism. Nicholas belongs to a poem of great drama but, as we’ll see, the drama doesn’t radiate from him, or any other speaker. It erupts from a challenge to mythic history and the disruption of an armistice between matter and spirit, a brief ceasefire between time and what preceded it. In short, he’s a Keystone Cop in a medieval poem that plays chicken with what is probably the oldest and most widely shared human story. Creation myths really do feel like creations and differ wildly in the details. By comparison, the early world going down like a shipwreck and the sad residue that survived feels like it was plagiarized from some standardized version, some single story that was by all reckonings, a horror story. As for the Miller, ‘he’s’ really an, ‘it.’ And by ‘it’ I mean something like a rhetorical gravity mass and a headquarters for a philosophy that exists inside and outside the audible and visible poem. If what follows feels like “psychological heresy,” I’ll offer this defense in addition to leaning on Lawton’s: it’s personification—“the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman.” It’s a story of forces. I just don’t know how else to tell it independent of the suggestion that “The Miller,” “the Hellmouth,” “Non-being,” “Gloomy Chaos, away from all the gods,” “old uncle Anarch,” ‘wants’ to make sure that, “Philosophy, that lean’d on Heavan before / Shrinks to her second cause and is no more.” 11

Literary Ethics And therfore every gentil wight I preye, For Goddes love, demeth nat that I seye Of yvel entente, but for I moot reherce Hir tales alle, be they bettre or werse Or elles falsen som of my mateere. (3171–3175)

“Or elles falsen som of my mateere.” However triumphant, falsifying a fictional poem doesn’t unriddle the nature of profanity in art. We cannot further ‘falsify’ the silent film sight gag and “more cogent allusion to sodomy” 12 of Nicholas sitting on a hot bayonet with his trousers around his ankles. The setting in which it occurs is false. If kissing Alisoun’s “thyng al rough and long yherd” ( Miller’s Tale , 3738) is profane, it’s not because it stays true to the spirit of recent local history. There’s no eyewitness account to f lout, no high chronicle or marginal shopping list shoehorned in an uneven hand that will convict Chaucer’s apocrypha of playing fast and loose with the real story of Daun Gervys, Blacksmith of Oxford. It 24 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL will never have the opportunity to experiment in the august suppression of political reality like a Vox Clamantis 13 nor will it wield the simple facts of life with as much bloodthirsty empiricism as The Good Wife’s Guide , 14 where, “In the closing years of the fourteenth century someone carefully complied a large book in French, addressed to a fifteen-year-old bride,” which included “over 380 recipes,” “advice about keeping fleas out of bedclothes,” and “detail(ed) the drudgery of hand-raising baby hawks.” 15 The best it could do is violate another fabliau, but that would only prove the larger point. Something’s being stretched on the rack here and it isn’t fiction. And it all has something to do with Augustine’s whimsy that “it is one thing to will to be false and another not to be able to be true. For a painted man cannot be so true, however much he may tend into the form of man, as those things which are written in the books of the comic poets. For neither do they will to be false.” 16 Instead, the narrator triangulates the tautology and argues a link between ethics and fiction, saying, in effect: “Apologies for the upcoming Noahic fantasy about mutilation, I’d tell it differently but it wouldn’t be true.” There isn’t much steam to the idea so next comes an about-face and the famous option by placard of the Prologue . It may as well appear as an opening crawl: 17

And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, Turne over the leef and chese another tale; For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale, Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse, And eek moralitee and hoolynesse. Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this. (3176–3182)

Simple enough. In the first argument, a Miller’s Tale without sex and tor- ture would require fictionalization: “falsen som of my mateere.” Here, the narrator proposes that in order to bypass the profanity of poetry, turn to “storial thyng(s)” that concern nobility, morality, and holiness. Earlier, more fiction means more ethics. In this course correction, for an ethical Miller’s Tale , do not read poetry—read history. In plainer language: read something else. “Chese another tale.” If we read “storial” 18 as a rhetorical category two things follow. The first is that “gentillesse,” “moralitee,” and “hoolynesse” occur in what is “storial.” They occur in what is “historically true, belonging to history.” The second is that “storial” is distinct to ‘what the Miller’s Tale is.’ But a true story provides a suitable setting for moral reflection by virtue of the fact that its meanings THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 25 are co-ontological with human existence, the temporal space in which the discourse and exchange of ethical goods between men obtains. Of course, there is a small snag when we “Turne over the leef and chese another tale.” There are no true stories in the Canterbury Tales. There is no “leef” we might turn in order to “cheese another tale” that deposits us on the safe “storial” ground of ethics. To sum up: erase the smut and it becomes a fiction. Amplify the ethics and it becomes history. Next, turn to history for ethics and there’s no history. The Prologue is a funnel pulling us toward itself. Hit bottom and ‘cry uncle.’ Any sound will help in a poem where, “Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole” (3731). We have no choice but to bask in the neverending night of the Miller’s Tale . Here, humanity goes blind for one morning and ‘profanity’ as a device of poetic content severs into a hermeneutic of poetic form. It is Artaud’s Theatre and the Plague , the “surge of erotic fever” where “the dandy decks himself out in his finest clothes and promenades before the charnel house.” 19 “That is why all the great Myths are dark” and “all the magnificent fables recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appear in creation.”20 Whether that’s true, what most certainly doesn’t seem to rise victorious is a systematic statement on what to do after you read the poem. There is no ethics of this poem’s truth. Its questions won’t be intervened upon according to the intellectual machinery of a virtuous existence. The most one could do according to that machinery is swear off adultery and mutilation, which are two things that—even the strongest believers in art’s moral mission must agree—have been roundly condemned independent of a close reading of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. I hope this clears the air of another critique, even if a hydra takes its place. A generation of critics looked to Christian Neoplatonism as mechanism of moral allegory. “Both Robertsonians and anti-Robertso- nians see Chaucer illustrating maxims—his narratives are about morality, whether Christian or humanist, God-given or universal.” 21 As we’ll see, Neoplatonism as a mode of metapoetic literature says something more extreme. The moral man in history is a mistake. He was never supposed to happen . Art isn’t responsible for the world that began under his watch. The argument isn’t that art’s knowledge is superior to moral truth—it’s just older. By the time we needed moral truths, all the poems had been written. So we’ll have to narrow our focus to “the first carnage of essences that appear in creation.” 22 In Paul Strohm’s evaluation, the Miller’s Tale is an “unfettered attack on all forms of transcendence.” 23 The goal is annihilation. I’d only modify the way we understand that annihilation with the suggestion that there are two poems in the Miller’s Tale trying 26 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL to annihilate each other. For ‘both poems,’ the moral identity of human action is a red herring, an invalid predicate for a simpler substance: “the order of knowledge that belongs to time and extension.” There is no great argument in the poem against the definition of that substance. There is only an argument whether, like Baudelaire’s “modernit é ,” it was judged at birth by its own counter-definition and, “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent” must always only “make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable.”24 If there is a single impish art of poetry to the Prologue , it must feed on the fact that what’s about to happen to you is true . It’s too “true” to be “falsened” or “storialized.” For as long as you’re reading it, the Miller’s Tale is as lonely, pure, and absolute as Descartes’s cogito . Like the incubus state of the Second Meditation , its last best hope is to find something it can’t doubt into nonexistence. But it all begins cheerfully enough and perhaps we know the poem too well. So I’ll retell it. Sometimes it’s better to look at human things from the perspective of a fish—wander like a Victorian tourist through the kaleidoscopic horrors and drought of Dagon’s unlivable upper Hell and report to your own kind what you saw: mass graves on beds of ice, your sons and daughters tossed for fun through the unwater. Everything that comes before and after in this study is directed towards a simple purpose and it’s not to accept a new reading of Chaucer but to accept the possibility that he’s a stranger poet than the one we’re presenting to the world. Short of that, I’d settle for a one or two converts to the idea of a stranger Miller’s Tale than the one we’re presenting to the world.

Act I: Deerne Love In medieval Oxford, pictured here as a nocturnal wonderland of appetite and revenge, we meet the young scholar Nicholas. Nicholas has sup- planted his liberal arts studies with astrology and aeromancy.

With hym ther was dwellynge a poure scoler, Hadde lerned art, but al his fantasye Was turned for to lerne astrologye, And koude a certeyn of conclusiouns, To demen by interrogaciouns, If that men asked hym, in certein houres Whan that men sholde have droghte or elles shoures. (3190–3196)

Repurposing the liberal arts for the tamer and more tactile occult mysteries of natural divination wouldn’t be much cause for panic unless, as Richard C. Dale writes, “They and their journey to heaven through THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 27 the celestial spheres in elaborately allegorical conveyances formed the basic outline of the world of learned poetry during the Middle Ages.”25 Or for instance, as Wetherbee argues, had Boethius, “in a passage which was to be much quoted in the twelfth century,” 26 not declared for the Quadrivium, “a higher sense of purpose ( excellentior animus ) [that] leads onwards, away from those senses which are born with us, to more certain kinds of understanding,” 27 that these arts will

rise and progress until the eye of the mind (that eye which, as Plato says, is far worthier of existence and preservation than all our organs of sensory perception, since only by its light my truth be sought or perceived)— until, I say, this eye, which has been submerged and blinded by our bodily senses, may be illuminated once again by these disciplines. 28

But at heart Nicholas is a practical man. He wants to live in a smaller cosmos. The age of oracles is past. The time has come to forecast the weather. This is not without precedent in the honky-tonk natural universe of the Canterbury Tales . In the Manciple’s Tale a rogue Phoebus, very far from home, damns his augural bird: “Ne nevere sweete noyse shul you make, / But evere crie agayn tempest and rayn” ( Manciple’s Tale , 300–301). Which is to say, for Nicholas meteorology is one victory amongst many in the empirical interrogation of the universe. For the crow, it’s all that’s left after the god of poetry returns to Parnassus without him. It is an odd, but recurring Chaucerian mode. When augury succumbs to material contamination, the entropic 29 finale is the ability to predict a storm. The backward praise of the “poure scoler” directs us to larger agitations in poetry. To be sure, weather forecasting may still be the quickest way to become a legend in your own hometown but is a fallen shadow of Delphic powers. Nicholas, man of the people, is walking into a trap. An expert in the wrong heavens, he spends his young life scanning the horizon for natural rainstorms in a poem about a Providential Flood. When he isn’t reading Nature’s palms, Nicholas makes love in secret. “Of deerne love he koude and of solas; / And therto he was sleigh and ful privee” (3200–3201). A curious non sequitur, perhaps, but it is a cohesive philosophical unit. All narrative ‘naturalisms’ are part of a consistent Naturalism in the Canterbury Tales. However far they extend as distinct experiments, they’re no fair-weather friends to the monad whenever the bell calls them home for a sex-scene. Even in this poem, when you want to catch someone “In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas” (3653), you need only listen, “Till that the belle of laudes gan to rynge, / And freres in the chauncel gonne synge” (3655–3656). And it’s not the sweet counter-tune of cloistral chastity that we intuit like a shy whisper at the striking of 28 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL church bells. As we’ll see, it’s the lower, tectonic growl of metal returning to the place it was first dug up. To his credit, Chaucer is a terrible erotic poet. But so were the poets he admired. Too often with this literature a simple roll in the hay requires the violation of some part of the contract between heaven and earth. To satisfy an almost childlike fascination for sexually abusing mortals, Phoebus-Apollo (that “mooste lusty bachiler”) 30 will contort himself and counterfeit nearly any shape, even a man’s. To get Eos back in bed, Tithonus has to age in reverse. To sleep in peace with an old man’s wife, Nicholas locks the doors and creates a Floodless world. It is all part of the emerging theoretical Nicholas: free-spirited skeptic and materialist: “women” are bodies to be enjoyed; “knowledge,” identical to the movements of nature—better weather forecasting will save us from the next drowning of the human race. Such is the poetic region made possible by Nicholas’s secrets. Whatever can be known of Nicholas’s mind, to say that a poetic interlocutor “sometimes . . . is no more than a product of rhetorical imperatives,” 31 is to say a lot. Through it we appreciate the philosophical strangles and restricted ranges of movement certain rhetorics impose upon their spokespeople. As a person, Nicholas’s utilitarian view of the world might transgress certain represented social norms. As an icon of natural utility he can transgress the entire frame of social representation. Just down the hall from the room Nicholas rents, a carpenter’s secret is his too-young wife. “Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage. / For she was wylde and yong, and he was old” (3224–3226). Somewhere far away, a narrator sees through Nicholas’s eyes and lingers overlong. Alisoun: “softer than the wolle is of a wether” (3249), a mouth “sweete as bragot or the meeth” (3261), a body “gent and smal” (3234). The Miller’s Tale will build a new human history—a Genesis that isn’t scrubbed clean of its minor characters—with a Lilith for Nicholas. 32 “She was a prymerole, a piggesnye, / For any lord to leggen in his bedde, / Or yet for any good yeman to wedde” (3268–3270). According to Mark Miller, she is an “object of consumption for the masculine gaze that wanders over her soft wooliness, sweet mouth, and supple, thin body; it is part of what makes her the perfect object of desire, and we are not invited to imagine it as much more than that.”33 Male voices in the poem will suffocate speculation with appetite. “Her character and behavior,” argues Erik Hertog, “are wholly revealed to us in physical aspects and activities.” 34 And yet, writes Richard Daniels, she is “beyond the phallus.” “That ‘beyond’ refers at once to her almost total mystification as absolute Other . . . and to a question. ”35 Sure enough, the flesh-construct “Alisoun” is central to the larger metaphysics of the Miller’s project. The idea seems to be you can’t inflict the more sweeping reforms while the people go THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 29 hungry. Win a few hearts and minds; get the population on your side, a chicken in every pot. In something of a backroom deal, the poem offers a perfectly tamed and commodified naked ass as a figural substitute for a providential order of knowledge in art. And this poem spends a lot of time trying to decide which human ass fits best at the right hand of God. “The Miller’s Tale ,” writes Louis M. Bishop, “blasphemously—and deliciously—elevates Alison’s private parts and their unknowability to the level of God’s.” 36 First, a man’s enjoyment of her will have become the foundational gesture, the immediate promise and payout in a natural antipoetry of equal power to a deluge that, somewhere far “beyond the phallus,” 37 has its source in “the down-flowing water of the Styx,” 38 which just happens to be, according Homer, “the greatest and most dread oath for the blessed gods.”39 “And it spouts through a rugged place.” 40 Cupped together by invisible hands, Nicolas and Alisoun meet. With his visible one, he grabs her by the ‘queynte’ (3276), inspires the worst pun in all of Chaucer’s writing (3275–3276), and speaks his premature- ejaculatory philosophy into reality. “For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille” (3278). He’s reached the zenith of human knowledge: “A clerke hadde litherly biset his whyle / but if he koude a carpenter bigyle” (3299– 3300). He knows what art celebrates: “He kiste hire sweete and taketh his sawtrie / And pleyeth faste, and maketh melodie” (3305–3306). This sunny capriccio 41 is the first great flowering of the tale’s natural poetics. When Nicholas, nighttime busker (3214) of cover tunes like “Angelus ad virginem ” (3216) finally finds the right subject matter for his first original, “Thakked Hire Aboute the Lendes Weel” (3304), no doubt it speaks to what Jesse M. Gellrich describes as a “coincidence of sacred and sexual” that “typifies Nicholas’s ‘deerne methods.’” 42 But when you’re drawing up the blueprints for new terrestrial government, Boethian favorite, “music,” is the song of the spheres: “the soul of the universe was joined together according to musical concord.” 43 Here, the young scholar’s physical lust sublimates the primordial harmony of prehistory in good faith to the former’s promise to constitute a stronger first principle and new “soul” of the Miller’s impending universe. In that sense, we should be grateful to have witnessed the composition of “Thakked Hire Aboute the Lendes Weel” because it’s a rare instance of a tangy number from the oft-overlooked vaudeville genre becoming a national anthem. Outside the parish church, a curly haired countertenor plays hop- scotch in a pair of red pantyhose. “In hoses rede he wente fetisly. / Yclad he was he was ful smal and proprely” (3319–3320). Safe in a new blue jacket (3321), master of twenty fashionable dance moves from the Oxford school (3328–3329), and the type that washes after each handshake, Absolon, as is his custom, flashes gander gray eyes (3317) at every married 30 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL woman in church. (3341–3342). For a self-styled Proven çal, the devoted wives of others are best. Lovemaking is the courteous plucked “giterne” (3333) and not the dead clap of skin. It’s there he sees the married woman he likes most of all. This is how the boy’s expert courtship of Alisoun begins, an affaire de coeur that ripens into a fullblown affaire d’honneur . “Fro day to day this joly Absolon, / So woweth hire that hym is wo bigon. / He waketh al the nyght and al the day; / He kembeth his lokkes brode, and made hym gay” (3371–3374). Germane to that portion of the plot which culminates in his transcendent humiliation, it is worth mentioning Absolon’s budding fascination with fire. When he isn’t being the perfect gentleman and loaning her money because she’s a “townie” (3380), he sends her “wafres, pipyng hoot out of the gleede” (3379). The precious Absolon is the photo negative of Nicholas. But a photo- graph and its negative are the same image. Both are natural-born citizens of the Miller’s city. The deeper connection between a pushover proverb like ‘Speak no ill of the dead’ and Robert Barnard’s lionhearted insolence “I shall only speak ill of the dead” 44 is simply that both favor a no-nonsense approach to the topical enquiry: “how to speak of the dead.” The satyriastic 45 Nicholas, sexual positive, “spills” with desire. The kolpopho- bic46 Absolon, sexual negative, is “somdeel squaymous / Of fartyng, and of speche daungerous” (3337–3338). Mark Miller writes, “He is deeply taken with the postures of love-longing—lyrical and dramatic expressions of passion . . . all of which take such ridiculous forms they seem to be designed to keep the possibility of an erotic payoff at bay.” 47 “In the context of his squeamishness about farting, his fastidious speech, and his obsession with fresh breath, this aversion begins to look like it has its source in a more general aversion towards the human body.”48 Absolon is Hippolytus, enthusiastic virgin slave to the virgin goddess, Artemis—part of Literature’s epicene army of child soldiers, goose-step- ping to rescue chastity’s folk spirit from a decadent culture. If Macrobius is right and “the body is a tomb,” 49 then the boy is on a death march. And he is a difficult rhetoric to control. Like in Orwell, the next generation is a forward looking bunch, eager for good doctrine: “With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were hor- rible.” As for poor Mrs. Parson: “‘They do get so noisy,’ . . . ‘They’re dis- appointed because they couldn’t go to see the hanging, that’s what it is. I’m too busy to take them. And Tom won’t be back from work in time.’ ‘ Why can’t we go and see the hanging ?’ roared the boy in his huge voice.” 50 For now, the poem is too busy mapping foreign threats to police domestic ones. The “wrastlyng” 51 denunciation from above of the fiddle-playing THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 31

(3331) eunuch is clear. Nicholas is the favorite son. Desire is superior to non-desire. But something larger is afoot. As Strohm argues, “The self-sufficient narrative world of the Miller’s Tale frustrates any inclination to look for norms or causes beyond its chronological and spatial bounds.” 52 Shift the gaze upward and he’s right. There’s a sense in this poem that when we “look for norms or causes beyond its chronological and spatial bounds” what we find are its “chronological and spatial bounds.” I mentioned earlier that “far away” someone was looking through Nicholas’s eyes. Like the silent Fates above and behind the Greek gods, a more powerful philosophical voice blows through the town like a sick breeze. This medieval Oxford is a toy-sized diorama of daily life, or perhaps it is simply a toy. Imagine it like a hellish snow globe, no larger than a grapefruit: a self-contained human theater raining ash. Look up from inside, beyond the glass dome that is the farthest reaches of space. Stretched end-to-end across a tiny sky is a gigantic and twisted image: the anamorphic, 53 distorted face of the maker, a friendless hermit hovering over his life’s work. Like all snow globes, it’s a world of perfect causation and limited telos. Streetcars wait at Main Street because that is what streetcars do. But they don’t take people anywhere because that is what streetcars are for. A toy man at a caf é table holds a beer because that is what men do at caf é tables. But he never drinks it. Strictly speaking, that is what men with beers at caf é tables are for . That is why they were unceremoniously tugged into existence is the first place. Nicholas, Alisoun, and Absolon are humans created by something that doesn’t understand humans, or at the very least, by something that doesn’t much like them. It is a bespoke world and the product of a lonely mind. Among these props is Nicholas: back alley charm, good with the girls, sure to pull a fast one on that old sack of a landlord. Alisoun: best looking gal in town, boy does she like Nick. Absolon: afraid of his own shadow, ‘kid never stood a chance.’ ‘The Miller’ is a kind of caricature too, “a picture, description, or imitation of a person or thing in which certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect.”54 The General Prologue sketched him with “A werte, and thereon stood a toft of herys” ( General Prologue , 557). In the tough nut technical- ities of pitching woo, a caricature like that probably needed to dream up a caricature like Nicolas once. But now he’s invisible and the caricature is philosophical. Instead of a street artist giving him Jimmy Durante’s nose, a street artist gives him Chaos’s loins and Hesiod’s unguarded, “wide- bosomed Earth.” 55 The epistemological content of Nicholas’s secrets, his “deerne love,” is a smaller image of the collected rhetorical strategies of the Miller’s Tale . Nicholas is an island governor, sent by royal charter to swelter and 32 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL dissipate and, god-willing, not bungle the implementation of the new cost-effective labor force. Put simply, Nicholas-as-interlocutor is allowed to mimic an iconoclastic cad in order to resolve the chord of a local philosophy only as long as the Miller-as-interlocutor is allowed to mimic a sexually frustrated human trafficker to resolve the chord of a global one. However much promise the young astrologer shows, he’s managing a franchise, carrying a brand, and kicking money up. Nicholas’s upcoming denigration of the Flood has as its most tangible premises the bedding of Alisoun and the injection of a little freethinking into a sleepy seminary town. The Miller’s attacks, voiced or sponsored, upon the poetic identity of the Flood are a metapoetic and nihilistic bid to “patrol the boundaries between literature and history,” 56 to leave the world of “Goddes Pryvetee” behind and—even if a “poure scoler’s” skin pinches like last year’s suit—awake incarnate in a dollhouse bed next to a wife whose husband has gone to Osney for the weekend.

Act II: The Floodless World For life in miniature, it is an important moment. The carpenter’s biweekly trips to Osney aren’t privacy enough for Nicholas and Alisoun. 57 True privacy is hiding in plain sight. And this is where a very small and saucy poem unleashes bizarre forces and becomes the very large and stupefying one. There may be those stray few who read the Miller’s Tale and find the plotting more innocent, the vocabulary more genial, or the atmosphere altogether clubbier than the wide screen diabolism I’m suggesting here. Alternatively, this could read with all the savage sting and blunt trauma of a fresh orchid pinned to the lapel when it should be doing dirtier historicist work. What follows won’t do much to remedy either. Splitting the difference, the poem is as fundamentally hectic and stupid as the reader intuits but it’s bleaker and more homicidal as a fart joke than anything written since. In that sense, it’s as bleak and homicidal as spinning plates as a party trick but as hectic and stupid as spinning Salome’s plates as a party trick for Herod, whom, it just so happens, Absolon imperson- ates as part of his titillating arsenal (3384). V. A. Kolve points out that, “Absolon’s attempt to interest Alisoun by playing Herod ‘upon a scaffold hye,’” “constitutes our only evidence that Oxford had plays in the fourteenth century.” 58 At this precise point in the Miller’s Tale , the defunct laws of some once-great culture are sucking the healthy air out. The old carpenter says it better: “This world is now ful tikel, sikerly” (3428). Whether “ful tikel” simply means “unstable” 59 or a “light teasing touch on some sensitive part,” 60 “deerne love” is always on the run in the universe of THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 33

“Goddes pryvetee.” As Peggy Knapp writes, “The Miller’s Tale lives con- stantly under that threat.” 61 For Marijane Osborn, “it becomes impossible to think of the tale without Chaucer’s non-fabliau element of calendric mé taphysique and envisioning the arc of celestial time looming above the action.” 62 Eternity keeps watch, antagonizing the mortal sphere, mar- bling it with immortality. “Freedom” is a relative good when you’re trav- eling by night under a fake name. Which brings us to what I perceive to be the main reason the Miller’s Tale works so well. Tripping a random stranger while he’s carrying something heavy is moderately funny. Tripping a random stranger while he’s carrying something heavy along the Via Dolorosa is art. In short, this vision of the current world will not stand on its own feet unless it reinterprets the contract with the world it replaced. “And thus they been accorded and ysworn” (3301). Nicholas, weather forecaster and the man who knows “whan that men sholde have droghte or elles shoures” (3196), is swept up and propelled by something that knows where and when the contract became binding. To the best of my knowledge, this is the ‘story behind the story.’ Nature didn’t exist in Eden; everything was supernature, unfallen. Nature begins at the Fall. To save nature, you have to reverse the moment supernature proved dominion over it. The Fall was the end of the perfect world. Centuries passed. In the new age of human rule the first city walls went up, great seas of men gathered between them, a new word was whispered into our languages: “empire.” Josephus, whatever can be said about his abilities as a historian, had a steady hand for myth. He reduces the problem of human ownership to an ancestral conflict and a Marxist “unity of opposites,” which “is the essence of dialectics.” 63 “Adam and Eve had two sons: the elder of them was named Cain; which name, when it is interpreted, signifies a possession : the younger was Abel, which signifies sorrow .” 64 And the last we hear of Cain, other than the fact that the first murderer was ‘cursed’ by God to be the only unmurderable man on earth (“And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him”) 65 is that he met the girl of his dreams, “she conceived . . . he builded a city, called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch,” 66 and became Lord Mayor of all East Eden. 67 The earth was, more than any other time since, ours . Christ’s edited fireside version is soothing enough: in “the days of Noah . . . they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.” 68 Soothing, until you read what precedes it. A secret that “knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” 69 Because then the impossible happened. Rumors circulated that the perfect world, the garden our fathers erased, was alive and well and had come back to judge the fallen one. There was barely time to doubt the news. “The same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken 34 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” 70 The water was already knee-high in those early empires we’ll never know. Just a few hours later, “all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.” 71 Nicholas’s “deerne love” needs to make a hiding place out of a husband’s house. The Miller’s Tale needs to make a hiding place out of the entire natural universe. So both will prophecy the extermination of a geriatric menace. When John calls the world “ticklish” he offers proof: “I saugh today a cors yborn to chirche” (3429). And indeed, the poem is a sort of funeral procession, whether for a Hellmouth or a Hell Harrower, and a litigious squabble over how to divide up the inheritance. Meanwhile, a young scholar disinherited of augural powers by the Canterbury Tales pre- tends to be an oracle. Just like Plato’s cicadas that “sing from the moment of birth till death without eating and drinking,”72 he hides in his room for the weekend with a stash of “mete and drynke for a day or tweye” (3411). When the carpenter bursts in, Nicholas playacts an ecstatic astrological trance (3472–3473). The old fool rattles him back from the outer regions of revelation, exorcising by “nyght-spel” (3480) every fell creature, even the furious pestilence of the “elves” (3479). Nicholas returns a little weaker to waking reality, worried for its safety, and—even if a bit thick as foreshadowing—accidentally asks the right question about the poem. What was Christ’s other secret that “knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only?” 73 “The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light.” 74 “Heaven and Earth shall pass away.” 75 “Shal al the world be lost eftsoones now?” (3489). “This carpenter answerde, ‘What seystow?’” (3490). “This Nicholas answerde, “Fecche me drynke. / And after wol I speke in pryvetee” (3492–3491). According to Richard Sorabji, “The Plotinian comparison of mystical experience with drunkenness also recurs in Augustine, although H. Lewy has shown how this would have come to Augustine via Ambrose through a tradition starting with Philo.” 76 No extremist, Nicholas contributes only a slight modification to a working historical formula. He ascends to the cooler headed mysticism of the middle platonists after attacking a quart of “myghty ale” (3497–3500). Once arrived, he has something to say and binds the old man to secrecy. “For it is Cristes conseil that I seye, / And if thou telle it man, thou art forlore” (3504–3505). He uses new words; someone speaks through him. Rhetorics blur. Nicholas, who would once “spille” for “deerne love,” will now “speke in pryvetee” (3493) a language he doesn’t know. “Axe nat why, for though thou aske me, / I wol nat tellen Goddes pryvetee” (3557– 3558). The stakes are too high. The secrets of heaven are unnecessary for Nicholas’s scheme. He told us his undergraduate education was sufficient; he already drew the circle that contained all knowledge: “A clerke hadde THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 35 litherly biset his whyle/ but if he koude a carpenter bigyle” (3299–3300). Something is hunting bigger game.

“Now John,” quod Nicholas, “I wol nat lye; I have yfounde in myn astrologye As I have looked in the moone bright, That now a Monday next, at quarter nyght Shal falle a reyn, and that so wilde and wood That half so greet was nevere Noes flood. This world,” he seyde, “in lasse than an hour Shal al be dreynt, so hidous is the shour. Thus shal mankynde drenche, and lese hir lyf.” (3513–3521)

How do you get the girl in the Miller’s Tale ? Disembowel the Flood. Use apocalypse to your own advantage. Rebuild the cities of Cain and reconvene the human epoch. It may fail Occam’s razor as the leanest subjunctive ‘possible world’ for sneaking into someone’s bed undetected, but this is a possible world of expanding rather than shrinking ambition. Nicholas, for one, doesn’t seem to be trimming the fat when he posits the new Dominionist theology: “And thanne shul we be lordes al oure lyf / Of al the world, as Noe and his wyf” (3581–3582). As the poem expands so does its metapoetry. Now, there was a particular species of philosophy already on the wane in Chartres by the time its famous Gothic temple was sprouting up like a watered stone. But it would have felt at home imagining the blue photographs of Noah 77 in its new cathedral’s stained glass dripped like Dal í and swelled into waves. It will feel at home as the Miller’s Tale ’s pantomimic protests of Noah make them pitch again. It was, according to Wetherbee, “a particular com- plexion” of the twelfth century and “a complex philosophical experience which had been brought to maturity in the Hellenistic period and in the early centuries of the Christian era, during which the Timaeus had exercised a central and polyvalent influence.” 78 So let’s imagine here that the frozen Flood and settled debts of Chartre’s Vitrail 47 begin to shift and swell and remember the cruel footwork of their old waltz. It not just because I happen to think it’s a pretty idea. I do, but even the crumpled visitor’s guide my parents kept as a souvenir from their first visit to France says that “ Vitrail 47—No é ” is the story of “ un nouvel ordonnancement des cho- ses c élestes et terrestres ,” a new ordering of celestial and terrestrial things. Noah is the story of wartime and shifting borders and it’s the story of an epoch in mythic time. Genesis 5:29 is an interesting verse in two hasty particulars. It mentions a newborn named “Noah,” born into a world 36 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL whose “ground the LORD hath cursed.” 79 For the purposes of dispensing with allegory, it’s probably appropriate that we don’t know if the five-hundred-year-old man 80 was a carpenter before he built a boat in the middle of a field. It’s possible that he shotgunned the tricks of the trade as an ungenerous deadline loomed and time’s foamy hind galloped after him like a punished thoroughbred. All the Bible relates is that one hundred years later, “Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth.”81 For the purposes of dispensing with practical piety, we don’t know if he ever fed the poor or was a good grandfather during that time when he was the only grandfather on earth. He had a faith, sure, but faith is only the madness through which great feats of morality and immorality are accomplished. Abraham was about to murder his own son. But what Noah happened to do he did better than anyone and he did it in a bizzare age of men: he was an old sailor; he built a good boat and saved the animals; he liked wine and was a bad drunk. 82 The Flood was the fall of a fallen world. The waters of the Deluge didn’t boil over from Asheron to drown Paradise. The idea, as I understand it, is opposite and Paradise went underground to nurse its wounds, gather its strength, and, quite literally, ‘live to fight another day,’ which—by extension—means it was similar to, but ultimately less successful, than the Harrowing of Hell. But, if it seems to have “prepared the way” as a “voice crying in the wilderness”83 the way the Baptist would, then it seems to have done so by transforming Cain’s total antediluvian wilderness, “the ground which the LORD hath cursed,” into a partial postdiluvian one. Calling the Flood a “new ordering of celestial and terrestrial things” is another way of saying there was an ‘old ordering of celestial and terrestrial things.’ And it’s not the ‘oldest ordering’ either. Whichever anonymous Chaucerian genius wrote the Cathedral’s guide de visite , this implied ‘older ordering’ existed in the marshal law Reconstruction period between a Fall and a Flood. Meanwhile, Nicholas inches ever closer to his rhetorical fate and transforms the carpenter’s house into a fake Ark. Well, he supervises it. He makes the old man do the manual labor. He’s the ‘ideas guy.’ “Anon go gete us faste into this in / A knedyng trogh, or ellis a kymelyn” (3547–3548). As a design concept it has the best of that early Zurich spirit. ‘Ark? No. Arks. Little ones. Everywhere. But big enough for humans’: “looke that they be large, / In which we mowe swymme as in a barge” (3549–3550). ‘Hang them from the roof’ (3623). That way they float,’ “As dooth the white doke after hire drake” (3576): ‘like white ducks in a second world flood. And no Flood.’ Prefiguring abstract conceptual art, the poem exposits its guiding philosophy. It’s pastiche, the repurposed vocabulary of metaphysical negation: “And pryvely he sente hem to his / And heng hem in the roof in pryvetee” (3622–3623). Adorno describes the THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 37 larger tensions in the gesture. “The key to contemporary antiart, with Beckett at its pinnacle, is perhaps the idea of concretizing this negation, or culling aesthetic meaning from the radical negation of metaphysical meaning.” 84 And so for a second time, at least in one house, humanity waits for sky to split in two. John snuggles into his skiff and drifts to sleep, suspended from the rafters of the most experimental home in the neighborhood, but a home in which he is now a stranger. “Withouten wordes mo they goon to bedde, / Ther as the carpenter is wont to lye” (3650–3651). That night there is nothing but Nicholas, Alisoun, and the physical bliss of “deerne love,” guaranteed now by the unsolved riddles of “Goddes pryvetee,” hidden from view in a Floodless world. What began in the Prologue and whose toil belongs to many hands sings itself to sleep. In the distance, church bells ring and friars sing the Lauds, “the Morning Office or Office of Aurora.” 85

Ther was the revel and the melodye; And thus lith Alison and Nicholas, In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas, Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge, And freres in the chauncel gonne synge. (3652–3656)

It’s the chirping hour of Tithonus now, the aubade and upside-down mass of a “brave new world.” 86 At last, for the Oxford inside the snow globe, it’s the dreamless sleep of the natural man. “The dede slepe, for wery bisynesse” (3643). Let’s assume here the connection between material and materialism, toy and toymaker, has been established. The cross-channel tunnel begun from two ends is complete. In a great feat of rhetorical engineering they met in the middle. After this point, the speed increases, first to farcical and then to chaotic pace. Place the lazy summer lust of Alisoun’s descriptio alongside the action that follows. The poem is changing. There is a new, itchy velocity. Next, a creeping sense of irritation. Desperation follows; narratological perspectives falter. Sleep is a dangerous place in Chaucer. Generally speaking, dreams have more causation in his poems than causes do. Inside something stirs. The old carpenter, “for travaille of his goost . . . groneth soore” (3646). But that’s because, roughly speaking, outside something stirs: fitful breathing from a “mouth as greet was as a greet forneys” ( General Prologue, 559), a Hellmouth tired of watching. The maker outgrows the peepshow world it built for itself. Its legs hang over the edge of a doll-sized bed. For Alvin W. Bowker, “The dark spirit of 38 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL the Miller’s Tale moves in a distinctly theatrical milieu . . . The Tale itself, and the drama it embraces, is divided between an initial spirit of ebul- lience and one of ultimate darkness.” 87 “The truth of a coldly realistic world begins to force its way upon the poem’s action.” 88 Sure enough, when the carpenter snuffs out the candle before the Flood, the poem goes dark (3633–3634). Though I feel calling the darkness “cold” and whatever’s about to “force it’s way upon the poem’s action” “realistic” is to state the exact opposite metaphysical texture we should conjure up in preparation for Act III. We’d be closer to the truth imagining that in the vast shadow of Oxford before sunrise, a single light goes on. Weak at first, it grows brighter, and soon emits a terrible heat: a blacksmith’s day has begun.

Intermission There is the world of the poem and the world-within-the-world of the poem. There is also a world under the poem, like there were “the fountains of the great deep broken up”89 in Genesis. In that sense, the water did not just fall down upon men. Men fell down to the water. Every underground river rose up in a howl against him. We lived upon a structure riddled with the secret of our own judgment, which is another way of saying we lived in a poem. And the Miller’s Tale is a poem about the great howl of supernature against nature. Nicholas is easily possessed by spirits. However stable in his mode of rhetoric, he’s something like a conduit for whichever major metaphysical idea is bulldozing the background at any given moment. He gets passed around. The idea of possession isn’t entirely without illustrative use. One way to imagine it is that up to this point Nicholas has been suckled upon the snickering spirit. Soon enough it will be the howling one. If the second ‘spirit,’ or, if you like, ‘rapidly expanding epistemological status of water in the story,’ or even ‘the metapoetic field of meaning for divine hydrodynamism’ first laid eyes on him when the poem claimed his power to predict its arrival, it didn’t seem to mind, even if, “But of that day and hour knoweth no man,” 90 and those men, “knew not until the flood came, and took them all away.” 91 Instead, the poem starts to wobble when an unseen voice from the peanut gallery makes good use of a useless carpenter and threatens its home: “Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee. / Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed man / That noght but oonly his bileve kan!” (3454–3456). The blessed “lewed,” “of all men most miserable.” 92 No one’s told them the truth. The poem joins hands with its Prologue , where “An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf / Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf. / So he may fynde Goddes foyson there, / Of the remenant nedeth nat enquere” THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 39

(3163–3166). A lot’s happened since the Prologue’s cheeky equation of God’s secrets with a cuckolding wife’s. The Prologue and poem warn us: God’s secrets will disappoint. They are like the secrets of an unfaithful wife. We’ll wish we hadn’t found out. We’ll miss the happy day before we asked the question. Not enquiring into God’s secrets is the only way that we “may fynde Goddes foyson there” (3165). The Flood was a secret not even the angels knew: “No, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” 93 It was more secret than the Nativity. That secret was more like an angelic PR campaign followed by a product launch. To get very practical for a moment: God’s secrets are knowable, even his most secret one. In order for them to be knowable by finite creatures, they must be finite. It is easy enough to recognize that if we list ‘knowability’ and ‘finitude’ as divine predicates, they amount to ontological challenges that constitute defeaters of the God thesis altogether. Anselm’s arguments were already three hundred years old when Chaucer wrote this poem. “The famous premise that God is ‘something than which nothing greater can be thought’ ( aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari posit ) and the suggestion that this premise is self-evident have their roots equally in Christian and pagan philosophical literature.” 94 It’s an intuitive argument that passes through Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, and Boethius. 95 Even Dryden wrote a version: “How can the less the Greater compre- hend? / Of finite Reason reach Infinity? / For what could fathom God were more than He.” 96 The disappointment that resides at the farthest regions of God’s secrets is simply that there are none; the trail goes cold. In the Miller’s theology—his own Gay Science —we are Absolon waiting in the dark for a kiss. Alisoun-as-flesh will assume Pryvetee’s empty throne. She is the last thing left in the universe worth knowing. So now Alisoun is seated. But the poem continues. For the maker, it was all going so well. Then it turns on him. When it does, he breaks the world. He throws it against the wall and shatters it to pieces. And again, I’m subjecting a metaphysical tendency to personification. But it’s familiar enough in the history of despots. You’ve taken the city, disbanded parliament, and renamed the streets. Time to look inward. Commence the purging of the Republic. And so the poem riots in its own renamed streets. Finally it goes house to house, yanking its heroes from their beds. “The warrior hero sets fire to the city he once risked his life to save.” 97 Antipoetry is the goal, not the gentleman’s sport of atheism. Atheism is a means to an end in this poem. The Miller’s rhetoric is not a systematic dismantling of Christianity. This is not a dialectic between belief and disbelief. That is something humans do in the “storial” sphere. An atheistic poetic cosmos occurs en route to a comprehensive and symbolically annihilated one. It is Sherman’s March to the Sea, a total war doctrine 40 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL against signs. This is the speculation of being and nonbeing, or being and its negation. Belief and disbelief haven’t come into existence yet. In Artaud’s words, the theater-as-plague “is a total crisis after which nothing remains except death or an extreme purification.” 98 The “purification” here, in Anselmian terms, occurs “if you think of ‘God’ and ‘water’ simply as words.” 99 In the Miller’s Tale , either “death” means “to the object to which the word refers,” 100 or it means to simply die trying. The dialectical power and initial control this rhetoric exerts is unri- valed. Perhaps it is the least philosophically dispersed of the Canterbury Tales . It is—in my imagination—the only poem of Chaucer’s that feels like there’s a genius or two at the wheel on the verge of a crack-up. To revisit Strohm’s argument:

The self-sufficient narrative world of the Miller’s Tale frustrates any inclination to look for norms or causes beyond its chronological and spatial bounds. Intimations of transcendence, to be sure, flicker through the tale . . . yet such allusions are no great challenge to the sufficiency of this world . . . God’s providence makes no dent in the materiality of the tale. Mocked rather is the very possibility of transcendence. 101

The poem has comprehensive philosophical potential. It is a fearless desolation of its own theological landscape. But criticism is a mood and a question. The “self-sufficient narrative world” of the Miller is the mood. Criticism’s question is whether the world of the Miller’s poem achieves self-sufficiency. To argue on behalf of the epistemological self-sufficiency of the tale’s poetic vision, we must to some extent identify the unspoken with the spoken and literary irony with the rhetoric that conducts it. Or we must allow that the form of the Miller’s Tale fuses with its content, that the hieroglyphs are identical to the obelisk, and, by way of illustration, if we find a petrified fruit tree between the Tigris and Euphrates one day with the good-natured graffiti, “Adam loves Eve,” that it is a monument to love for all of time. Accept that self-sufficiency as something more powerful than its critique and you have something of a conclusion. Accept that self-sufficiency as something that exists without critique and you have a plain old conclusion and an entire theory of art. Strohm is correct: “Mocked rather is the very possibility of transcendence.” 102 But, in as much as the Miller’s Tale is piebald with that “possibility,” I’m going to make the broad suggestion that there are rivers under the world of this Noah poem, like there were rivers under Noah’s world. Long before a brokenhearted young man lays hold of a hot iron, we noticed something stirring. Homer’s original nightmare, “the dread oath of the gods,” the slumbering “Goddes Pryvetee,” was conjured up THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 41 in voyeuristic heat to sign away its control over the artistic cosmos of the story. Travelling by subterranean sea, if the Scipo of the Parliament is right, it followed constellations the reverse of ours 103 and stopped when it reached the point directly under the Miller’s Oxford. The collision of that “original nightmare” with the Miller’s in ‘The Collected Verse Parody of an English Anarch’ is the most explosive physical scene in the entire Canterbury collection. It has become the most recognized and remembered moment in Chaucer’s writing. Try it for yourself. Find a normal, happy human, the strange bird that hasn’t dedicated their life to the study of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ask them what they remember of the ‘Father of English Poetry.’ Usually nothing. Fair enough. Shakespeare was a genius but Chaucer is a curriculum. But sometimes: “I do remember that poem about a hot poker getting shoved up . . .”

Act III: Descensus ad inferos The stubborn lightlessness of the previous night hovers in the first morning after war. It’s the opening moments of the new mortality, cured of its pioneer infection, a new mind cured of its primary causes. The rooster crows but no sun rises. To that effect, it’s a moonless Monday. The “ticklish world” (3428) should be dead and gone, like yesterday’s corpse “yborn to chirche” (3429). The itch was scratched. Anything “al rough and long yherd” (3738) has been smoothed down. In an Oxford on “curfew” (3645), the only un-policed ‘threat’ is homegrown and isn’t worth policing. At any rate, no one seems to turn Absolon over to the authorities when he says “My mouth hath icched al this longe day; / That is a signe of kissyng atte leeste” (3682–3683). And so the lonely heaving of the blacksmith’s bellows, indistinguish- able from a Hellmouth’s breathing, gives way to the hopeful clatter of young love. “Whan that the firste cok hath crowe, anon / Up rist this joly lovere Absolon, / And hym arraieth gay, at poynt-devys” (3687–3689). Making extra sure to show up with his body erased, “he cheweth greyn and lycorys / To smellen sweete” (3690–3691). In blindness, he trusts his senses, long-conquered by his art of love—slaves to his virginity and the trusty broken compasses that always point backward to the magnetic north of mother’s womb. Silent as a lamb that mourns “after the tete” (3704), Absolon walks by memory to her window. Louder than the dull growl of his eating disorder, a boy that can “ete na moore than a mayde” (3707) unleashes his bodice-ripping rebel yell: “What do ye, hony-comb, sweet Alisoun, / My faire bryd, my sweete cynamome?” (3698–3699). And from the window, her voice, like a babbling brook threatens to stone him: “Go forth thy wey, or I wol caste a ston” (3712). But, for Absolon, 42 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL her entirely ceremonial “I’ll throw a rock at you,” her ‘playing hard to get,’ is a credit to both her breeding and to the fairer sex’s nimble naviga- tion of the arabesque rules of the f ête galante . In the words of Mr. Collins, “Though I am far from accusing you of cruelty at present, because I know it to be the established custom of your sex to reject a man on the first application . . . ‘Go fro the wyndow, Jakke fool,’ she sayde” (3708). “ . . . And perhaps you have even now said as much to encourage my suit as would be consistent with the true delicacy of the female character.” 104 It will be victory at all costs for Absolon. A kiss tonight or a one- hundred-year vigil. “Thanne kysse me, syn it may be no bet, / For Jhesus love, and for the love of me” (3716–3717). She relents. “Thanne make thee redy,” quod she, “I come anon.” (3720). At Alisoun’s promise, he drops to his knees (3723), wipes his mouth bone dry (3730), and grooms the odorless, spitless, sexless kiss that love deserves. “Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole, / And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole” (3731–3732). In the neglected dawn of this new universe, nature’s first day on man’s watch, the poem’s Eos slept through her first sunrise. In her own words, “Let me sleep for twenty devils!” (3713). Here, a missing sunrise is an unstable Nature. Sunrise is man’s guarantee the universe can be known, that our property can be surveyed and measured, and that Macrobius’s “numbering of days” 105 has begun. It is the basic promise of decay. Somehow the exit of supernature made nature work worse. “The Miller’s naturalism . . . at least one as thoroughgoing as that expressed in this tale—cannot have the normative force the Miller wants of it.” 106 Now in the mongrel darkness, someone speaks truth through the Tithonus lying next to her. “By Goddes corpus, this goth faire and weel” (3743). And it is “Goddes corpus,” Alisoun enthroned. God’s secrets, the unfaithful wife of the human race, hangs the “foyson” of its unknowable ass out into the moonless sublunary world. “Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole, / And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole.” / “And Absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers, / But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers” (3731–3734). In sickness a young man comes-of-age: Absolon discovers the human body. With the taste of God fresh on his lips, a boy that once handled himself like a rare pearl throws himself to the ground and eats it by the mouthful. “Who rubbeth now, who froteth now his lippes / With dust, with sond, with straw, with clooth, with chippes.” (3747–3748). Pan down from Absolon, trying to remove all traces of his first kiss. Look directly beneath a man eating the soil that abandoned him and see new fractures in the day-old deep. Step back and observe the whole: this ‘con- version’ of Absolon and the ‘victory’ of the body, the rise of physicalism over its opposite. The poem defends itself from a friend. Sure enough, THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 43

“His hoote love was coold and al yqueynt” (3754). “For he was heeled of his maladie” (3757). But he was one of their own. He, too, overleveraged the fate of this poetic universe on the body. He simply did it by denial rather than affirmation. The Miller’s poem doesn’t understand its enemy, or at least its embedded critique. The expulsion of “Goddes Pryvetee” was not the fight of nature against antinature. It was the fight of nature against supernature. Perhaps now we know why the boy was born into the poem. Someone mistook him for Plato, mistook his fear and loathing for a philosophy—thought a young man’s disgust of human history was poetry’s lament for human history. The Miller’s Tale wages state warfare against language to combat a guerilla a linguistic. Not a single word was uttered in dissent. The poem was saving Absolon for its purge without knowing the difference between idealism and Idealism. One is a psychology. The other is a philosophy. Absolon’s idealism exists in an audible story whose language is too rough for his tastes. The poem’s Idealism exists in an inaudible story that’s too powerful to be a language. In one, the language measures the limits of idealism and in the other the Idealism measures the limits of language. And it’s not all sadness, the philosopher’s lament, especially in Chaucer, a natural comedian who probably had to learn pathos to practice it so impatiently. Lewis Carroll’s crabby “Professor of Classics . . . taught Laughing and Grief.” 107 Anamnesis as a poetic mode may get misty-eyed remembering things it forgot. But in this literature some of the best memories haven’t happened yet. Two gardens bookend the wheezing world. In the history of art, I’ve seen the lament, “whistle as [it] walks; slashing the grass with a stick.” 108 Never have I seen it “froteth now his lippes / With dust, with sond, with straw, with clooth, with chippes” (3747–3748) nor so desolate as the young recovered romantic that offers himself to the devil: “My soule bitake I unto Sathanas” (3750). Neither have I seen it disappear into the shadows after one bad kiss and whisper the promise of holocaust. “And to hymself he seyde, ‘I shal thee quyte’” (3746). But that’s how one Absolon becomes another and the Miller’s milksop who, “In hoses rede wente fetisly” (3319) becomes Artaud’s “dandy who decks himself out in his finest clothes and promenades before the charnel house.” 109 So, in a newborn kingdom, spoken into being by a “mouth as greet was as a greet forneys” ( General Prologue , 559), a “forneys” is its only light. We look for philosophical cracks in the makeup of Chaucer’s poems and small fissures where ideas seep through. Sometimes we find a wormhole. A place, a “Wood Between the Worlds,” where things stranger than the story taking place enter undetected. Like all great and dangerous treasure, better it remains hidden under the accidental watch of a farmer or schoolteacher. In the war of the genies against men, better that the owner 44 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL of a village antique shop counts among his unsellable inventory an old oil lamp that needs polishing. In this humanity without humanity, one man acts truly human. Which is to say, while every person in Chaucer’s Oxford is preoccupied with the sacred task of eating each other, there’s only guy with whom you’d feel remotely safe and he happens live on an atom bomb. He just doesn’t know it. So sunrise or no sunrise, the blacksmith, Daun Gerveys, is busy at the forge (3761). It’s like the anec- dotes, probably untrue, of people living deep in Siberia, unaware that a seventy-five-year Proletariat had come and gone. God save the Tsar! Daun Gerveys “sharpeth shaar and kultour bisily” (3763). News hasn’t reached him that a new god’s taken up residence just a block away, that someone kissed her ass, and that the Passion Week is taking place in a single night. When a lost pony of the apocalypse enters his shop, his only worry is that the boy will catch his death of cold. “What, Absolon! for Cristes sweete tree, / Why rise ye so rathe? Ey, benedicitee!” (3767–3768). What possible objection could a blacksmith have when Absolon says, “That hoote kultour in the chymenee heer, / As lene it me; I have therwith to doone” (3776–3777). He does what any decent blacksmith would on any decent morning. “Gerveys answerde, “Certes, were it gold, / Thou shold- est have, as I am trewe smyth’ (3780–3781). He hands over the metals of war that Chaucer says were mined to bring down Elysium. “But cursed was the tyme, I dare wel seye, / That men first dide hir swety bysiness / To grobbe up metal, lurkinge in derknesse” ( The Former Age , 27–29). It could be, in the words of Adorno, that, “The source of art’s power of resistance is that a realized materialism would at the same time be the abolition of materialism.”110 In Aeschylus, the pre-bound Prometheus declares himself “arch-chemist of the finite universe.” 111 “Now as to the benefits to men that lay concealed beneath the earth—bronze, iron, silver, and gold—who would claim to have discovered them before me? . . . Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word—every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus!” 112 Whatever the case, the human art of poetry hunts itself down with the technology that liberated it from the gods. Absolon marches forward from the “furnace between the worlds.” But a hot iron is not the only thing he picked up along the way. The “sick breeze” that built the poem keeps pace. Behind it, the secrets of the literature’s subterranean sea snuck through. The poem’s philosophies are ready to lock horns. James Thompson’s sulfurous flâ neuring in the City of Dreadful Night is the only poem I’ve found that achieves the same over- eager sense of neighborhood doom. “The lanes are black as subterranean lairs . . . Save in that city of so lonely streets . . . All patiently awaited the THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 45 event.” 113 In the orange glow of a hot iron, with a dirt-caked mouth and woodchips for fangs, it’s hard to see the rosy-cheeked altar boy that used to spend Sundays winking at old ladies. Or as Richard Daniels says, “After the kiss . . . Absolon is no longer “jolif.” 114 “And then we heard a voice of solemn stress / From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met / Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet.” 115 Absolon stands outside the window and calls to God for one last kiss. Inside, minutes have passed like years. The world of Nicholas already feels old. It’s the symptomatic languish and Babylonian typhoid of all who conquer it by thirty-two. Nicholas, bored with pleasure, peels himself from the carpenter’s bed, where he sleeps with the carpenter’s wife, in the house where he keeps the carpenter prisoner, and takes a piss (3798). It’s the last time he’ll be so doggy and fashionable on the subject of water in the poem. He hears the boy. There is some fun left in a rotting universe. “O melancholy brothers, dark dark, dark! / O battling in black floods without an ark!” 116 I’m not sure if you can say that philosophies “smile.” And with Eos still on bed rest no one could see it anyway. So at least I can’t be proved wrong. No human eye can see the philosophies smiling when the wrong ass hangs out the window. They share two deep epistemological connections. They’re both absolutes, being and nonbeing: “I AM” and “great Anarch.” 117 And they’re both doyens of antichristic Opera buffa . In poems about poems, every movement judges the other. But without sight, you have to listen for the end because Themis is blind. “Themis is untranslatable . . . the will of the gods . . . revealed by an omen, with little of the idea of right,” 118 the goddess of divine law rather than human, the postdiluvian oracle at Delphi, and the antediluvian judge of poetry before Apollo. All considered, her physical handicap isn’t much of an issue, because in blindness human literature’s best fart blinds the sworn enemy of human farts: “That with the strook he was almost yblent” (3808). Themis, blind as a bat, need only guide Absolon’s blind hand in the direction of Thor’s angry hammer. Because that blinding fart was also “as greet as it had been a thonder-dent” (3807). That’s how the light at the end of the iron goes out, light stolen from the furnace inside and outside the poem. “And he was redy with his iren hoot, / And Nicholas amydde the ers he smoot” (3809–3810). So seldom do Chaucer’s poems show the collapse. They sound it. The Parliament of Fowls shouts over its own ending. The House of Fame unleashes the collective scream of human time. In the Manciple’s Tale and Nun’s Priest’s Tale , language combusts into onomatopoeic noise. The deeper truth of Chaucerian noise won’t be resolved until Chauntecleer trips and falls upwards to it. It is Alain’s conflict in the Anticlaudianus : “You would think that the art was seeking opponents and a contest for 46 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL herself.” 119 But, as Samuel Butler wrote, “Art has no mortal enemies.” 120 “The noise of history, writes Travis, “writ large avails itself to no . . . ‘har- monic’ interpretation.” 121 This is where mythological catastrophe collides with Nicholas’s provincial one. Here, in percussive, alliterative staccato we can hear the end of one poem and the beginning of another. Even so, this is a sustained rather than episodic irony. Nicholas, doomed to be the plaything of larger philosophies, is possessed once again. The term is “thalassophobia: an abnormal dread of the sea.” 122 It’s our oldest story so perhaps it’s our oldest fear. “Fear of water or waves, fear of the vast emptiness, fear of the distance from land.” 123 The howling spirit of those fountains of the deep was conjured up and accidentally made guarantor of “deerne love.” The poem lumbered on. Unnoticed, it made the long trip from prehistory, up the familiar streams of destruction, and created new fault lines as it passed. Like it did once before, it arrived by rumor. An astrologer knew, “Whan that men sholde have droghte or elles shoures” (3196). This “reyn . . . so wilde” (3517), this “hidous . . . shour” (3520) was the terror of an old carpenter but would be the victory cry of natural man: “Thanne wol I clepe, ‘How, Alison! How, John / Be myrie, for the flood wol passe anon’” (3577–3578). Next it was meant to flow into a stolen chamber pot, digested by the Promethean liver of the victorious natural man who “was risen for to pisse” (3798). But it took a detour. Strictly speaking, it hadn’t yet arrived. The rumor crawled through a Hellmouth, came out on the other side, followed an angry young man from a blacksmith to a window, burned its name backward onto the end of a hot iron, was shoved into the last secret place in the universe, and read the right way around from behind the cauter- ized eyes of a human sacrifice. “Astounding heat seized Chaos . . . and to hear the sound with ears it seems as if Earth and wide Heaven above came together . . . so great a crash was there while the gods were meeting together in strife.”124 And just like it did in the first ‘world of men,’ the misanthropic rumor arrived just in time to hear its name spoken aloud: “ Help! Water! Water! Help, for Goddes herte! ” (3814). Like all metapoetry and all ‘poems about poems,’ hearing its name is enough. “In the image of catastrophe, an image that is not a copy of the event but the cipher of its potential, the magical trace of art’s most distant prehistory reappears under the total spell, as if art wanted to prevent the catastrophe by conjuring up its image.”125 So it is in the Miller’s Tale : a “cipher,” “the magical trace of art’s most distant prehistory,” a May Day of bungled “catastrophes.” In the words of Thom Yorke, “a drunken punch-up at a wedding.” Divine privates on death row, the human ones that get in the way, a “grobbed up,” “fyr out of the flint” javelin a few inches off the mark, a natural flood that never comes, and a divine Flood THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 47 that doesn’t come when called. I suppose the whole thing was something like a joke.

The Broken World Earlier I said that when the world turns on the maker, the maker breaks the world. And it seems true enough here. Break a snow globe and it lies in a pool of water. This poetic world turned on him when it was at its strongest—when the vast cavalry of natural rhetorics were for a brief moment gathered inside the young scholar. It was there, staring at the ceiling, that the lack of telos spoiled its perfect causation. “The two original sources of hermeneutical meaning, God and man, have vanished, taking with them the cosmos.” 126 The new meaninglessness of the friar’s morning song while Eos snores next to you, the distant banging of metal that used to sound like bells (3655–3656), it was grim dinner music in the post-coital tristesse of a “self-sufficient narrative world.” 127 But that’s not how it died. It died because it was a poem about the Flood. It died by drowning. It also died by autoerotic asphyxiation. If God-as-signified is supposed to buckle and deform into the signifier ‘Alisoun’s ass’ and be mutilated altogether, then we understand a consistent finish to religious signs—and to all signs. Absolon had the right idea. The wrong ass came out the window. The materialism of the poem abandons Nicholas to the cruelty of a universe he helped create. He was the Hellmouth’s embodied vessel, his own slapstick incarnation into the poem, his nerve-endings and surrogate speaker in a miniature world. The breaking of Nicholas is the self-mutilation of an entire poetic, a philosophy that puts itself out of its own misery. There is a psychological study of autocastration that recounts the story of a sixty-six- year-old man who “after the act . . . felt enormous mental relief and said that he could now live a ‘proper life’ with his mistress.” 128 Chesterton memorably notes, “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do . . . The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion.” 129 As Wetherbee writes of Beranardus’s Cosmographia :

Nature must search long and anxiously through the universe; she seems an alien presence in the celestial regions, and the atmosphere in which she moves is that which Hugh of Saint-Victor associates with the natural philosopher, for whom the universe is finally a barren and unmeaning place. 130 48 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

But the poem was built to fail. Nicholas cries out for the water of a natural flood. But art cries through him in memory of the real one. All Platonic art is memory. There was no natural flood. Nor is there a second Flood. “And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.” 131 The apocalypse has rules. The first apocalypse was the Fall, judgment by Time. The second and third are different. The Flood was the fall of a fallen world and judgment by water. A rainbow goes up. Never again will there be “a flood to destroy all flesh.” Water rebuilds after it destroys. Man will live another day. The third is also the fall of a fallen world and it is judgment by fire. Fire just destroys, whether it comes “down from God out of heaven” 132 or through a window. “Adam and Eve had two sons: the elder of them was named Cain; which name, when it is interpreted, signifies a possession : the younger was Abel, which signifies sorrow .”133 The only subtlety in the context of the Miller’s Tale is that one half of the conflict turns out to be stronger than the other. “Sorrow” raged through the poem with more violence than “possession.” If it seems counterintuitive I’d look at it in this light: In this poem about extending ownership and possession across the surface of the earth, and the surface of the earth “flinching beneath the attack,”134 as we “grobbe up metal, lurkinge in derknesse” ( Former Age , 27–29), a poem about suns never setting, or for that matter, ‘rising,’ on empires, imagine if there were more territory under the earth than on it. Similarly, imagine that the metaphysical vocabulary was larger in its wordlessness than the entire historical dictionary of its negation. “Verily thou art a knave, and not stunted in wit, that thou hast bethought thee to utter such a word. Such an oath did the gods appoint the eternal and primeval water of Styx to be.” 135

Remaking the World “Utter such a word.” Nicholas called it “water.” That was its name. But we know it was also made of fire. What really came through that window? I would like to conclude a story about a hot poker with a story about a wooden stick. In Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus , Rhetoric, who “enfolds in her bosom the complete art of the painter,” 136 takes hold of a piece of wood to build a chariot.

She bespangles the pole with the beauty of gems and sets it in a class apart; she clothes it liberally in silver and the highest decoration is brought in to THE BROKEN FLOOD OF THE MILLER’S TALE 49

supplement the wooden material, which has less distinction and this decoration compensates for the wood’s inferior status. An adoptive splendour hides the wood’s primeval origin from sight and removes every basis for complaint; the old age of the wood disappears and thus it forgets its primeval origins. A star-cluster of gems, then, gilds the pole; in fact its light restores true day and the actual day grows dull for the natural light of day sinks down in admiration before an adoptive light so great. 137

First, she accomplishes what is usually expected of rhetoric: she bejewels and “supplements” an existing natural truth. “She bespangles the pole with the beauty of gems,” “she clothes it liberally in silver and the highest decoration.” But the reason and effect are curious. This “highest decoration is brought in to supplement the wooden material” because it has “less distinction and this decoration compensates for the wood’s inferior status.” The effect is to “set it in a class apart.” Rhetoric “removes every basis for complaint.” What is the basis for complaint? The wood is ‘true.’ It palpably exists in nature. The first complaint: time . “The old age of the wood disappears.” Rhetoric delivers the wood from its own history. Through her sorcery, the unlucky stick collides with an “adoptive splendour” and “forgets its primeval origins.” And “origin” is the second complaint. Whence come poetic objects as opposed to natural ones? The bald assumption here is that the wood has an origin but is on its way to not having one. It is on its way to becoming art. The opposition between two worlds is set. The wood disappears from nature and history. This newborn alien is now a “star-cluster of gems” that emits a light that “restores true day.” What is a “true day”? Are there false ones? Rhetoric answers, ‘yes.’ There is a “true day” that makes “the actual day grow dull.” Now “the natural light of day sinks down in admiration before an adoptive light so great.” Out of a stick, Rhetoric creates the sun of a lost world. The “false day” of nature bows before the “true day” of Paradise. The Hellmouth’s philosophy would rewind human history to before the Flood. The medieval Neoplatonist would take it much further. Both, for different reasons, feel like the fallen world is against them. Eden is an experiment. Language, the wooden stick of human knowledge, awaits transformation into a mythic force, one that reunites in itself a lost human inheritance: the “true day” prior to our own when we spoke the easy spherical melodies of “Goddes pryvetee” instead of the postlapsarian noetic epoch in which we attempt to solve the riddle of humanity in the grammar of “deerne love.” Natural objects in Platonic literature have symbolic destinies. Daphne is still a laurel and Apollo’s crown is still made from her leaves. Rhetoric’s piece of wood shines on Plato’s cicadas—they are still servants to the Muses. Chaucer’s glowing iron will always break 50 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL nature into supernature. Perhaps it sounds more austere than it really is. At least Chaucer’s poem seems to locate some very enduring comedy in the fact that sometimes, all that is required of art’s interlocutors is to see an “iren hoot” for the “yonge sonne” 138 that it really is. Of all the interesting questions asked about the Miller’s Tale since it was written, one question is so simple that it is, perhaps, beneath us. Why is this a poem about the Flood? Why mention it at all? Imagine a poem in which Nicholas sleeps with another man’s wife without having to prove the death of God. That poem would have been safer for naturalism. In that poem, the lead rogue could have said: “Ramada Inn, room 3312. Meet me there,” 139 and not “meet me there after I sacrifice a pig in the Temple.” 140 It would have been a worse poem, a smaller poem, but one that was easier to control. Instead it summons the strange story of when Eden attacked nature. It is an ancient anger. It was the anger of Jupiter in the Metamorphoses who “calls the river to council” 141 and commands them to “throw open your doors, drain the dams, and loose the reins of all your streams!” There, too, a “sea in unchecked freedom . . . buried the hills.” 142 But the difference between the broken poetic world of the Miller and the broken poetic world of Scripture and Ovid is that gods return and rebuild it. In another story, God falls from the sky, disguises himself as a homeless man, and dies for it. There was a secret to the blindness of the Miller’s Tale . The last man and woman on earth worship the blind “goddess of the oracles, prophetic Themis.” 143 Triton put away his trident and “sounded out the order for retreat . . . it was no longer an angry sea.”144 These last of their race ask the blind goddess: “Themis tell us by what art the damage to our race can be repaired, and bring help, most gentle one, to this drowned world!” 145 “The goddess was moved, and uttered oracular speech:

Leave the temple and with veiled heads and loosened clothes, throw behind you the bones of your great mother! 146

By what “art” can poets repair the “damage” to our race? By “throwing behind you the bones of the great mother.” For Artaud, “But all of this can be of use only if there is behind such an effort a kind of real metaphysical temptation, an appeal to certain unusual ideas which by their very nature cannot be limited, or even formally defined. The ideas, which all have to do with Creation, with Becoming, with Chaos, and are all of a cosmic order, provide an elementary notion of a realm from which [art] has become totally estranged.” 147 And as Ovid writes, “the great mother must be the earth: I think the bones she spoke about are . . . the body of the earth. It is these we are told to throw behind us.” 148 CHAPTER 3

THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE

f the Pardoner’s Tale and Miller’s Tale tell stories that kick God out of the I world, the Manciple’s Tale tells a story that kicks God out of heaven. “It is significant,” writes Marijane Osborne, “that the tale features a euhemerized Apollo, his deity almost entirely suppressed.” 1 Put simply: In the first two stories, the men try to become like gods. The Old Man would defy death. First in the bed of Eos and centuries later by killing Death and making sure the Fall stays put, that nothing comes to replace it. The Miller’s narrators attempt, to use Strohm’s words, an “unfettered attack on all forms of transcendence,”2 and pool their resources in order to collapse the universe into a single empty signifier. Both poetic worlds try to mean more than they can and they destroy each other, either one drunk at a time or one “poure scoler” at a time. The Manciple’s Tale is an opposite movement for similar ends. The gods try to become like men. Insofar as it recounts the jailbreak of a promiscuous and pagan Phoebus, the gimmicky bedsheet rope was furnished by a promiscuous and pagan tendency in the medieval mind. É douard Jeauneau writes, “according to William of Conches, the ladder of Jacob was nothing other than the golden chain mentioned by Zeus, father of the gods, in Homer’s Iliad .” 3 In her discussion of the Knight’s Tale , Ann Astel observes in Chaucer the same, for lack of a better phrase, ‘ecumenical broadmindedness’ on the topic of poetic eternity. “Starting at Saturn’s height, Chaucer does not conclude a pattern of ascent, but rather initiates a pattern of descent. Whereas Dante’s Paradiso uses Jacob’s Ladder as an emblem of the monastic saints climbing up scala perfectionis . . . Chaucer introduces the Neoplatonic “faire cheyne of love” (I.2988) as an emblem for the order of being, ‘descendynge so til it be corrumpable’ (I.3010).”4 I happen to believe we shouldn’t attach too much importance to the difference between moving down or up when 52 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL both take place on the same imaginary Golden Ladder and “ bele chaene doree ”5 that connects heaven to earth vertically and classical paganism to medieval Christianity horizontally. Where two poets admit the reasonableness of such a ladder I see a difference in temperament and not metaphysics. In the Manciple’s Tale , the major significance in the idea of art “descendynge” the magical ladder and “faire cheyne of love” “so til it be corrumpable” is indeed metaphysical. Here too it repurposes rather than refutes the enquiries of an Italian poet. Jamie C. Fumo describes it as “Apollo’s ontological degeneration from god to man to beast.” 6 “The golden chain of Homer” writes Macrobius, is one that “God ordered to hang down from the sky to the earth . . . even to the bottommost dregs of the universe,” with reflected images “degenerating step by step in their downward course.” 7 Earlier I called it a “pulp romance.” To a certain extent, that’s what it is – a short story about a guy with a sidekick who falls in love with the wrong girl. Sidekick tells him she’s a cheating dame; guy shoots her dead; never speaks to the sidekick again. Where it deviates from pulp it borders on science fiction. Because it turns out the ‘guy and his sidekick’ are from outer space. It may be part of the reason why the poem has never been the darling of Chaucerian criticism. F.N.M. Diekstra writes, “I am not going to argue that it is one of Chaucer’s more brilliant tales. It is not. It is obviously a lightweight thing. ” 8 “As a narrative,” Fumo argues, “the Manciple’s Tale is hardly compelling. As a fabliau, it is profoundly unfunny.” 9 Derek Pearsall strikes a diplomatic tone: “The Manciple’s Tale is in many respects a peculiar performance.” 10 It’s not an operatic poem, at first glance. There’s no Flood coming to ravage it. It is a minimalistic history of the gods and its minimalism is almost scientific in effect. And perhaps it is scientific. For Augustine, literature is the “scientific knowledge” of falsehood 11 and Chaucer’s poem is about a bird that tells a truth that isn’t true. Even so, narrative minimalism is an unusual literary conduit for this mode of literary epistemology. Plato, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Alain de Lille, none of the great marble busts of the school were writing haikus. The clipped diction is especially unusual here, in a poem that serves as a spiritual sequel to the Metamorphoses , one that self-consciously invokes classical linguistic traditions, and one that parades the famous Platonic aphorism from the General Prologue for an encore. The poem is episodic because it’s a series of flashbacks. Like us, it remembers its childhood by montage. Unlike us, its childhood was thousands of years ago. The Manciple’s Tale only seems small because it comes at the end rather than the beginning of a very long story. I think a more helpful starting point is Loren C. Gruber’s position: “The Manciple’s Tale . . . seems for the most part to either have been little appreciated or but partially understood.” 12 THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 53

Despite its somewhat surprising unpopularity it is one of Chaucer’s most sophisticated, and certainly most focused, philosophical warning shots concerning speaking in art. The poem continues the Ovidian tradition of ‘poetic judgment.’ Poetry is memory but it is also judgment. It’s an Old Man who asks for eternal life without eternal youth. It’s rowing boats with someone else’s wife on the bloated river about to drown the world. 13 It’s also the augural bird that follows its god from Elysium to earth and gets left behind. The Manciple’s Tale exhibits all the features of an ‘in-house’ discussion, or at least an inside joke. It assumes prior knowledge. That prior knowledge is an entire literary tradition: metamorphosis—poetic judgment by transformation. If Ovid is still the gatekeeper, in Chaucer’s era he was more like the gate itself. And he guarded a large world. Ovid begins at the beginning: “I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, (since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things,) inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.” 14 For all transformations in the Metamorphoses , poetics stalks the narrative dressed as gods, ready at the feeblest provocation to make monsters out of failed artists and constellations out of great ones. Metamorphosis is aetiology. It is not simply the story of men changing into monsters and constellations. It is the story of how and why our monsters and constellations came to be. In Plato’s sun that never sets: “From them sprang thereafter the race of the cicadas” that “sing from the moment of birth till death . . . and after that go to the Muses.”15 In Chaucer’s chiaroscuro: “Thou and thyn ofspryng evere shul be blake, / Ne nevere sweete noyse shul ye make” (299–300). In this and other senses, the Manciple’s Tale is unique in Chaucerian poetry, the majority of whose relationship to Ovidian literature is based in the mis- appropriated love rhetoric of the Amores and Ars and not the aetiological transformations of the Metamorphoses . It is a wonderful and precise poem, but it is a homesick poem. To argue that its principal inspiration is the Metamorphoses is a philosophical exercise and not one simply based in source study. There is a tremendous amount of good scholarship concerning the cosmetic and narrative relationship of the Manciple’s Tale to its sources, especially to Ovid’s work, the Ovide Moralisé , and Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Voir Dit . 16 J. Burke Severs argues, “Chaucer’s poem is much closer to the vul- garizations of the story, especially the Ovide Moralisé , than to the original Latin,” while going on to say, “The important fact, however, is that his version is quite different from that in any of the analogues. It is by no means a mere retelling of any of them.” 17 In Pelen’s evaluation, “A study of the sources cannot resolve Chaucer’s own poetic attitude, let alone the 54 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL baffling “moral” of the tale.” 18 Another method begins in transhistorical space. Here, criticism is ectothermic, cold-blooded, and should always find the hottest rock to live on. We could follow the joyride of Phaeton, where “the earth bursts into flame,” “Mount Athos is on fire,” “Etna blazes with immense redoubled flames,” 19 and recognize in Chaucer’s poem the nervous energy and troubled histories of Ovid’s. We could work backward where a figural genealogy of Phoebus and the crow from Metamorphoses I and II to the Manciple’s Tale tells the cyclical tale of Apollo abandoning his divinity and falling to earth. We’d find something like Jonah’s midnight run from God. After a descent into the sea and full- scale personal revolt he unwillingly converts Nineveh. Apollo, too, kicks against the goads, plunges “to the bottommost dregs of the universe,” 20 and accidentally upholds the world of symbols he no longer wants to gov- ern. Chaucer’s poem is an exercise in linguistic pessimism set to the tune of artistic optimism. The condemnation of Apollonian and avian antipoetry affirms a poetry proper. Put another way, metamorphosis ‘judges the judgment’ of the gods.

Apollo on Earth Once upon a time—from time to time—the god of poetry and omens lives on earth with a human lover. This time her name is Coronis and she is, by divinity’s dumb luck, the loveliest woman in Thessaly. Apollo’s best friend is a talking raven, an augural being, once human, now entrusted with “the harmony of the revolving spheres, and things strange and unknown to mortals before,” 21 a magical bird in an age of magical birds. An age when “Saturnia, in her light chariot drawn by painted peacocks, drove up through the clear air.” 22 Like no raven on earth, Apollo’s is a “bird with silver-white plumage, equal to the spotless doves, not inferior to the geese, those saviours of the Capitol.”23 Even equal to the swan, “the lover of rivers.” 24 One day the bird witnesses a sublunary truth and catches the loveliest woman in Thessaly in bed with one of her own kind: a young, human Thessalian. The “pitiless informer hurried to its master, determined to reveal her guilt.” 25 A second bird enters, this one a talking crow with the same weakness for the steamy details. She stops Apollo’s raven mid-flight, “wanting to know everything.” 26 When the raven tells her, she looks as though she’s seen a ghost. And in a sense she has. Hers lives in a mirror: “This journey will do you no good: don’t ignore my prophecy! See what I was, see what I am, and search out the justice in it.” 27 She was once “a king’s daughter, wooed by rich suitors.” 28 “But my beauty hurt me.” 29 On her last afternoon of human life, Neptune spots her walking the shores alone. The THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 55 sea-god “grows hot.” 30 When “flattering words” fail, he “tries force.” 31 “Then I called out to gods and men. No mortal heard my voice, but the virgin goddess feels pity for a virgin and she helped me. I was stretching out my arms to the sky: those arms began to darken with soft plumage. I tried to lift my cloak from my shoulders but it had turned to feathers with roots deep in my skin.”32 The beauty of metamorphosis—here, the gift of the gods. “I lifted from the ground, and soon sailed high into the air. So I became an innocent servant of Minerva,” 33 a flying oracle, servant to the goddess of wisdom, possessed of the power of speech, spared from lust and cruelty—a winged Daphne. But she faltered. “Pallas hid a child, Erichthonius, born without a human mother, in a box made of Actaean osiers.” 34 Minerva “entrusted this to the three virgin daughters . . . and ordered them not to pry into its secret.” 35 The crow watches from “the light foliage of a leafy elm.” 36 Two sisters obey the command and keep Minerva’s secret. The third, Aglauros, opens the chest. “That act I betrayed to the goddess. And this is the reward I got for it: no longer consecrated to Minerva’s protection.” 37 No longer human, now no longer a prophet, even “ranked below the Owl, that night-bird!” 38 “My punishment should be a warning to all birds not to take risks by speaking out.” 39 We’ve already seen how seriously poetry takes the secrets of the gods. The fate of many worlds hangs in the balance, even the extinct ones just waiting to be summoned back into being. Yes, for whatever pon- derous sea of reasons, whatever meager slice of “pryvetee” belongs to a goddess of wisdom, Minerva did not mean for the contents of the chest to be revealed. But what happens here is less orchestral. In fact it’s all rather technical. Aglauros commits the crime. She continues quite hap- pily into later panels. We hope she lives life to the fullest, up to the very last minute before Hermes turns her to stone in an unrelated incident. 40 Clearly, the “truth” is not the event, the thing that happened. The rage of Minerva passes over the doorway of Aglauros and lands on her personal omen, the servant to her secrets, and a life she once spared in wisdom. “Truth was my downfall.”41 What terrible “truth” turns the augural birds out of Elysium? Apollo’s raven takes it pretty well, “I hope your attempts to hold me back may recoil on your own head! I have no time for your futile pre- dictions!” 42 So off he flies like doom to deliver the news to his god. At the sound of another augural bird’s terrible truth, “The wreath of laurel slipped from [Apollo’s] head, his face changed, his colour ebbed away, and the plectrum fell from his fingers.” 43 In a “fever of a swelling rage” 44 he takes up a bow and shoots Coronis in the heart. Her last wish? “Let me give birth first: now two will die in one.” 45 Things have gone 56 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL wrong for Apollo. Some sickness took root in the runaway god during his time on earth. “Even though she cannot know of it, the god pours fragrant incense over her breast, and embraces her body, and unjustly, performs the just rites.” 46 “He employed his healing art without avail, his aid came too late.” 47 Next, something happens that always happens in the story. The god prepares to go home. He recovers from the hallucination of human life. He rights a few wrongs. An unborn does what he was ‘born’ to do: judge the poem in which he lives. He tears open the dead mother’s womb and saves his son, Aesculapius. A superhuman god delivers a half human infant to “the cave of Chiron the Centaur, who was half man and half horse.”48 “The semi-human was pleased with this foster-child of divine origin, glad at the honour it brought him.” 49 In Pindar’s fifth century bc version, “he found his child, and snatched it from the corpse . . . and gave it to the Magnesian Centaur to teach it how to heal mortal men of painful maladies.” 50 Apollo abandons his grisly career change and relinquishes the project of bodily healing to bodily beings. There is no successful comingling of art and nature, no monistic co-ontology. The bridges failed poets build across the canyon of being come down in the end. It may seem mean-spirited. It may seem like plain moral failure. But the Flood was a rather nasty way to reinforce the ontological order of the universe, too. Finally, Apollo turns to his bird, “who had hoped for a reward for telling the truth.” 51 But he only turns to say goodbye. It was there “he stopped the Raven . . . from living among the white birds.” 52 Many times since the bird has relived the day when it was first said: “Thou and thyn ofspryng evere shul be blake” (299). I called the crow-princess a “winged Daphne.” That’s what she was, for a while. Daphne never ‘lost’ her leaves, or at least they never made the Frostian stumble from gold to green, but she found them in the same place the bird found feathers: running for dear life from the escaped rap- ists of Olympus. Neptune, Ovid’s sea-god that “grew hot,” 53 couldn’t have been nearly as hot as this sun-god grown hot. Apollo’s taste for earth women is a recurring theme. Before he met Coronis, he met Daphne. “Phoebus’s first love was Daphne.” 54 It is the early age of Metamorphoses I . The gods have barely learned to walk, but they do know how to give a good chase. According to Ovid, Apollo was, quite literally, breathing “on the hair flying round her neck” 55 when:

Her prayer was scarcely heard when a deep languor took hold on her limbs, her soft breast was enclosed in thin bark, her hair grew into leaves, her arms into branches, and her feet that were lately so swift were held fast by sluggish roots, while her face became the treetop. Nothing was left of her, except her shining loveliness. 56 THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 57

What happens next, we’ve seen before. Rogue Phoebus. Act II: Necrophilia. An undying being sees something die and can’t interpret it. Apollo overcompensates for the lack of understanding between immortality and mortality. Apollo as a man is worse than a man. Over Coronis, he “unjustly, performed the just rites.” 57 Here, “Even as a tree, Phoebus loved her . . . Embracing the branches as if they were limbs he kissed the wood: but, even as a tree she shrank from his kisses.”58 Then comes Act III: End of the Human Hallucination. Next he declares, “As my head is ever young, my tresses never shorn, so do you also, at all times, wear the crowning glory of never-fading foliage.” 59 Thus ends Apollo’s latest devastation of the romance genre. He resumes his post as the god of poetry, resting beneath the laurels of the transformed Daphne. The peace and quiet of a rebalanced poetic universe return. He makes a wreath for himself seated in her shade and wears it the rest of his neverending life: “My hair, my lyre, my quivers will always display the laurel.” 60 An age of men later the same “wreath of laurel slipped from his head” 61 when he murdered Coronis. This structure and the simple fact of its conclusion survive the long journey to the Canterbury Tales intact. Apollo can dissipate all he likes. He can attempt every other week to live according to a natural order of meaning. But a renegade Apollo will pass judgment according to the supernatural laws of his homeland. At its essence, the Manciple’s Tale is a poem about those laws, laws that sometimes knit crowns in the shade and laws that sometimes turn white crows black. As for the victims, driven from divinity the rusticated crow-princess keeps her feathers but loses her visions. She’s exiled to the middle ontology of non-oracular talking bird. Daphne could have transgressed the gods after Metamorphoses I . She could have become a natural plant and ceased to be the halo of Apollo. But she passed her first test as a poetic icon. “Even as a tree she shrank from his kisses.” 62 It’s not a moral victory—Ovid tooting chastity’s trumpet—but it does suggest her branches cast a stranger and more elemental shadow over Elysium than Apollo’s phallus. The crow told a truth wasn’t true enough to maintain her life as an oracle. She didn’t “shrink” from whatever invisible kisses came to “unjustly, perform the just rites.” 63 It is Africanus’s rebuke of Scipio, “‘How long,’ he asked, ‘do you propose to keep your eyes fastened down there upon that world of yours? Look up, instead, and look round at the sacred region into which you have now entered.’” 64 We should linger on necrophilia just a moment longer. It’s not all fun and games. For these poems, there’s something in it that suggests the foggy shape of where the gods go wrong in art. The Orpheus panel of Metamorphoses X is a typically bleak exploration of poetry’s incapacity to 58 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL save us from physical death. Ovid’s imagery is persistent. In another marriage of questionable ontology, Orpheus, the half-human son of Oeagrus and the Muse, Calliope, descends into the underworld to save a dead nature nymph named Eurydice. Ovid gives the rather heavy-handed clue that the story does not adhere to the more elegant expectations of the descensus ad inferos , a literary tradition about which Bernard F. Dick writes, “In myth and fairy tale, the descent to the underworld was the highest form of the supernatural, surpassing omens, dreams, and prodigies . . . it afforded a loftier vision of reality.” 65 In Ovid’s “loftier vision of reality,” Orpheus makes the rather frank request to the deities of the lower world, “I ask as a gift from you only the enjoyment (usum) of her.” 66 Orpheus’s mastery of the lyre earns him the brief return of Eurydice. Then in violation of the gods he turns his head for a glimpse and she dies a second death. When he sneaks a look to make sure the wife he ‘sang back to life’ is keeping pace on the short walk out of Hell, the underworld judges him for it. Orpheus, born of art, and servant to Apollo doesn’t trust art to negotiate life and death. He expects it to marshal life and death. Ovid’s matter of fact report is that a grief-stricken Orpheus henceforth “preferred to centre his affections on boys of tender years, and to enjoy the brief spring and early flowering of their youth: he was the first to introduce this custom among the people of Thrace.” 67 Plato retells the Orpheus myth in the Symposium but with a philosophically precise obfuscation. The underworld gods merely present to Orpheus an image of Eurydice rather than the woman herself. Plato is a writer who found his literary voice warning against images in caves. Let it refine the irony. “But Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, they sent back with failure from Hades, showing only a wraith of a woman for whom he came; her real self they would not bestow.” 68 Let it also reinforce the ungenerous rules of fantasy: The Old Man’s “moodres gate,” opens. The ground upon which he knocks with his “staf, bothe erly and late” and screams, “Leeve mooder, leet me in!”69 lets someone through. Orpheus enters the terrifying heaven under the world, a world with Apollo’s laws written on its walls, and dedicates his craft to the reinvigoration of body. He wants art to buy more time , to give up our dead. Eurydice always sinks back to the bog of eternity, safe from his reach. In Plato, she never shows up at all. To simplify necrophilia in Ovid: When art fails to reanimate biological life, failed poets rush in to enjoy the next best thing. Poems refract ideas through a linguistic identity. Necrophilia, like all poetic content, awaits its appointment with poetic form. When poetry calls its number, it too will become a hermeneutic. There is a dead body over which failed poets, the great army of rogue Apollos, “unjustly, perform the just rites,”70 THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 59 and employ “healing art without avail.” 71 It is language; language, whose limp limbs the natural art of poetry tries to sonically restore. Some poets can’t tell the Phaedrus ’ dead rhetoric from the living. It is Heathcliff hovering over Catherine’s grave. “I got the sexton to remove the earth off her coffin-lid, and I opened it . . . I saw her face again—it is hers yet!” 72 For Chaucer, language will only be “sung back to life” as silence, as the resurrection and second birth of its absence. Apollo is not the Promethean champion of sex and death. According to Genesis 3, we are. In De planctu naturae , Nature stands before the second birth:

By me man is born for death, by Him he is reborn for life . . . I, Nature, am ignorant of the nature of this birth . . . It is with difficulty that I see what is visible, she in her mirror understands the incomprehensible. I walk around the earth like a brute beast, she marches in the hidden places of heaven. 73

Alain’s crystalline aporia ends up with a black eye and a missing tooth in Chaucer and Ovid. But the point is the same. Apollo expatriates to the mortal sphere, he tumbles from “the hidden places of heaven” to “walk around the earth like a brute beast” in search of a natural birth for himself and supernatural lifespan for his lovers. According to Apollodorus, Aesculapius succeeded as a half-human where Apollo’s “healing arts” couldn’t. Then he failed to accept his half-humanity. “And having become a surgeon, and carried the art to a great pitch, he not only prevented some from dying, but even raised up the dead.”74 So Zeus “smote him with a thunderbolt.” 75 Reach forward in time for a Christian context to the irony of gods and reanimated corpses. Where it sheds the sexual deviance of classical art it plumbs other depths. Apollo’s attempt to revive the dead fails to negotiate the paradox that “It is appointed unto men once to die”76 with the fact that “Ye must be born again.” 77 Even Lazarus had to be supernaturally “born from above”78 in order to survive the divine gift of a second death with his soul intact. “Stunned by the double loss of his wife, Orpheus wished and prayed, in vain, to cross the Styx again, but the ferryman fended him off.” 79 In that sense, art in the epoch of the new theology ratifies this philosophy of the old mythology but comments on it with greater precision and economy. The Old Man, Orpheus, and Phoebus, even his half son, Aesculapius, it turns out, were on a fool’s errand. But the errand is only foolish in retrospect because literature had yet to invent the most gonzo dimension to the problem. It was only a minor miracle that Lazarus lived for a second time. The major miracle is that he still lives today. What does this have to do with birds? Sometimes poetic laws are rather like human laws. They lack humanity. They dispense punishment 60 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL without regard to scale. In Ovid, they are more Javert than Valjean. “The anger of the Gods,” says Proclus, “is not an indication of any passion in them, but demonstrates our inaptitude to participate in their illumi- nation.” 80 In Ovid’s words, “the faces of the heavenly gods cannot be touched by tears.” 81 Orpheus exits the cave of abomination and lives a life of adventure in Thrace. For what seems a trifle, Arachne is transformed into a spider. In this claustrophobic violation of Helicon customs is the unreasonable truth of the matter. If art is justice, it is not jurisprudence. The temple is booby-trapped for mice and elephants. There is nothing quite so naturalistic and soul-denying as rape and necrophilia. But there are also things just naturalistic enough for the Muses not to be able to tell the difference. In Metamorphoses VI , Arachne retells the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods in the language of nature. “All these incidents were correctly depicted, people and places had their authentic features.” 82 “Arachne wove a picture of Europa, deceived by [Jupiter when he presented himself in] the shape of a bull. You would have thought that the bull was a live one and that the waves were real waves.” 83 For this technical mastery, for painting Eden’s forbidden fruit in the mouthwatering language of hungry stomachs, they damn Arachne. They demote her to technician instead of artist, a weaver of webs for survival instead of a weaver of tap- estries that would praise the power of poetry. Arachne wove the wrong Jupiter. In moments of self-righteous outrage people speak of certain acts as ‘violation of the laws of nature.’ The cross-section of Ovid’s poetry says that nature itself is the violation. Girls turn into trees in the fight against nature. Eurydice is left to die in peace when a man demands she be revived for usum . The Manciple’s Tale is Ovid in focus. It blurs the background to bring other things into view and does away altogether with positive transformations. Art dooms the technê of Arachne’s photorealism by the authority of epist êm ê . There is a story that yawns across literary history about speaking what she weaves. According to Ovid, “His speech condemned him. Because of his ready speech he, who was once snow white, was now white’s opposite.” 84 It occurs in the same story in which a god slinks away from heaven in the night and tries to pass himself off as human. In the blurry background, art will try and mate with a corpse. For Minerva’s crow, “Truth was my downfall.” 85 Apollo’s raven “had hoped for a reward for telling the truth.” 86 Centuries later, Chaucer’s Phoebus hears the same truth and calls it “thy false tale” (293). One wonders what the gods hear when these birds speak the “truth.” What inaudible breach of poetry, what challenge to the purity of their being and undetectable disease caused the great orphaning of the augural birds? Answering those questions requires less Elysium and more Middle THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 61

England. Hemingway understood the principle: “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.” 87 The point is the same for Chaucer, a poet who writes best about Elysium from pubs in Flanders, blacksmith shops in Oxford, and the cabbage patches of chicken coops. Because part of the answer has to do with the heights from which things fall. In the curious case of the cursed birds of Phoebus who once soared above the mountains of heaven, it was a very long fall.

Phoebus in the Suburbs Ovid’s purple sunset fades into the distance and row houses appear. “Whan Phebus dwelled heere in this erthe adoun, / As olde bookes maken mencioun” (105–106). And this Phoebus doesn’t gambol across sylvan Italy. He lives in a “hous” (130). Of the atmosphere of the Manciple’s Tale , Pearsall writes, “Chaucer has removed or not exploited those elements in the tale which might have given it human interest as a story, or poignancy, or a sense of reality or meaningful conflict.” 88 To be sure, Chaucer’s version of the myth does admirably little to expand the elegant aesthetic of Ovid’s, nor does it attempt in any very generous way to ori- ent readers to the literary history of Apollo and the raven. But Chaucer’s poem answers a question. And sometimes answers lack the thrill of questions. The question, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” 89 is the sound of the universe linking arms. Whoever discovers the answer should have their face stamped onto our coins but it will read like a trip to the dentist. If it is pulp romance, it is also film noir. And in film noir, prepare to spend the last fifteen minutes in captivity to Sam Spade’s90 lecture on causation. The history of Apollo and the raven remains a silent force, save for a glib but dense mention of “olde bookes.” If the Manciple’s Tale wastes no time establishing an old metapoetic conflict, it also wastes no time explain- ing it. The opening drama of Metamorphoses —‘the gods living among us’—flattens into matter of fact. Ovid’s story of god and his bird begins: “The gods of the sea nodded their consent. Then Saturnia, in her light chariot drawn by painted peacocks, drove up through the clear air.” 91 For Chaucer: ‘Phoebus lives on earth. Just like in the old books.’ It is said without pause and said as perfect reasonableness: The god of poetry lives in Cleveland. He’s done it again. Pelen writes,

Implicitly, the Manciple has resurrected an old ploy that Plato and Ovid have ridiculed, to the effect that human failings can be attributed to, or justified in, divine failings. But with the dramatic system of religious irony in the Metamorphoses, we observed the fate of poets or artists like Arachne, who conceived of the gods in human terms.92 62 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Chaucer is a good enough writer not to give away the ending. I’m not. Prepare yourself for any number of horrors in this fresh breach of Phoebus’s post as the patron of poetry. And whoever speaks next seems to have read Geoffrey Chaucer. Nicholas was an astrologer who made love in secret. Phoebus “was the mooste lusty bachiler / In al this world, and eek the beste archer” (107–108). Without the specter of the Metamorphoses , the poem’s coupling would perhaps strike us as a mere curiosity. Conjure Apollo’s romantic past and appreciate a poem stating a plain fact: When Phoebus lapses into a “mooste lusty bachiler,” archery comes in handy. In a right state of being, “My quivers will always display the laurel.”93 In a state of dis- associated fugue, 94 Apollo’s bow tries to shoot like Cupid’s. It is divine role-playing. Apollo in human drag. The god of omens wants to cash in his laurels for the putti’s wings. Apollo’s ‘arrow’ is broad comedy, too. Then he starts shooting pregnant women in the heart. This composes a silent antinomy. The arrow of physical love that becomes the arrow of physical death is nearly a cunning condemnation of failed love poetry’s inability to negotiate artistic eternity. But the contentual opposition is not an opposition. Physical death is not of a superior order to physical love. Physical love belongs to the necrophilic rhetoric of physical death. Killing “wyf” only brings Phoebus another inch closer to the deathless world to which he always returns in the end. The narrator speaks of many “noble worthy dede / He with his bowe wroghte, as men may rede” (111–112). The Manciple’s Tale is another archer’s tale that “men may rede” in the long history of Apollo. Ovid’s poem narrates from the bench and gavel. In Chaucer’s poem, many hands make light work. The work is a euhemerist strategy. Gaze upon the various lands laid waste by Phoebus’s bow. “He slow Phitoun, the serpent, as he lay” (109), Python can harm us no more. In mythology, it is the story of young Apollo rising, Apollo Begins . Here: “He slow Phitoun, the serpent, as he lay / Slepynge agayn the sonne upon a day” (109–110). Ah, so it turns out Python was asleep. Apollo clubs a sleepy reptile to death during its nap. Diekstra notes the “touch of smug simplicity in the way he [Chaucer] chooses to reduce the heroic feat of killing the Python.” 95 Why invoke Apollo’s victory over Python to reduce it? It is part of Chaucer’s method. We’ve seen it before. Canterbury narrators summon by sneer what is most dangerous to their antipoetry. Whether a Flood or a Python, it’s a good general rule in matters of persuasion to seek out the truth of your opponent’s straw men. Straw men begin their careers as artifacts of true terror before their incarceration by cartoon. In cartoon form, any suggestion of a tax increase might now be derided-in-pantomime as “Marxist.” Rewind to the era of clown tribunals and a “Red Scare.” THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 63

Rewind further to the rise of American Labor and a New Deal. Go back far enough and you might stumble upon the idea that the “‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production” transform “the mass of the population into wage labourers,” into “free labouring poor,” 96 and that “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”97 The straw man was once the bogeyman. Add the full flesh to the stick figure and you have the hulking form of something that’s come back to feed on your worldview. Asleep or not, Python’s creation partook of every wild and powerful element in classical myth. In the early days after the Flood, choked by the vapors of a global marsh, a waterlogged Mother Earth gives birth to a monster. Ovid writes, “When Tellus [Gaia the Earth] deep-coated with the slime of the late deluge, glowed again beneath the warm caresses of the shining sun, she brought forth countless species, some restored in ancient forms, some fashioned weird and new. Indeed the Earth, against her will, produced / a serpent never known before, the huge / Python, a terror to men’s new-made tribes.” 98 Python was appointed to guard the oracle at Delphi. Entire epochs of omens fell under his protection. The Manciple’s poem says, “He slow Phitoun, the serpent, as he lay” (309). To that effect, his bed was the Omphalos, a stone that was the mythical center of the earth and the spiritual shrine of humanity, bundled against the cold by Clotho’s chord in a bedheaded tangle of original lifeline. When Apollo arrives to Delphi, he finds the snake guarding the blind justice oracle, the one that always shows up when there’s something important to do in a poem. 99 The spawn of great mother earth guards Themis, the goddess who told the last humans left after the deluge to “throw behind you the bones of your great mother!’” 100 This is a story of regime change in the universe of myth—twilight of the tectonic forces. “The Primal Chaos”101 and “The Separation of the Elements”102 give way to new gods. Python is one of the last of his kind. In some versions, he is simply a snake that terrorizes the ashy, underfed survivors of a cosmic catastrophe. In others, “Python, offspring of Terra, was a huge Draco who, before the time of Apollo, used to give oracular responses on Mount Parnassus.” 103 Python becomes part of the oracle he guards. “Death was fated to come to him from the offspring of Latona. At that time Jove lay with Latona.” 104 Python does not go quietly into the night in service to the Fates. “When Python knew that Latona was pregnant by Jove, he followed her to kill her.” 105 A servant to divine secrets refuses to accept the divine secret of his own death. He fights to reinter- pret pryvetee’s interpretation of his life by protecting his life. “But by order of Jove the wind Aquilo carried Latona away, and bore her to Neptunus. He protected her, but in order not to make voice Juno’s decree, he took 64 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL her to the island Ortygia, and covered the island with waves. When Python did not find her, he returned to Parnassus.” 106 Safeguarded by the non-rapist Neptune, Latona gives birth to a son and daughter, “Apollo and Diana, to whom Vulcanus gave arrows as gifts.” 107 Only four human days have passed since his birth when a fully grown Apollo “exacted vengeance for his mother.” 108 The arrow sails into one of the last beating hearts of the primordial age. In Ovid’s retelling, “the archer god,” never admired for subtlety and the diaphanous ‘notes he doesn’t play,’ essentially ‘pumps him full of lead’: he “destroyed the creature . . . with a thousand arrows, almost emptying his quiver.” 109 Art’s fresh-faced and shortfused world soul takes the oracle from the serpent son of the postdiluvian material world. Thus begins the unbroken rule of Apollo at Delphi. Earlier I stated “poetic eternity occurs on the ruins of time rather than as the apotheosis of time. According to Ovid, “The oracle and festival of the god were then named Pytho and Pythian from the rotting (pyth ô) corpse of the beast.” 110 This tireless and, for the most part, absurd antagonism between two spheres of meaning is something like a first principle for this species of poetry. “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” 111 Which isn’t to say that the distance between the two is inflexible, even if the idea of “distance, as such” is. I’m no expert, but I’d imagine both good jug- glers and great ones rarely drop a ball. The difference between the two is that the good juggler makes it look easy and the great juggler doesn’t. Given the same general skill set, the one in constant crisis is probably the true professional. The Metamorphoses recounts these first Pythian games. The winners were “honoured with oak wreaths. There was no laurel as yet, so Phoebus crowned his temples, his handsome curling hair, with leaves of any tree.” 112 The subheading of the panel in which this takes place? Metamorphoses I: 438–472: “Phoebus kills the Python and sees Daphne.” 113 Lulled into a false sense of security by the apocryphal story of Python snoozing, the Manciple’s poem continues to develop its naturalistic re- ontology of Phoebus. “Thereto he was the semelieste man / That is or was sith that the world bigan. / What nedeth his fetures to discryve? / For in this world was noon so faire on-lyve” (119–122). Phoebus’s figural beauty is physical beauty. Poets can successfully realign the semiotic properties of metaphor with their empirical referents. It’s Rhetoric’s new sun on the backward path to life as a stick 114 and the euhemerist’s boast: make way for natural criteria in the poetic arena. Phoebus is the seemli- est man since the world began (119–120). The governing principle is time. The human past. Phoebus possesses finer features than anyone on earth (121–122). The governing principle is physical comparison (plus time). THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 65

Now, “on-lyve”: the available “faire fetures” on earth at present. Deploy traditional modes of cognition from the material world of extension. Let them illuminate poetry’s particular contribution to human knowledge. Here, too, there is a Python in the grass. Phoebus’s singing is without compare. “Certes the kyng of Thebes, Amphioun, / That with his syngyng walled that citee, / Koude nevere syngen half so wel as hee” (116–118). Amphion, whose singing “was thought to wield occult powers over the natural world,”115 is an expert foil to a logical series of natural comparisons. He and his twin brother Zethos were sons of Zeus. Of the two, Amphion was rather the sensitive type. In the Library of Apollodorus, “Now Zethos paid attention to cattle breeding, but Amphion practiced minstrelsy, for Hermes had given him a lyre.” 116 “The robust Zethus blamed Amphion for his passionate addiction to music and urged him to abandon it for what he deemed the more manly pursuits of agriculture . . . and war . . . one advocating the practical life and the other the contemplative or artistic. “The gentle Amphion yielded to these exhortations so far as to cease to strum the lyre.” 117 According to Horace’s speaker in the Odes , “We see that Amphion let his brother have his way; [Therefore] respect your friend’s position . . . when he’s going to the fields and takes his dogs . . . get up, lay aside your melancholy, antiso- cial Muse and earn your food by work . . . Roman men care about hunting; it gives them fame, health, and physical stength.” 118 The day comes when Zethos and Amphion assume rule of Thebes and they take it upon themselves to fortify the city walls with entire mountains. Zethos, the Marlboro Man, staggers under the load. “Amphion strolls along drawing a cliff twice as large after him by singing to his golden lyre.” 119 He builds a city out of mountains with song.120 It is “the feebleness of brute strength by comparison to the power of genius.” 121 Euripides writes in The Phoenician Women , “In days gone by, the sons of heaven came to the wedding of Harmonia, and the walls and towers of Thebes rose to the sound of Amphion’s lyre.” 122 For a moment, Art itself was gathered inside Thebes. When an army gathers outside it, Antigone asks, “The walls that Amphion made with music, do they hold fast?” 123 The strategy to demys- tify Phoebus requires the demystification of all literature—the breach of its musical walls and the grounding of its flying cliffs. In the sixteenth century, Juan Luis Vives attempted by accident to logically reinforce Chaucer’s Manciple on this particular subject. In De causis corruptarum artium , he writes: “enraged against nature, about which they know nothing, the dialecticians have constructed another one for themselves . . . Platonic ideas and other monstrosities which cannot be understood even by those who have invented them” (VI, 190– 191).124 Granted, Vives’s direct targets, says Charles Fantazzi, were the 66 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

“pseudodialecticians of Paris” 125 and not Amphion of Thebes, save for the following unsolicited humbug in his notes to Augustine’s Of the Citie of God. “Pliny saith he inuented Music . . . Amphion built Thebes (saith Solinus), not that his Harp fetched the stones tither, for that is not likely, but he brought the mountaineers, and highland-men vnto ciulity, and to help in that work.” 126 Of course it’s possible that an otherworldly, total fabrication like a race of hardworking highland giants “brought vnto ciuility”—something no one’s ever heard of—may be ‘likelier’ as an explanation for the miraculous construction of a Greek city-state than a “magical harp.” The difference is that a “magical harp” is something everyone’s heard of because every sane poet since Euripides felt it their duty to mention it in connection to Amphion. “The tradition . . . was readily available to Chaucer and his contemporaries and was one that the poet knew well . . . Chaucer himself alludes to Amphion’s prowess as a harpist in ‘The Merchant’s Tale.’” 127 This in no ad hominem against Vives, who was ahead of his time. He was right that “peasants and artisans know nature far better than many philosophers.” 128 Every peasant and artisan understands the soterial and supernatural point of music moving mountains because it’s common sense philosophy. No one except a philosopher understands the philosophy of Amphion building cities with Nephilim slave labor because it’s complex and absurd. And the juggernauts would have never accepted the terms. There’s no good version of the story— not that there couldn’t be—where the giants “put their dreams away for another day” 129 and just go through the motions, punching time cards at a prehistoric construction job. Giants either live in mountains, 130 create mountains by fighting the gods, 131 destroy them by f ighting each other, 132 or they fell asleep one day and became mountains. In the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, “All about they saw the monstrous forms of Earth’s children, that once made war on heaven, the Giants, whom in compassion their mother had clothed with rocks, trees, crags, and piled up to heaven new-shaped as mountains.”133 At least music exists. Who knows what it’s capable of? Plato said it created the universe. 134 Giants are syphilitic hallucinations. Deploying them as a rationalist to rationalize the childhood of myth is counterproductive because they only ever existed in the childhood of myth. In the same way, deploying Amphion and the childhood of Thebes to rationalize Phoebus’s music is going to create more problems than it solves for the empirical method. All of which is to say that when a natural series takes a supernatural turn, whether by blissful ignorance of or will- ful mutiny to the rules of the classical fantasy he’s rewriting, the narrator concludes the argument with a natural turn: “This Phebus, that was flour of bachilrie” (125). Here decorative rhetoric praises poetry’s co-ontology THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 67 with existence, according to which, the social category of human chivalry is sufficient to describe the metaphorical nobility that belongs to the patron of art. One way to “unjustly, perform the just rites” 135 is to pour the human honey of little-“r” rhetoric over the corpse of language. Honey has enjoyed a long but controversial career in mummification. Legend says Alexander the Great was mummified in honey. “The last record of his appearance was that by Octavius (Caesar Augustus) nearly three centuries later, who touched the body and inadvertently broke off Alexander’s nose.” 136 These are the simple and straightforward metapoetic ‘facts’ of mummification: that it’s all one drastic measure to wield power in eternity and it leaves something brittle behind. No one can accuse the ritual of not having its “heart in the right place” as a bold interrogation of the afterlife, especially since the heart was the only organ that wasn’t packed away in canopic jars. At the same time, no self-respecting critic of human rituals can really do their job without wondering if allowing the heart, “Which Egyptians regarded . . . as the essence of being,” to remain “in place” and decay in this world before it was, quite literally, weighed for its stories against a single feather isn’t something like a tacit admission of defeat for the relative power of physical signs as they pass beyond the rational universe. 137 “In Ramses’s case, burial surgeons removed the heart and then stitched it back into its original location, using golden threads.” 138 Assuming that Ramses’s gold brocaded heart would have weighed more rather than less when it faced off against the feather of Anubis, it’s difficult to imagine any chance of success unless the entire collection of stories stored inside, spanning a life, made it somehow lighter than its own history. “Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a crowe” (130). Inside this white bird are two from Ovid: a crow-princess once enlisted into the league of Minerva’s augurs and Apollo’s personal messenger, a raven with “silver- white plumage . . . not inferior . . . to the swan, the lover of rivers.” 139 This crow, “Which in a cage he fostred many a day, / And taughte it speken, as men teche a jay. / Whit was this crowe as is a snow-whit swan, / And countrefete the speche of every man” (131–134). It is the same species of voice that naturalizes the “universal light of the great world” 140 into a sharpshooting bachelor. Now a “spotless” 141 Raven who “was once snow white” 142 and “spurned empty prophecies” 143 lives in a birdcage. The thorny singularity of his “speche” is a mere technicality. The dual movement to ground augury is this: First the god “taughte it speken” (132). The gods do not teach birds to speak in the Metamorphoses. Augury is a gift. Strictly speaking, poetic form is not taught, it is remembered. Ovid’s positive transformations impart anamnestically reoriented powers. The first feather of transformation carries with it the fluent language of gods. 68 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

As such, you don’t find many training sequences in metamorphic myth. The human music lovers of the Phaedrus didn’t become a little buggier with each passing day. They sang themselves to death and woke up as bugs with a new song. It turns out that “the end or goal for the sake of which they have been constructed” 144 was “Beauty,” a “final causality that moves all things from within,” 145 and an unteachable “inner, nonde- liberative purposiveness.” 146 Next, Phoebus simply teaches the crow to imitate human language, “as men teche a jay” (132). The path goes from oracles, to the learnt technê of language, to something even lower: augury as ‘nature’s mirror.’ It is the language of Arachne’s tapestry. “You would have thought that . . . the waves were real waves.” 147 But there are no “real waves” in art. There’s only “the down-flowing water of the Styx, which is the greatest and most dread oath for the blessed gods.”148 As Janet Coleman argues, “Augustine believed that nothing in the material world (signifi- cata ) that is external to the mind can, in the last resort, be regarded as the source of its knowledge.” 149 The world “external to” or beyond the waters of eternity’s “greatest and most dread oath” 150 can’t support the augur, because, “above grow the roots of the earth and unfruitful sea.” 151 The Manciple claims the crow’s speech has no “sentence,” that it is only the dry carcass of counterfeit sound. In that sense, it is truly language. And it isn’t Apollo’s. Margaret F. Nims writes that metaphor is “a word carried out of its normal semantic range into foreign territory.” 152 In the Manciple’s poem, metaphor returns from “foreign territory,” rejoins “its normal semantic range,” and completes the transformation back to “a word.” The only step that remains is to limit the anagogical possibility of “a word,” and conclude the matter. The argument is gaining momentum. If the realities that Platonic Realism describes exist beyond the reach of a physical system of signs, then a crow that imitates sound as sound —as a mimetic and acoustic candidate of natural language—has not qualified in its bid to join the ranks of the augurs. At this point in the poem, the representation of the augural birds of art as pets that imitate their owners’ speech goes unchallenged except by secret supernatural history. Or, it goes unchallenged until the narrator challenges it. “Therwith in al this world no nyghtyngale / Ne koude, by an hondred thousand deel, / Syngen so wonder myrily and weel” (136–138). The song of this bird is identical to its augury. We can test this idea. Later Phoebus proves it by lament. When and how does he “syngen” like a “nyghtengale”? “He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale” (135). This new logic is the old logic: relativize the augural crow by comparison to biological birds of this world instead of the one from which he came. Here the comparatio is unstable. Nothing except a general rule can stop a philosopher of art. And as a THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 69 general rule: any ‘crow’ that tells stories and sings more beautifully than nightingales is probably a ‘magical crow’. From Aesop forward, crows have been clever. In some cultures they are ghosts. They have even been messengers to Odin. Rarely have they replaced the nocturnal concert of the nightingale—those “light-winged Dryad of the trees” 153 —outside the window of young love. The ability of interlocutory strategies at the level of content to contain the crow’s powers of speech to mere imitation becomes increasingly difficult in the poem. The bird is no imitator. He seems to think perfectly well for himself when he delivers the bad news to Phoebus. He has a will. He also has a history. We know where this bird ‘learned’ to prophesy. The narratological wish that the crow’s language would divest itself of noumenal matter comes true in the end, but it happens by accident. In Orwell’s phrase, for a lack of what is called, “quite frankly, ‘reality control.’” 154

2.5 Kids and a Mortgage This philosophy must, at all costs, convert poetic objects back into their original ontological designations. If up to this point the narration calls into question the aporetic distinctions between metaphor and literal language, it now attempts a full merging. “Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a wyf / Which that he lovede moore than his lyf” (139–140). The movement now is from naturalization to domestication. Phoebus, god of poetry, lives in a house on earth. He has a human wife and a pet bird. Cosmetically, we are far from the fields of the Metamorphoses and the sunny afternoons of Apollo’s flings. The desire for art to merge with human concerns is more energetic. So Phoebus is married to “wyf.” There is no luxurious introduction for “wyf.” She doesn’t have a name. She never speaks. “Wyf” is a function inside an argument about Phoebus. Once she was the prettiest girl in Thessaly. She was about to be a mother when an alien gunned her down. 155 What little we know about the skeletal romance we gathered from circumstantial evidence. There is no indication that she was putting flowers in his curly hair and watching him sleep. She seems to have been thrust into this situation against her will. Prior to the Manciple’s Tale , Wyf was unmarried. She seems to be in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend, “lemman.” In this poem Wyf does not meet “lemman.” She sends for him. “His wyf anon hath for hir lemman sent” (204). To her everlasting detriment, she was a homeowner. One day god and his bird arrived to her doorstep for reasons beyond her dimensional interest. The place could have used sprucing up, sure, but Phoebus liked it well enough. “Show me to the bedroom, human.” For his winged miracle, the birdcage in the corner would do. Such presumptuousness is 70 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL not out of character for the rogue gods. Jupiter handed Europa a neverending trough of troubles. 156 Wyf is silent in a poem about the way poetry and life sound to each other. She and her house are the living symbols of the literal world, the human family Phoebus’s rhetoric would like to inhabit. The linguistic epistemologies of history and art are unable to communicate with each other without serious philosophical concessions. Once in a while, Phoebus is willing to make these concessions. Wyf, what little we can divine, seems to have little interest. Perhaps she just wants him to leave, or chip in for rent. The more thrilling possibility is that she doesn’t see him, doesn’t know he’s there. For “lemman” and those closest to her, she was taken before her time by a sudden heart attack. Because even if Phoebus is willing to trade his symbol for her language, the question remains whether it is possible. By the time life and art give enough of themselves away they’ve already become the other. Look at what happened to Rhetoric’s wooden stick in the Anticlaudianus . Watch what happens to Phoebus’s crow when he figures out how to do what Wyf can’t: speak her language out loud in a poem, within earshot of the god of poetry. Wyf could be a real chatterbox in her own world. But whenever Phoebus sets foot in a room, he turns it into a cosmic myth. The truth of life broadcasts on a different wavelength than the underfunded twenty- four-hour public radio that plays Macrobius’s singing spheres, “thilke speres thryes thre,” which Chaucer calls “That welle . . . of musyk and melodye / In this world heer, and cause of armonye” ( Parliament of Fowls , 61–63). Perhaps it’s for the best the god doesn’t live in the poem where he could hear what she mutters under her breath. The Manciple’s Tale is another of Chaucer’s experimental worlds, a world that counterbalances the experimental irony of divine failure with the surer knowledge that Phoebus is on the run from and not to his true home. That is to say, the language of the poem is only represented according to the postlapsarian epoch. If its share in that epoch was substantial instead of representational, we may have been able to hear wyf speak. When poetry bends the note of history in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , it will snap the string. Here, the house of Phoebus cannot contort to fit the shape of the “hous” of man. Nevertheless, Phoebus does his best to contribute as a literal rather than metaphorical lover. “This worthy Phebus dooth al that he kan / To plesen hire, wenynge for swich plesaunce, / And for his manhede and his governaunce, / That no man sholde han put hym from hir grace” (156–159). It is an uncomfortable conversation, but we may as well have it. The Art of Love is not the act of love. In the deepest sense possible, it’s all talk. This new version of the Coronis myth is no ringing endorsement THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 71 of the god of poetry. But neither was the last. Clearly Phoebus-Apollo is no tiger in the sack. Every time he tries out with what he hears humans call ‘the rough stuff’, Coronis-Wyf ends up in bed with a younger man. The narrator rushes to Phoebus’s aid. Perhaps the poem’s voice of naturalism finally sees in Phoebus one of its own. “But God it woot, ther may no man embrace / As to destreyne a thing which that nature / Hath natureely set in a creature” (160–162). Pet birds in a gold cage glutted on “mete and drynke” and “deyntees” will still prefer the forest and its worms (163–174). After a lifetime spent in debauch on a “couche of silk,” the ungrateful housecat will chase a mouse and leave the dish of cream (175–180). Such is the wild, thankless nature of a pet Wyf. The gods can’t leave them alone in their own house for a minute without some human ending up in their place. Of course this string of red herrings fails to address the central theoretical dilemma of the non-relationship: relegate Wyf to nature and she’ll be natural. Phoebus’s art of love will never satisfy her physically. Can we blame her? At least the cat was given a dish of cream. Chaucer’s Pheobus is more like a ghost castrato. His invisible phallus doesn’t work as well as the temporary one Ovid gives him. In Ovid’s stories it atrophies like a plover’s in time for the migration home. For Wyf, the rustle under the sheets was a metaphor. The central engines of meaning in poetry are meager building materials for sexual ethics. Phoebus’s marital failures march in step with the epistemological failures of the Manciple’s thesis, a thesis whose attrac- tiveness seems never to fade to the “lusty bachiler” of Metamorphoses I, II , and the Manciple’s Tale. The poem participates with relish in the literary tradition that says art will not produce a stable system of metaphor about physical pleasure, unless it first dismisses it as part of an ontological aporia. Whether it’s ‘true’ that “art will not produce a stable system of metaphor about physical pleasure” matters less than the following fact: It’s true that a literary tradition said it was true. The “Alle poesye”157 where Chaucer sends his books is really ‘some poesye’. But it is that kind of “poesye” that tests itself by fire, that wants to discover what “poesye” is and is not. Kissing “the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace”158 is more like running the gauntlet. “Alle poesye” is a prettier way to say that not all poems are poetry. Of course in that sense, “alle poesye” is “alle poesye.” It is a love letter to all men that have walked on the moon. There are other steps to kiss in the history of poetry, traditions based in opposite philosophies that would, for instance, witness the monistic elision of two souls into One in the northward trajectory of John Donne’s “compass.” “If they be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are 72 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL two . . . It leans, and hearkens after it, / And grows erect, as that comes home . . . Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun.” 159 The metapoetic integration of physical and spiritual ecstasy depends upon a co-ontological description of mind, body, and soul. Such a poem, and such a tradition, belong to the current of Western ideas that Chaucer’s interlocutors champion in irony as they skip like a stone across “the unfruitful sea” of poetic materialism. Phoebus-Apollo has tried since the classical age to write these sorts of poems and reinvent himself as a love poet of experience rather than intuition, but always by story’s end he is unable to persuade even his reinvented self that the proper judge of artistic speculation is the ‘truth’ of natural bliss.

“Wise Plato seith” After a small diversion in which nature trumps nurture, buttressed by various proofs of housebroken animals behaving like the little Judases they really are, it’s time to bring the correlations home to the lawless lust of the human “she-wolf” (183). And so the monologue ends, “Alle this ensamples speke I by thise men / That been untrewe, and nothyng by wommen. / For men han evere a likerous appetit” (187–189). Yes, the choplogic “ensemples” were about men. Arnold E. Davidson writes, “In fact, by assessing the Manciple’s inconsistencies, the careful reader can discern that there is a definite logic to the muddlement that this character attempts to perpetrate upon his audience.” 160 Next the poem expands a judgment of male hedonism for the next four lines, proves Chaucer’s point by accident, “That we ne konne in nothyng han plesaunce” (195), and returns to the story with another change of heart about the “likerous appetit” of men: “This Phebus, which that thoghte upon no gile / Deceyved was, for al his jolitee” (196–197). All men are “likerous.” Phoebus is a man. Therefore, Phoebus is not “likerous.” Before you can say “Phoebus is not a man” the poem adds, “Therefore Phoebus was deceived by a woman.” Very well. The newly guileless (196) Phoebus leaves with Wyf’s checkbook to go grocery shopping for three (203). While he’s away, she leaves the back gate unlatched. “His wyf anon hath for hir lemman sent” (204). But someone else sneaks in before. He arrives by invitation. “Hir lemman? Certes, this is a knavyssh speche! / Foryeveth it me, and I you biseche” (205–206). To that effect, one rather thorough way to seek abso- lution for the things we say is to prove that language is meaningless. And so the naturalist narrator turns to Plato, John of Salisbury’s “prince of all philosophy.” 161 THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 73

The wise Plato seith, as ye may rede, The word moot nede accorde with the dede. If men shal telle proprely a thyng, The word moot cosyn be to the werkyng. (207–210)

In the Platonic maxim, borrowed from the General Prologue , “wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” ( General Prologue , 742). “Wyf/wenche/ lemman” are empty signs that depend on external objects for meaning. “There nys no difference, trewely, / Bitwixe a wyf that is of heigh degree, / If of hir body dishonest she bee, / And a povre wenche, oother than this” (212–215). One must concede this sociolinguistic point to the Manciple. Words evoke reality but they share no identity with it. Nims writes, “A word standing alone has an element of un-definedness anal- ogous to that of prime matter. It is, to be sure, a unit of meaning, but much of its meaning is held in suspension, in potency, until its position in discourse stabilizes its grammatical form and elicits the relevant areas of its meaning.” 162 In a literal semiotic system language derives its meaning from empirical reality. Literal language came into being in order to name the world of sense- experience. Bees ‘bzzzzz’ before they ‘buzzed’. “The long period of use of onomatopoeia in the predicative function serves as the starting-off ‘plat- form’ for the emergence of verbs.” 163 Travis discusses the work of phi- lologist Charles Nodier, “whose Dictionnaire des onomatopé es and Notions él é mentaires de linguistique advance the thesis that only a ‘slight effort’ is needed ‘in order to arrive . . . at the belief that the imitation of animal noises was the main element in the beginning of natural languages.’” 164 “For Nodier the child’s maturation toward articulate speech repeats the growth of the species . . . ‘His linguistic expression was at first simply vocal, like that of the animals . . . bellowing, mooing, bleating, cooing, hissing.’” 165 Sounds grew up into words. We made them “cousin to the deed.” By force of will and popular consensus we attached them to the objects around us. Next we named ideas. One day we finished labeling the entire natural universe and hadn’t come closer to erasing the original contradictions at the heart of language. The foundational link between words and things was arbitrary. Everything outside of us had a name but not everything inside of us. That arbitrariness and that desire to outgrow the world of the senses is precisely what is at stake. Could language generate the artistic solution to its own instability? Could, as Édouard Jeauneau writes, “the science of words . . . and the science of things . . . come together harmoniously?” 166 74 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Here, Plato’s “dede” is the natural object at which we first hissed until our palate gave way to something better. But language is still hiss. Stewart Justman writes,

His tale is in fact an ironic attack on speech; to say “ther is namoore to sayn” is in keeping with the moral of the tale, which is “Kepe wel thy tonge.” If punning reduces words to sounds, the Manciple reduces reality to silence. His tale perfects the attack on symbols in the Canterbury Tales . It is a verbal attack on words. 167

True enough. But, if cornered, I couldn’t imagine a better way to describe literary Platonism generally and Chaucer’s particular contortions within it than to call the whole project one giant “ironic attack on speech” that “reduces reality to silence.” I think the difference between the Manciple’s ground level hatchet-work and Plato’s aerial bombardment has to do with the fact that only one of them is a “verbal attack on words.” To “perfect the attack on symbols in the Canterbury Tales ” one has to control the identity of Plato’s “dede.” It is useful to inquire at the level of method upon the evocation of the same Platonic aphorism in both the General Prologue and the Manciple’s Tale. If it was simply to establish the blood relationship and linguistic co-identity of the Canterbury Tales with the rest of the human catalogue—words set adrift from the deciduous ontology of deeds in the natural world—then the Manciple’s thesis becomes the lean hermeneutic key to the entire collection. Language is an acoustic absurdity and a historical accident. What the Manciple doesn’t seem to realize is that he’s peddling ‘controversies’ in a room full of good-humored anarchists, all of whom would accept such premises as homespun reasonableness. It’s the conclusion they’d find tiresome, that, therefore, poetry has no special status or access to a vista that isn’t grounded in historical being. Or that the history of language is the meaning of language. Because, strictly speaking, those are the questions. Ralph McInery writes, “As for the sensible things around us, John (of Salisbury) agrees with Plato that they ‘await no naming due to their instability.’” 168 This is the difference between anti-language and pre- language. One’s a categorical opposite and the other’s an alternate history. In Chaucer’s poetry, the philosophical challenge to language is essentially mythic. For Pelen, “The particular conjunction of the Ovidian legend and the Platonic aphorism in the Manciple’s Tale may afford us now an approach to Chaucer’s poetic irony in his overt use of contradiction and paradox.” 169 What if the “dede” to which words must be united does not belong to the epistemological power of the natural objects? What if, to borrow from Rousseau, “figurative language was the first to be born” and “at first only poetry was spoken”? 170 In order for the theater to reclaim THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 75 mythic powers, Artaud advocated “the abolition of the rupture between thing and words.” 171 All of Chaucer’s sources for the maxim belong to a world-denying philosophical current: Calcidius, Boethius, Jean de Meun. The aphorism shares the spirit of its philosophical models. In the Consolation Lady Philosophy states what she thinks is obvious: “There is no reason for you to wonder, since you have learned under Plato’s authority that words should be akin to the things spoken about.” 172 In the General Prologue , some other power is at work in the very medieval elision of Christ and Plato. “Crist spak hymself ful brode in hooly writ, / And wel ye woot no vileynye is it. / Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede, The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” ( General Prologue , 739–742). Even a short examination of Christ’s speaking suggests a more elusive vision of linguistic reference. “Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, ‘Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?’” 173 Later in the Gospel of John: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every [branch] that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.” 174 If the word is to accord to the deed in the manner of “hooly writ,” then the deed is probably located somewhere in that temple he raised up in three days. And in the story of human death and the accidental naming of the world, that temple turned out to be larger than the entire natural universe. The “dede” of poetry is foreign to language. More precisely, it is ‘prior’ to language. Put simply, Christ is not a vine, but that is exactly what he is, with roots stretching forward and backward to the interrupted gardens of eternity. Christ’s body is an “invisible instrument” that serves as “a scandalous countersign to anarchic discord of the human city,” staging a utopian integration of the “heterogeneous strings of the city of man into the transcendent unity of the sign of Christ in anticipation of history’s end.” 175 Poetry is language “straining to outgrow the limits.”176 Ultimately, as Pelen argues,

Chaucer’s cousin to the deed is therefore a highly-charged comment, comparable perhaps with Chaucer’s oft-expressed interest in Macrobian dreams. The “cosyn” comments on the ultimate function of poetry, which is to speak of the eternity (cousin) beyond literal language (deed) that Plato’s myths address. 177

The Sound of Arachne For the Manciple, the wrong Plato enters the “hous” of man, which means that “Plato” entered. “But for I am a man noght textueel, / I wol noght telle of textes never a deel; / I wol go to my tale, as I bigan 76 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

(235–237). In the time it takes to retire from the contest to define poetry’s “dede,” Wyf and Lemman already finished theirs. “Anon they wroghten al hire lust volage” (239). From a prison within a prison, a white crow silently observes. “The white crowe, that heeng ay in the cage, / Biheeld hire werk, and seyde never a word” (240–241). When Phoebus returns, the augur and oldest friend of god speaks. Earlier, we wondered what the gods hear when these birds speak the “truth.” This is an old story. It took a long time for a poet to zero in on an answer. “This crowe sang “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” (243). For the first time in their many adventures, Phoebus cannot understand his prophet. “What, bryd?” quod Phebus. “What song syngestow? / Ne were thow wont so myrily to synge / That to myn herte it was a rejoysynge. / To heere thy voys? Allas, what song is this?” (244–247). The fallen patron of poetry was not asking much of his bird in these latter days of domestic bliss. Even so, ‘home’, the memory of its laws and the old forgotten rage comes rushing back. Inside the rage are two obvious truths hardly worth stating. This is a story about a crow that’s never ‘crowed.’ He belongs to a god whose being is so bound up with poetic justice that not even a made-up Wyf can shake it from him. Perhaps the bird languished too long on earth, went native, forgot its own history. It’s possible he lost touch and came to accept the poem’s reinterpretation of his identity. It was the exhaustion of life in a cell. Then daily summons to the court of illiteracy, presided over by a tin ear whose philosophy couldn’t discern between prophets and parrots. In another life, the Manciple might have been a wartime bore, wondering where in the world the grumpy old man in the polka-dot bowtie learned to mumble things like “beaches” and “landing grounds.” Lately, the bird believed Phoebus taught him to speak. It wasn’t how he remembered it happening, but art is memory and, here, art is the memory being wiped. One day the idea took root that all Phoebus taught him to do was imitate human speech. His eyes readjusted to dimmer lights. He could see the visible world. Like the first men, the crow begins the great natural catalogue of the world. In imitation, he hisses the sound of the first natural object worth naming. Some of the old magic remains. That onomatopoeic rasp- berry is the sound of the future. Augurs don’t go down without a fight. Tithonus chirps every morning in protest of sunrises. This orphan of Elysium will “evere crie agayn tempest and rayn” (301). When he does, he’ll shout the last thing he remembers about the one who left him there. It is the natural name of the god behind the tempest. That’s what we call him here: “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” (243). Coley writes, “Obvious punning aside, the crow’s outburst . . . might nonetheless be understood as nonsensical birdsong, as vox rather than dictio , sound rather than sense.”178 “However,” he continues, “the crow THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 77 eliminates all ambiguity . . . the statement, after all, is subordinated to a stable truth (the wife’s infidelity).” 179 But “Wyf’s” infidelity and Pheobus’s life on earth aren’t the “stable truth” to which the poem “subordinates” sound and sense. Whether the Cokewald-God is a cuckolding “wyf” or the “housbonde” of one, “An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf / Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf” ( Miller’s Tale , 3163–3164). Neither cos- tume allows “pryvetee” to remain intact. The augur goes out of business when etymology exerts more power than eschatology. For the Manciple, the Friday of the Fall is moveable feast and if it sticks to the ribs of the poetic cosmos, “ Etymologia [becomes] the principal means of recovering meaning [“immanent to the word”] since it is the grammatical activity which discovers the causes of language in the forms of words.” 180 The “terrible truth” that hitchhikes across three beaks and survives the empire that thought it up is the sound of something when it slips out of art. It is the sound of a crow kicked to the curb. “And out at dore hym slong” (306). Transgress the language of Phoebus and you’ll fall under ours. We never found a better name for these creatures than the one we first gave by natural “dede.” We were just learning to speak then. Still, the technology improved. Men invented livelier expressions. We grew out of calling pigs “oinks” and frogs “ribbits.” There must be some secret to why we never stopped calling crows, “crows,” even if it’s not a very breathtaking one, since I suppose what they actually do is “caw.” Cocks crow. And Chaucer’s crow “Cokkows.” “The etymologist,” argues Mark Amsler, “proceeds backwards in time as far as he can until he can no longer be certain about how a word was imposed.” 181 The argument here is that the poet “proceeds backwards in time as far as he can” until he reaches a point before any words were imposed. Above all else, this poem tries to be precise about myth. Acts II and III of the Apollo-on-earth storyline get a good washing behind the ears. There’s very little to say here that hasn’t been said, but there is definitely less to say and less time to say it as Amphion’s musical walls close in around the tale. The last frenzied minutes of the crow’s Elysian employ- ment go like this. “By God,” quod he, “I synge nat amys” (248). It isn’t mere imitation, “as men teche a jay” (132). It is self-defense. To cover his tracks, the crow pours the human honey over the language of his extinction. “Phebus,” quod he, “for al thy worthynesse, / For al thy beautee and thy gentilesse / For al thy song and al thy mynstralcye / For al thy waityng blered is thyn ye” (249–252). John J. McGavin writes, “There is no doubt that the crow’s explanatory speech to Phoebus is rhetorically structured.” 182 It is the difference between Rhetoric’s initial act and her final act in the Anticlaudianus. First she “bespangles” a piece of wood. 183 This is what the crow attempts. By the time she finishes, the piece of 78 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL wood is the “true day and the actual day grows dull.” 184 That is what the crow forgets how to do. In the Manciple’s Tale , rhetoric as a technology will never make the leap from decorative to Delphic. Only Rhetoric as a philosophy will. Both need to be reversed to a time before they existed. And so the honey runs out. “The fact is that the speech modulates into report . . . The crow informed Phoebus of the adultery using irrefutable evidence and words of assured certainty.” 185 The bird finds his sea legs in the language of sense perception. He speaks what he “saugh with his yen.” “By sadde tokenes and by wordes bolde, / How that his wyf had doon hire lecherye, / Hym to greet shame and to greet vileynye, / And tolde hym ofte he saugh it with his yen” (258–261). “Viewed within the context of augural practice,” writes Fumo, “instead of suffering punishment for divulging the hidden designs of the gods to men, Chaucer’s crow is cursed for revealing the secrets of men to a god.” 186 Here’s the story of a divine serial killer. On a desert island in early prehistory, a soon to be mother of two was on the run from the great primordial dragon. “There Latona, clinging to an olive tree, bore Apollo and Diana to whom Vulcanus gave arrows as gifts.” 187 “His bowe he bente, and sette therinne a flo. / And in his ire his wyf thanne hath he slayn” (264–265). Her son would spend the rest of his life learning and unlearning that his lyre and quivers would “always display the laurel.”188 “Phoebus-Apollo spoke out among the deathless goddesses: ‘The lyre and the curved bow shall ever be dear to me . . . ’ and began to walk upon the wide-pathed earth.”189 In the Metamorphoses , “the plectrum fell from his fingers.” 190 Here, “For sorwe of which he brak his mynstralcie, / Bothe harpe, and lute, and gyterne, and sautrie, / And eek he brak his arwes and his bowe” (266–269). The Manciple’s Tale is a poem that reduces the palate of myth in order to answer the questions of myth. One crow for two. Wyf is childless: too much blurring of the poem’s ontology in half-born gods. More to correct in the end. Draw with cleaner lines. This is about languages at war. Not gods and humans. Act II: Necrophilia. Visually distracting. Chews up the scenery. Language is the corpse. So resurrect the dead with rhetoric. “O deere wyf! O gemme of lustiheed! / That were to me so sad and eek so trewe” (274–275). Rewrite Wyf’s history and carry a different person out Eurydice’s cave. “Traitour,” quod he, “with tonge of scorpioun, / Thou hast me broght to my confusioun” (271–272). There, finally: “confusion.” The flapping fish of Apollo. The epileptic and suffocating god of poetry washed up on the beach of man. Shout to the back of theater that we should never kill our wives without good evidence. “Ne trowe no thyng withouten strong witnesse” (284). Let him kick and scream. Let the Manciple write the definitive anthology of Phoebus on earth. The THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 79 bird’s evidence wasn’t bad evidence. It was great evidence. He saw it with his own eyes. And in the last sovereign roar, someone that will live forever threatens to kill himself: eternity threatens suicide. “Allas! For sorwe I wol myselven slee!” (291). Good Friday, every Friday. Finally, Act III: End of the Human Hallucination. Apollo prepares to go home. Chaucer’s emptied the poem of anything unessential—only one wrong to right this time. Phoebus turns to his bird to say goodbye. “I wol thee quite anon thy false tale” (293). He does something that Ovid should have done a long time ago.

Now shaltow, false theef, thy song forgon, And eek thy white fetheres everichon, Ne nevere in al thy lif ne shaltou speke. Thus shal men on a traytour been awreke; Thou and thyn ofspryng evere shul be blake, Ne nevere sweete noyse shul you make, But evere crie agayn tempest and rayn, In tokenynge that thurgh thee my wyf is slayn. (295–302)

Ovid’s poem turns a bird black. Chaucer’s poem turns one mute. Ovid’s orphaned birds were ejected from a private club. “Divinity only.” They’re still rather remarkable creatures. Bad judges of art, sure, but they speak and remember; they even ruminate on the tough lessons of life. “Truth was my downfall.” 191 The hard evidence of the senses: true everywhere but art. Watch the descent to natural bird. “Ne nevere in al thy lif ne shaltou speke” (297). “Ne nevere sweete noyse shul you make” (300). What remains for the failed prophets of the Canterbury Tales ? Something replaces the “sweete noyse” of omens. There’s a warm seat next to Nicholas and the knowledge of “whan that men sholde have droghte or elles shoures” ( Miller’s Tale , 3196). A place just big enough for a bird that will “evere crie agayn tempest and rayn” (301), the dime store prophecy that Chaucer can’t get enough of. Onomatopoeia is not just the origin story of human language. It is the deconstructed history of metamorphosis. Poetic judgment by transformation. It matters only a little that Phoebus plucks out the white feathers, one-by-one, so that black blood quills can grow in. Any Ovid can tell us “And for this caas been alle crowes blake” (308). Sometimes it takes a Chaucer to tell us why they “made hym blak, and refte hym al his song” (305). “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone 80 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” 192 Chaucer lends a hand to one of his heroes, even if it means briefly concentrating the “shoures shoote” of Parnassus into the misanthropic jet of a fire hose and simpli- fying the impressionistic epistemology of an epic into the leaner beats of a screenplay. “Only a ‘slight effort’ is needed ‘in order to arrive . . . at the belief that the imitation of animal noises was the main element in the beginning of natural languages.’” 193 That first “Cokkow!” was the last language the birds of Elysium would ever speak but it was humanity’s second. The “heigh ymaginacioun” 194 of oracles expires. State your name as you enter the “lif present.” 195

“Kepe wel thy tonge” Apollo is on his way home, but here in the “hous” of man, language has become too much to bear. It was funny when someone called a magical bird a bird. Why did he have to go and become a bird? The bird said he told the truth and the narrator believed him. The god said the bird lied. The narrator believed him. Even his mother believed him. “My sone, thenk on the crowe, a Goddes name! / My sone, keep wel thy tonge, and keep thy freend” (318–319). It is, according to V.J. Scattergood, “the lon- gest moralitas among the Canterbury Tales ,” comprising fifty-four lines. 196 For Fumo, a “self-defeatingly chatty moralization against chatter.” 197 In the Anticlaudianus , Alain de Lille writes, “How language, subject as it is to Nature, is dumbfounded when it tries to express things divine, loses its power of communicating and tries to take refuge in its old meaning.” 198 Isn’t this what happens? Natural language “dumbfounded”: salvage the poem by a “taking refuge” inside a moralitas . This was a poem about ethics all along, not language. Don’t kill “Wyfs” and don’t tell lies. Better yet, don’t tell lies that kill “Wyfs.” “Ne telleth nevere no man in youre lyf, / How that another man hath dight his wyf” (311–312). In fact, let’s stop talking altogether. “My sone, spek nat . . . Dissimule as thou were deef” (346, 347). Retreat. The moralitas says the same thing fifty-four times: language is dangerous—better to remain silent. “Kepe wel thy tonge and thenk upon the crowe” (362). Subject a fifty-four part single point sermon to the Latin figure repetitio and you have the poem’s final antiphrasis. The opposite of literal speech is literal silence. But the silence of poetry is full and not empty. “The silences of heaven’s music, of Cicero, Aristotle, Virgil, Phronesis, and Dante, reflect reason’s inability to fathom and language’s inability to express the mysteries of God.” 199 “No poet is a poet unless he has felt the temptation to destroy language and create another one, unless he has experienced the fascination of THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE MANCIPLE’S TALE 81

non-meaning and the no less terrifying fascination of meaning that is inexpressible . . . The Word has its roots in a silence previous to speech.”200 This is a poetic truth for which Chaucer’s poetry could give a long list of thanks: to Augustine, to the ‘school’ of Chartres, to Boethius, a heritage that ultimately owes to long Latinate reappraisals of linguistic perspectives in Platonic dialogues. Boethius writes, “‘Now do you recognize that I am a Philosopher?’ To which the first very cuttingly replied: ‘I should have, had you kept silent.’”201 It is an old idea that poetry is silent to language. It is an idea too rich for the Manciple and one that forms a tradition very dear to Chaucer. As we approach the final chapter, perhaps we have a clearer idea of what to expect. Chaucer has a career-long habit of drawing interlocutors that would scrub the universe of every last trace of eternity. How this is attempted is less important than the attempt itself. Either heaven needs to share a house with an earthling or heaven needs to cease existing altogether. And it is not a problem of religion; it is a problem of language. In one vision God “is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech.” 202 In another, “grammar lives and generates worlds because there is a wager on God.” 203 In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , another bird carries all of this in him and faces the choice of whether he will dream and “syng” rather than “Cok! cok!” 204 for his survival. CHAPTER 4

THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE

f the Old Man’s tree, an “iren hoot,” and a crow’s “Cokkow! Cokkow! I Cokkow!” are the symbolic meeting places for the diverse themes and antinomies of the previous poems, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is the trial by fire for the entire vision. It’s here we witness the resurrection of every major philosophical dispute, every first-rate nightmare and crummy joke in the Chaucerian performance, all huddling together in one psychotic utopia and overcrowded Panglossian murder mystery. The goal is to understand the epistemological architectures that make Chaucer’s style possible. And his style, generally speaking, is to split his poems in half between a dada- esque community dinner-theater short run of Don Giovanni, with visible wires, cookie sheet thunder, coconut shell cavalry—all the pennywise spiritual ambitions and Pygmalionic death threat of “O, statua gentilis- sima ” played on a donated pump organ—and then somehow ‘stick the landing’ on the slippery surface of what Takada called, a “simple and straightforward and even austere . . . ambition to affiliate himself with the great continental tradition of Neoplatonism.” 1 If we’re willing to entertain the idea that he splits his poems in half (and the measurement isn’t exact) then we’ll probably derive more enjoyment from the fact that he plays both ‘halves’ at once—and almost never at equal speeds or volumes. Donaldson writes, “One is apt to come away from this feast feeling that one has been abundantly fed, but one is not sure on what kind of food.” 2 Sure enough, the Nun’s Priest Tale is an inter- denominational pileup of literary gestures and classical name-dropping. It also happens to be the definitive nursery rhyme of medieval Platonism. Every reasonable person could accuse the Nun’s Priest’s Tale of doing too many things at once. What’s more exciting is that every reasonable person seems to have accused it of doing too many things at once and doing all of them well. 84 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Nevertheless, through its stream of consciousness and airborne lunacy the poem conceals a beguilingly simple structure. This might sound like disappointing news, in the way the lazy trope of an alarm clock is in the final scene of a good fantasy. But here the alarm clock works in reverse. So it’s only as disappointing as an alarm clock that rings everyone back to sleep. The entire experiment is to make sure that it’s set like a deranged snooze. Every time we want to make the poem answer to waking life it keeps howling things like, “meanwhile, in the land where the fireflies have eradicated polio, monster truck rac- ing is making a huge comeback .” The “beguilingly simple structure” upon which it takes place is the fundamental aporia of the Platonic and Neoplatonic literary traditions: the conflict between Human Art and Human History, whether they are part of the same struggle for meaning or whether they’re just destined to struggle against each other. The tale is decisive in any pursuit of a Chaucerian Poetic, even if the unforgiv- ing and elemental broadness of the aporia makes it easy for every other topic to ‘stick’ to the poem. The philosophical problem of Art and History in the tale belongs to another problem whose context is as much mythic as linguistic: postla- pasarian referentiality, the poetic status of fallen language. It’s a dizzy tangle of metapoetry in which, and bear with me: ‘a poem about poems’ tells ‘a story about the story of language’ in order to speculate upon the recovery of a ‘language before language’. Emmet T. Flood describes Augustine’s theological inroad to an unresolved classical division.

But when a man turns toward God to address Him, he cannot speak to Him directly through the device of physical language, because God is immaterial. At this juncture, the gap between the physical status of language and the transcendent and immaterial nature of the divine is unbridgeable. . . . He seems to be caught in a post-creation material world which is radically and irreconcilably disconnected from the sphere of the divine. But he has noted the key to his escape from this dilemma in his mention of the similarities between the writings of the Platonists and the Gospel of St John. 3

Therefore, by ‘Art’ we imagine, in the medieval Neoplatonic context, an uncreated order of knowledge negotiated through symbol and metaphor. The metapoetic appeal to infinity ‘in Art’ inherited from classical models. By ‘History’ we understand the external world of mimetic propul- sion that introduces the occasion and content of poetry. And by content we understand everything ‘in Art’ that belongs to the represented phenomenology of experience. In Emmett Flood’s Augustinian terms, “a physical THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 85 language” and “post-creation material world” “radically and irreconcilably disconnected from the sphere of the divine.” Next the possibility that “the key to his escape” might exist in “the similarities between the writings of the Platonists and the Gospel of St John.” 4 And where the reader feels uncomfortable accepting a metapoetics whose anamnestic vocabulary is, “God,” “gods, “soul,” and “eternity,” one can imagine them as categories of pure tautology or Ricoeur’s “language whose function of discovery is set free.” For instance, I see less theoretical conflict than others might between a metaphorical release by Platonic anamnesis and Max Black’s idea: “Metaphorical statement is not a substitute for a formal comparison or any other kind of literal statement, but has its own distinctive capacities and achievements . . . it would be more illuminating to say that metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing.” 5 It’s external to the discussion whether metaphor “created” the similarity between particular being and absolute, “remembered” it, or “created the memory” to remember. Those scenarios are likelier to end up saying the same thing than they are – independent of certain acrobatics – destined to harmonize with Frederic Jameson’s “Always Historicize!” 6 or Volo š inov’s critique that “a sign that has been withdrawn from the pressures of the social struggle . . . inevitably loses force.” 7 I use the vocabulary for two reasons. The first, simply, is that Chaucer used it. So it’s easier to talk about his poetry using terms like “God” than I think it is, for the most part, using terms like “categories of pure tautology.” The second is that God and the gods hadn’t died yet so there was more to them than a metaphysical category. Or if you like, there are histories inside the ahistory. “A to Z” is a material accident. The ‘true’ alphabet exists within “A=A.” Put another way, “I AM THAT I AM,” 8 was. It had good days and bad. Apollo had a story. His was in love with a tree. He killed his wife. God killed his Son. The folktales and family trees might have confused the metaphysical category more than they helped. At the same time, it’d be safer to say that the stories preceded the category than the other way round. As concerns art, it’s probably for the best. “Father into your hands I commit my spirit” 9 and “[substance] into your hands I commit my [co-ontology]” both ‘do’ metaphysics but only one of them does tragedy. And from what I gather, the category itself wasn’t as interesting as were questions of its texture and our poetic access to it. It’s not entirely unlike “History” for the historicist. I see less ‘does History exist?’ papers than I do ones that ask, ‘what sort of history?’ The Nun’s Priest’s Tale seems to put its shoes on before its trousers and ask ‘what sort of eternity?’ as a matter of course and treat ‘does History exist?’ as an open question. 86 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

However, Chaucer’s long march forward from the House of Rumour inaugurates a new cultural realism in the Canterbury Tales . Medieval England and its inhabitants replace exemplary epithalemic and Elysian settings. This complicates matters, no doubt, when one turns the discussion toward art’s antagonism to life. His poetry achieves high art through the unspectacular. The Old Man of the Pardoner’s Tale leaves Eos for a walk through Flanders during the Plague. In the Summoner’s Tale , truth of theophany slips through our fingers like a handful of Pentecostal fart. The Manciple’s god of poetry went from chasing nymphs for the sheer fun of it to a loveless marriage with “wyf.” Flood or no flood, the Miller is rather lovingly drawn in the General Prologue and conforms to medieval social stereotypes. So, on the one hand, there’s the sublime ahistorical flight of the tradition in which Chaucer’s poetry participates. On the other, the snuffling pleasure with which he sketches the lettuce in the teeth of his period. The rather austere sounding project of recon- ciling the two becomes especially difficult in a poem that, according to Helen Cooper, “refuses all attempts to turn it into something other than a superb story.”10 For Cooper what is “quintessentially Chaucerian” about the tale is “the brilliance of the telling and the resistance it offers to possible audience expectations of what it ‘ought’ to do.” 11 A large part of the difficulty derives from the nature of metaphor itself and its privileged place in the generation of meaning in art. Peter Travis’s Disseminal Chaucer is indispensable on the topic and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale generally. He’ll forgive me “zigging when he zags”12 even if it means zigging mystical on the River Styx where he zags theoretical on the River Seine. Travis argues, “That metaphor was absolutely central to medieval ways of thinking about poetry appears beyond dispute. It would be safe to say, as Lisa Kiser has written, ‘that the medieval theory of poetry was to a large extent dependent upon the understanding of how metaphors work.’” 13 The oft-ignored question regarding complex poetic metaphors is the nature of their ‘new’ referentiality. It seems to me that the prima facie assumption of the historical critic must be that metaphors can refer ‘outside’ themselves, or toward life instead of art—that a metaphor’s movement can be seized at a moment of literal predication. One result of this assumption is to bypass questions of first principle in forensic pursuit of sociohistorical realities to which metaphors might be aligned. Chief among these questions of first principle is whether the literal predication of metaphor is possible, and not simply in the context of Chaucer’s poetic performance. For Lee Patterson, “the social really is, as every form of historicism has always claimed, inescapable.” 14 And of course, that’s true for the “poem-in-the-world.” Is it true for the “world-in-the-poem?” THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 87

What I’m trying to smoke out in this genealogy of Chaucer’s poetry is, at once, more spectral and embedded to the artistic gesture itself and along the lines of what Adorno suggests when he writes,

. . . To this extent, whatever it wills or states, art remains theology; its claim to truth and its affinity to untruth are one in the same . . . The situation culminates in the question of whether, after the fall of theology, and in its total absence, art is still possible. But if . . . this necessity subsists, art retains an oracular quality; it is ambiguous whether the possibility of art is a genuine witness to what endured of theology or if it is the reflection of an enduring spell. 15

Which is to say, whether Chaucer’s poetry is a “genuine witness” or “the reflection of an enduring spell,” at some point the Nun’s Priest’s Tale will force us to confront the notion that “It is impossible to speak of God literally, and thus one cannot claim a literal equivalent for a metaphorical statement about God.” 16 As such, the hope is to inductively detect an epistemological mode within Chaucer’s writing and the traditions he adapts—test the claim that an artistic world of meaning can exist without being absorbed into a social one. It is my suspicion that there is a reasonable historical vocabulary for this art that doesn’t have to pass through twentieth-century historicism’s “crucial fact of initiation.” 17 And the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , far from representing an outlier in the Chaucerian corpus, is, to quote Charles Muscatine, Chaucer’s “most representative poem” and one that “fittingly serves to cap all of Chaucer’s poetry.” 18 We must imagine, then, that those methodological statements pertaining to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale usefully pertain to the entire idea of Chaucer’s poetics. Both species of interpretation have the opportunity to confront Chaucer at his ‘most Chaucerian’. The prize of the tale is history and whether it survives Chaucer’s theatrics. The beast-fable deconstruction is an Ars Poetica and an impressive long form exercise in counterbalance. It maintains a downright neigh- borly and screwball simple-mindedness while asking the most bombas- tic, hotdogging, and self-important question in art: “What is art?” The timid and meticulous manner by which it conducts this discussion is, essentially, to tell the story of human history in reverse and then ‘dare’ human history to invade it. This wouldn’t be so remarkable an example of the poem’s puppy-like hubris weren’t it for the fact that the entire nose pulling spectacle takes place on a fenced-in forest farm that belongs to a poor old human widow. To that effect, it’s something like a child daring his parents to invade their independent city-state, hurling insults 88 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL from behind walls thick enough to race chariots across, and crowing like a son of Zeus that “this lawless utopia will be a monument to all time.” Meanwhile this unsunk Atlantis is, quite visibly, a fort made out of sheets and the revolution in morals the last heady moments before a scheduled afternoon nap. Which is to say, “History” stalks as a linguistic mode throughout the poem. But it also bursts into the nursery. Practically speaking, the poor widow ‘owns’ the poem. Next comes the bewildering invasion of “Jakke Straw and his meynee” during the onomatopoeic uproar of the fox chase in order to, in Helen Barr’s phrase, “restore rightful ownership.” 19 It’s not only bewildering because of its sharp aesthetic incongruity with the artificial setting of the poem—the tragedy buffa of a childhood yurt calling itself Amphion’s Thebes—but also because it constitutes the only definite reference to the 1381 upris- ing in the entire Canterbury collection. A lot of hopes and dreams rest on Straw. He’s as important for some historicist critics as talking birds ought to be for any imaginary future ‘historical ahistoricists’. How we interpret the Straw reference (or not for that matter) is indicative, consciously or not, of a particular philosophy of literature. And inside every philosophy of literature is a logical enjambment concerning the status of history as a participant in its field of significations. The question of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is whether there should be a terminal punctuation. Of course, it’s important to bear in mind that an entire poem occurs before Jack Straw’s moment in the sun. When he storms the gates in the final moments, how we read him will likely be the effect of an interpretation rather than its cause: either the effect of the long meandering poem that finally invites him in or the effect of a long and purposeful career working within a theory of art. Probably both. The rebel leader cannot be a successful ambassador of historical meaning or the pitchforked breach of metaphor’s closed circle of signification unless some previous decision furnished that logical capability. What eventually complicates the ambassadorial power of Jack Straw is the poem’s encyclopedic function—the comprehensive manner in which it organizes Chaucer’s wider system of poetics. An immense back-story makes the Nun’s Priest’s Tale possible and it will try to over- whelm the Straw reference in its bid to subdue an entire history of ideas. Chauntecleer’s opera intervenes on an old philosophical debate. The fact that it happens to do so as an oversexed alloy of The Wind in the Willows and the Phaedrus just makes it one of the more reasonable incursions. It takes a lot of ‘howevers’ to make historicism work in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale . That doesn’t mean historicism doesn’t work. But the poem does make it sing for its supper. THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 89

The Low Road out of History To a certain extent, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale begins in the incomplete Monk’s Tale . I wouldn’t go as far as Rosalyn Rossignol who argues, “Although easily enjoyed for it’s own sake, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is best considered as a response to the Monk’s Tale , and specifically to the Monk’s view of tragedy.” 20 It would be more precise to claim that the Monk’s Tale is “best considered” as the first of two prefaces to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and – independent of a first-rate bathtub scene which we’ll later discuss – almost impossible to “enjoy for it’s own sake.” The other preface is the widow’s story. Both serve an anticipatory function. Chaucer was ahead of his time in the anti-comedy topos. It’s one thing to tell a corny joke on purpose. It takes real tranquility and a genuine misanthropic love of the game to punish your audience. Sure enough, the pilgrims interrupt his poem: “Sire Monk, namoore of this, so God yow blesse! / Youre tale anoyeth al this compaignye” (2788–2789). The literal complaint is that the tale is dull, which seems to be an intended and ably achieved effect. That the Monk’s straight-faced de casibus is cut short on account of boredom is a Horatian problem. Strictly speaking, the Monk does everything right. He just isn’t nimble enough to navigate the actual assign- ment. The Monk admits as much. “Nay, quod this Monk, “I have no lust to pleye” (2806). Horace’s Ars Poetica doesn’t receive enough credit for its glib moments. “The poet winning every vote blends the useful with the sweet, giving pleasure to his reader while he offers him advice. His book will make the Sosii 21 money and travel overseas, and far into the years ahead extend its author’s name.” 22 That’s the common sense of the Ars Poetica. It just doesn’t happen to be its art of poetry. Pleasure, sweetness, good advice, and subsequent reprints as the basis of literary immortality conceal a real fear and trembling about literature that the Monk aims for in earnest and misses. In Horace’s split-personality: “The poet’s aim is to instruct or please,” 23 and “so poetry, both made and introduced to give pleasure to the soul, sinks to the depths if it but fall a little short.” 24 For Horace, if you want to have a good time in art, “carve laws on oak” 25 and “let the poets have the right and privilege to choose their death.”26 When Alan De Lille takes the hatchet to Sidonius in the Anticlaudiuanus , he accuses his “loud, windy noise” of “neither falling to the depths nor swelling to the heights.” 27 Sidonious “holds a middle course,” 28 which is another way of saying that he’s too stalwart a geographer of midgard in a poem about to rocket away by chariot on an acid trip to the spheres in order to reverse the rising Cocytus29 in our lungs. According to Lynette Watson, “The bulk of Sidonius’ poetry is in the form of imperial panegy- ric which is truly occasional literature, always addressed to a particular 90 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL individual at a given point in time. It is a political discourse in the context of actual political events and is, therefore, shaped by the requirements of a unique and momentary situation.” 30 Put another way, when Augustine breezes through topics like “those who suppose that the visible world was the supreme God,” 31 he mentions that “Plato afterwards wrote all this down, making it pleasant to read rather than potent to persuade.” 32 It’s not altogether different from when Chesterton accused Dickens’s comedy of “trying to tell the truth about something that is about as funny as the fall of Carthage.” 33 The difference is that the Monk doesn’t tell the “truth” about something as funny as the fall of Carthage. He just tells the true story of the fall of Carthage. In the context of the Nun’s Priests’ Tale , the lesson of the Monk seems to be that whatever you do, don’t delight the soul with a sermon on the fall of Hannibal. Delight it all you want with a gassy lecture on the pratfall of Hannibal. As long as it’s exilic humor. Part of the larger pratfall of the soul into human history. And make sure to at least touch upon what Schmidt called Chaucer’s “deep regret for the lost paradise.” 34 Get in a good jab or two about what Boethius described as, “this fleshly frame’s oblivious weight.” 35 Delight is identical to the soul’s experience of excellence in art. Horace prefigures Chaucer’s straddling of the Houses of Fame and Rumour. In the Summoner’s Tale a fart is funny by virtue of the fact that farts have been funny since the dawn of time and provide an immutable foundation for the best jokes of every generation. Hidden in the same tale are mystical expectations that a fart in poetry can provide a small sliver of an opening onto the spiritual and artistic reality of Pentecost, one that could instruct and delight the soul, and one that could “tell the truth about something that is about as funny” as speaking in tongues. Even if the complaint against the Monk is grounded in the social anxieties of the Knight or the administrative responsibilities of Harry Bailey, their dissatisfaction, like that experienced by the audience of art, is more fundamental. The Monk’s failed rhetoric, his chatter, is unable to please because it cannot deliver upon its own promise to artistically, rather than ethically, marshal the history of literature. Such is the unconscious component of Harry’s “hevynesse.”

As han ye seyd, to heere of hevynesse. Sire Monk, namoore of this, so God yow blesse! Youre tale anoyeth al this compaignye. Swich talkyng is nat worth a boterflye For therinne is ther no desport ne game.

(2787–2791) THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 91

The tale stops for the sake of everyone, including its readers. Then comes Chaucer’s ars poetica. “Hevynesse” is the opposite of both ‘delights’ that exist inside one Horatian metonym. The boredom of the company seems to reflect the intuitional dissatisfaction of a reader whose experience of art is no more illuminating than her experience of history. To reference Grube once more, “Plato is not laying down the rule that artists should hold the mirror up to nature, but blaming them because that is, in fact, all they do.” 36 Harry hits on something. And it’s good cinema later on. That a badly told tale is “not worth a butterfly” deserves critical attention if for nothing else than to help frame the achievements of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale as balm to the literary deficits of the Monk’s Tale. In Conrad’s Lord Jim , Stein the naturalist collects butterflies but turns a blind eye to their symbolic identity.

I was very anxious, but I respected the intense, almost passionate, absorp- tion with which he looked at a butterfly, as though on the bronze sheen of these frail wings, in the white tracings, in the gorgeous markings, he could see other things, an image of something as perishable and defy- ing destruction as these delicate and lifeless tissues displaying a splendour unmarred by death. 37

In Classical Greek, the word for butterfly—‘psyche’—is, the same as the word for soul and breath. Aristotle writes, “After a little while the outer covering bursts asunder, and out flies the winged creature that we call the psyche or butterfly.” 38 The common Greek conception of the butterfly’s immortality was similar to the cicada, literally guaranteed through non-dietary perpetuation. In Aristotle’s responsible prose: “At first, when it is a caterpillar, it feeds and ejects excrement; but when it turns into the chrysalis it neither feeds nor ejects excrement,” 39 and then figurally guaranteed as part of a mythographic order of eternity. The symbolism survives long after Chaucer. In the nineteenth century, Jacques Louis David paints a butterfly above Psyche’s head in Amour et Psych é . 40 That said, David’s image is a timid gesture compared to Greco-Roman art in which Psyche grows wings.41 Artists possessed a strong linguistic and literary mandate for the convention. After her Four Trials in the Golden Ass : “Then he ordered Psyche to be brought by Mercury and introduced into heaven. Handing her a cup of ambrosia, ‘Take this, Psyche,’ he said, ‘and be immortal. Never shall Cupid quit the tie that binds you, but this marriage shall be perpetual for you both.’” 42 Psyche becomes immortal, circularly reinforcing the metonym. The Trial of Psyche is, in the strictest sense, a psychomachia. Myth catches up and turns the symbol into 92 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL a story. Apuleius wades into the traditions of a double Venus, a double Cupid, three psyches—butterfly, soul, and a human princess—a tripar- tite ontology—mind, body, and soul—and essentially cleans house by a Platonic experiment. 43 For a brief moment, Apuleius suspends the hydra and photographs the original face. Returning to Chaucer’s “nat worth a boterflye,” it is perhaps, in Dean Spruill Fansler’s words, a “device of emphatic undervaluation” 44 or a form of ad absurdum common in contemporary French literature and a favorite of Jean de Meun that Chaucer employs to expert effect some sixty-five times throughout his work.45 It could also be Harry’s accidental theory of art. Whatever comes next will have to succeed as a mystery where the Monk’s failed as a sermon. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale will have to be “worth a boterflye” and align itself with Horace’s silent definition of delight. Unlike the Monk’s psychological and historical Fortune-sponsored poetics, the story of Chauntecleer will be one that makes a play for the soul’s knowledge, for a poetics predicated on the destruction rather than the vacillation of literal reference in service to the philosophical expectations of a species of art. It will have to revel in tautological achievements—the trials that turn psyches into psyches, poems into poetry, and teaches the soul to remember what it already knows. Thus, in Lord Jim , Jim enters Stein’s study as though plumb in the middle of the Monks’ Tale/Nun’s Priest’s Tale debate:

“To tell you the truth, Stein,” I said with an effort that surprised me, “I came here to describe a specimen . . . ” “Butterfly?” he asked, with an unbelieving and humorous eagerness. “Nothing so perfect,” I answered, feeling suddenly dispirited with all sorts of doubts. “A man!” 46

Likewise the Monk retires from the storytelling contest: “‘Nay,’ quod this Monk, ‘I have no lust to pleye’” (2806). The Monk cannot “pleye” because he fails to realize, like Conrad’s characters, that with a different perspective they should have all along been talking about the same thing. Men are butterflies in art. There is no natural man, only naturalism. In the end, the philosophically rich boredom produced by the Monk bleeds into the next tale. The description of the Widow that follows does little to remedy the mood. Cin éma v érit é about dietary habits of old people makes the same mistake as the entire Monk’s Tale and orients language toward experience instead of intuition. It simply sets the low themes of history against the high. The docile exemplum of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale probably wants to parody the Monk’s ham handed bibliophilia. Pertelote and Chauntecleer’s dispute will operate on the same dynamic. That so, parody can give the false impression of stability, that something’s been THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 93 mastered or overcome, some pressing question about the universe finally put to bed. But two bad ideas can parody one another. It doesn’t make either work. And one bad idea can parody itself without knowing. It doesn’t make the idea work. Parody is only as powerful as the standard it conceals. I’ve heard Republicans call other Republicans “RINOS.” I’m not sure the internecine “Big and Small-endian” 47 dispute solves the larger riddles of American civil society. But I think that’s what happens here—one idea parodies itself. The bread and beans daily life of the Widow cartoons the Monk’s high-church variety show of ‘History’. Then the Nun’s Priest’s Tale dismisses both as the same bad idea. It does this with a supercilious but ultimately coherent attitude that assumes the philosophical and literary equivalence between high and low history in the artistic vision.

From High to Low History: The Widow’s World And so the Nun’s Priest’s Tale begins with another interruption. It picks up where the Monk leaves us. It’s history, albeit a people’s history. One is an obituary for the heroes and villains that gets booed offstage and the other is a fourteenth-century grocery list that gets forgotten when a prima donna moonwalks onstage to a fog machine. Until then, “A povre wydwe, somdeel stape in age, / Was whilom dwellynge in a narwe cotage, / Biside a grove, stondynge in a dale” (2821–2823). Here, a widow lives a blighted life of poverty on a small forest farm. For Fehrenbacher, this is the story of “social inequalities(s)” that the tale’s “highly rhetorical style . . . attempts to efface.” 48 There isn’t much use denying that social inequality has something to do with the idea of a “poor widow.” Though I’m not convinced that the windy hallucination that follows is the gathered strength of fantasy to efface it. First of all, the poem calls her a “poor” widow. It was honest enough to invent her. We didn’t have to impose it in the form of: ‘I’d like to see how all of this works out if we bring up the fact of human poverty.’ Attaching too much importance to the idea does risk missing the exasperated self- confession of this kind of art—that it’s destined to bungle the subject. The good news is that art bungles the bourgeois revisionism, too. The story of the Widow never brings its medieval spiritual message home. It’s bad at class politics and its even worse as practical theology, The Widow leads a “ful simple lyf” (2826). The simplicity of the Widow’s life, rather than opening onto a heroic spirituality, is “the result of pressing economic circumstance.” 49 “For litel was hir catel and hir rente” (2827). If anything, the passage conducts a reasonably conceived historicist reading, one that looks beneath the religious language of poverty to economic 94 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL reality. It dispenses with spiritual reification in the name of natural causation. Perhaps it conceals an ethical challenge to interpretations of the poor that defang their hardships into devotional artifacts. But there is more at stake. And by “more” I mean something giddier and phonier. The poem quickly passes over the Widow’s “doughtren two” for the sake of enumerating her livestock, two of whom (unlike the daughters) have names: Molly the sheep; later, Colle the dog. The tale’s introduction punts on the opportunity to “to gather us around the hearth to share with these three women their bond of familial caritas and Christian devotion.” 50 This is a poem with unusual priorities about the biological world. It is punishing and consistent on topic: it always sides with the animals. The Widow is only interesting insofar as she owns animals. Her sheep’s name is Molly. Her daughter’s name is “daughter.” One way to imagine it is that the poem is bored when it reviews human things but talks like Patton on the subject of animal things. When Chauntecleer eats corn he eats it like a “grim lion” (3179). When it describes the Widow’s diet, it sounds like it’s trying to memorize flash cards. It documents her eating habits, whose only positive description seems to be brown bread, milk, and the occasional bacon and eggs (2845), but never with spicy sauce. (2834). Her physical health is in good order. She sticks to her diet: “Attempre diete was al hir phisik” (2839). No binge eating: “Repplecioun ne made hire nevere sik” (2837). Daily “exercise” (2839). As such, she is gout free. “The goute lette hire nothyng for to daunce” (2840). Apparently her side passion for dancing hasn’t suffered from the patrician’s carbuncle, “the disease of kings.” No weakness for wine, “neither whit ne reed” (2842). Many critics remark upon the fact that the poem is Chaucer’s only reference to 1381. I’d like to remark that it’s Chaucer’s only reference to calisthenics (2839). The Miller wrestles: “That proved wel, for over al ther he cam, / At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram” (General Prologue , 549–550). However, he seems to do so in a purely festive capacity rather than as compliment to a high protein diet, which incidentally, even if absurd, makes for a better match with the tonal condition of the Widow’s description. Its only counterpart is Pertelote’s high opinion of laxatives with reference to the symbolic questions of non-waking cognition. When Chauntecleer believes that he has dreamed his own death, Pertelote thinks “poynaunt sauce” the likeliest culprit. She might be right. The poem says that a “moderate diet” is “al hir phisik,” but it’s not true. Next we learn of two other equal compo- nents of her medical treatment: “exercise, and hertes suffisaunce.” The contented heart of Christian caritas is really a matter of making the right food choices and working the core. Where it fails as an exemplum it also doesn’t light up the night sky as social ideology. The naturalism is too THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 95 empirical to participate in either. In the words of Volo š inov, “As regards the fundamental problems of historical materialism and of the study of ideologies altogether, the applicability of so inert a category as that of mechanical causality is simply out of the question.” 51 And it’s not the last time we’ll have to dodge a devotional genre. The moralitas at the end of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale helps to further experientially surround the story of Chauntecleer, to wall-in his “yeerd enclosed al aboute” 52 by incommensurable modes of discourse. One cannot accuse the Nun’s Priest’s Tale of shadowboxing when it comes to guarding its own figures from historical intrusion. The artistic world of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is bookended by history and experience. The question is whether they cross-pollinate. Whatever the conclusion, there isn’t much raw power to all of this unless we agree that the passage from the Widow’s world to Chauntecleer’s represents a movement from a historical to a literary realm. The logic of the passage has the composition of poetry nearer to mind than social difference. I’m not arguing that social tensions aren’t accepted as fact. I just arguing that the poem doesn’t accept any fact as true except the one that says, “once upon a time, beasts and birds could speak and sing” (2880–2881). The social tension of the exemplum , however rich in humor, is part of a larger cohesive wave of naturalistic strategy that suddenly crashes against the burlesque circus of Chauntecleer’s private world of symbols. Now, it would be a useful thought experiment to imagine the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ’s place in the canon of Western literature were the remain- der of the poem composed in this register. Useful, because if we didn’t already know that we were about to be transported to the literary lost weekend of Chauntecleer, we might draw the conclusion that this is not an awfully successful poem. Suddenly a chicken thunders into the poem atop a rainbow descriptio . Through the late Elvis judo and catapulted cows it’s hard not to discern the idea that excellence in poetry depends on liberation from the physical concerns of the Widow’s world, that the mission of poetic language is to rescue its audience from language itself. When I say “language itself” I mean language’s standard signifying relationship to the objects of existence. For even if Chaucer does a very good job of describing the daily life of the Widow, there’s no guarantee her historical biographer might not do a better one. The unique accomplishment of poetry cannot be secured in the empirical arena; language in its pre-poetic state is dependent on history for meaning. Muscatine writes, “The cock’s magnificence breaks out amid this carefully restrained setting with the best Chaucerian effect.” 53 Wetherbee argues, “From the opening lines we see style straining to outgrow the limits of the humble story. Ostensibly they set up the simple life of the poor Widow as a foil to 96 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL the mock- sumptuousness of Chauntecleer’s.” 54 Travis’s illustration gets at the aesthetic heart of the matter: “As in the movie ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ we begin in a black and white, Puritan landscape and then wake up suddenly, as if in a dream vision, inside a phantasmagoric kingdom of technicolor wonder.” 55 So the underachieving Monk’s Tale and the Widow’s vignette attempt to envision a theory of poetry that would have as its principal concern the business of existing in reality. As Barr’s argues, Chauntecleer’s principal significance is that he is a “vital means of her food production.” 56 But of course that is all Chauntecleer could be to the Widow because she has become, by no fault of her own, an analytical representative of a restricted poetic. Her world, along with the Monk’s, lacks the literary tools necessary to interpret the bird’s figural identity. In the philosophy of art the Monk inhabits, Chauntecleer is another morality play inside Fortune’s penal colony. In the philosophy of art that the Widow inhabits, Chauntecleer is a biological chicken. And now the Nun’s Priest’s Tale begins. The Widow doesn’t know, or isn’t allowed to know, that her farm’s rooster moonlights in another life as a walking, talking theory of art. We must imagine that as the Widow looks out of her window at Chauntecleer’s yard she sees nothing but animals carrying on like animals. We must also imagine that as Chauntecleer looks toward the Widow’s cottage he sees nothing at all.

The Chicken’s World It is a shame, too, that the Widow can’t see what really goes on in her small farm because her rooster’s “crowing has no peer.” Yes, the farm’s only rooster has no peer.

A yeerd she hadde, enclosed al aboute With stikkes, and a drye dych withoute, In which she hadde a cok, hight Chauntecleer. In al the land, of crowyng nas his peer.

(2847–2850)

The closest comparison to how merrily he crows is the church organ. “His voys was murier than the murie orgon / On messe-dayes that in the chirche gon” (2851–2852). It’s unclear whether this church belongs to the coop or whether the narrator is just trying to help us understand Chauntecleer’s merry song by recourse to the famously fun loving music of the medieval mass. At any rate, Chauntecleer’s crowing is merrier. THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 97

His song describes the movement of the heavens better than science. “By nature he knew ech ascencioun / Of the equynoxial in thilke toun” (2855–2856). His colors trump nature’s: “His coomb was redder than the fyn coral . . . His nayles whitter than the lylye flour” (2859, 2863), colors like Rhetoric’s robes in the Anticlaudianus : “Her countenance is steeped in radiant colour: a brilliant red glow tints her face with roseate luster.” 57 Like Minerva’s robe in the De Planctu , “The design describes what cannot be circumscribed, offers the invisible for inspection, and speaks what the tongue cannot.” 58 Travis writes, “in his painterly portrait of Chauntecleer, Chaucer has recontextualized in a few brush strokes a long-lasting aesthetic debate concerning the superiority or inferiority of the colors of nature to the colors of rhetorical art.” 59 The same medieval Neoplatonic lionization of rhetoric’s colors over nature’s occurs in the Franklin’s Tale.

I sleep nevere on the Mount of Pernaso, Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Scithero. Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede, But swiche colours as growen in the mede, Or elles swiche as men dye or peynte. Colours of rethroryk been to me queynte;

(Franklin’s Tale , 719–726)

The structure is clear enough: dye, paint, chlorophyll? Knowable. The colours of “rethoryk?” These belong to Ciceronian-educated non-waking residents of Parnassus. It is a travel-size ars poetica via the question ‘what is the connection between classical authors, rhetoric, the gods, and not being awake for any of it?’ It is the question of every Chaucerian dream poem. In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , the logical ascent of Chauntecleer from literal to figural object is modeled on the Neoplatonic ascensus . But as always in Chaucer’s poetry, its fully realized apotheosis is made up of a thousand hesitations and apologies. Chief among them is the fact that this Macrobian rhetor, dreamer, and oracle, this accidental emissary of upper heaven is a chicken. And while Yasunari Takada argues that “Chaucer is not completely positive about the Neoplatonic view of the world,” 60 I think the more probable interpretation is simply that Chaucer’s poetry makes ironic art of an Orphean literary habit. Because if we try and hold fast to what is slipping away the poem becomes more effective, and what is slipping away is that Chauntecleer is the Widow’s chicken, or at least was once. Now Caligula takes the stage in order to “bring the impossible into the realm of the likely.” 61 In Camus’s Caligula , “What I want to do 98 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL with all my strength today is beyond the power of the gods. I am taking responsibility for a kingdom in which the impossible rules.”62 The poem will try whenever it can to re-chickenize him, but, as the saying goes, picking at it will just make it worse. If there’s one guiding representational strategy to the poem, it’s to insist Ç eci n’est pas un poulet . The more the old Chauntecleer is held up against ‘The Good and Perfect Chicken’ the more readers finds themselves, through a very robust suspension of disbelief, in a world of impossibilities governed by slapstick illogic. Aesop’s fables are perfectly sane. Not just in their advice. The setting is sane because it is consistent. The first thing the Nun’s Priest’s Tale told us about itself is that it’s really just a barnyard fallen on tough times. One of the next things it tells us is that Chauntecleer’s got the best looking legs and toes, “like azure” (2862), and a personal harem of “seven hens to do all his pleasure” (2866) that are also his “sisters.” They’re beautiful, too. They look just like him, or at least “wonder lyk to hym.” Well, their colors are similar. “Wonder lyk to hym, as of colours” (2868), So not as good. But pretty close. One of his sister “paramours” (2867) has better coloring than the rest. At least “on her throat” (2869). And she doesn’t seem to mind the living situation. She’s “discreet, and debonaire” (2871). It’s Chaucer at his most fanciful. A Chicken through the Looking Glass. “‘There’s no use trying,’ she said ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen . . . ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”63 The Queen believes “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Chauntecleer’s feathers his best looking sister “twenty tyme” before the sun even comes up (3177). Of course, it isn’t pure whimsy. The reason he does it is to celebrate the fact that they’ve reached an amicable draw on the subject of whether dreams predict death. Like in Chr é tien’s Yvain , madness becomes a private symbolic world. It speaks a different language, flees human society, and goes to live among its own kind. “Yvain cannot reply to her, having lost his senses and power of speech . . . He would have wished to take flight, quite alone, in a land so wild that nobody would know where to look for him.64 Yvain retreats from the medieval court to the “land so wild.” Chauntecleer’s world severs itself from the determinative power of the Widow’s and the Monk’s, emptying itself of traditional logical and numerical modes of cognition in the process, shedding the baggage of understanding for the trip across “an infinite sea.” 65 But the poem said that Chauntecleer tells time better than a clock. Chaucer’s rooster “crows” harder truths about time and space by fantasy and accident than the Manciple’s crow “caws” or “cuckoos” by natural mandate. “Wel sikerer was his crowyng in his logge / Than is a clokke or an abbey orlogge” (2854–2855). Maybe it isn’t that remarkable. Many THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 99 scholars have pointed out that medieval clocks were notoriously inac- curate. Fair enough. Perhaps the poem goes for an easy win in its pains- taking discussion of time. It’s just showing off. It does seem remarkable, however, that “the most challenging feature of all three chronographiae [in the Canterbury Tales ] is also the most frustrating and confusing: when the scientifically inclined reader goes through all the necessary calculations to verify Chaucer’s data, it turns out that each and every one of Chaucer’s three determinations of time is somehow wrong!” 66 The poem is no better with sacramental numerology, which it employs like fixed cosmic bingo. Threes and sevens pepper the text without any emerging clarity: “Thre large sowes hadde she, and namo. / Three keen, and eek a sheep that highte Malle” (2830–2831). “Sevene hens for to doon al his plesaunce” (2866). “Syn thilke day that she was seven nyght oold” (2873). Though something ingenious and unifying could one day spring from the poem’s numerology, it might still come at the cost of the tale’s rumpled charm in which the sacramental seven, God’s number of completion, is used to describe the bucolic life of a chicken septagamist. “Seven nights old” also is the age of Pertelote when she steals Chauntecleer’s heart. Who knows what it all means? The only thing we really know about Pertelote is that she’s the strongest naturalist in the poem, an herbal confessor with dietary solutions to all spiritual anxieties. The narrator tries to apply a little critical thinking. “For thilke tyme, as I have understonde, / Beestes and briddes koude speke and synge” (2880–2881). He enters the mad house and then retreats toward the colors that “growen in the mede” rather than those of “rhetoryk.” Travis rightly describes this as a “choplogic” defense in which the highly unlikely event of animals speaking is justified by the fact that it was a long time ago. 67 “The Nun’s Priest’s figural justification of his figural art suggests that the premise upon which every metaphorical construct is grounded is, simply, another metaphor.” 68 Such is the reversal of language in art: it’s more reasonable to rejoice in the eloquence and logical cohesion of chicken epistemology than to attempt an explanation. It is a privilege of a poem, no doubt, that it begins epistemologically in medias res , unconsciously assuming its own plausibility, guileless as a discussant of its own coherence. The donn é e of literature is Chicken Middle English rather than the narrator’s, or a critic’s, interpretive history of the world. The attempt to explain the talking chickens of art by appealing to history is a philosophical exercise. It’s an exercise that doesn’t explain much in the end, but it does point to the central obstacle: that history lacks the power to impart reality to art’s truths because of an obvious aporetic disparity between its own ontology and that of talking “beestes” and “briddes.” The initial attempts at cross- pollination fail. If J. Leslie Hotson is correct, and criticism is a “rational 100 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL historical explanation of obscure meanings,” 69 we note a rather extreme philosophical tension between method and text.

Pertelotean Naturalism It is a long set-up: The underwhelming Monk’s Tale and aftermath, the stillborn tropology and social ideology of the Widow’s description, and now the new Golden Age of Chauntecleer. What happens next is perhaps most difficult for historicist readings to absorb. Without even a ‘good morning,’ two chickens embroil themselves in a Neoplatonic dialogue concerning the interpretation of dreams modeled on Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. This argument shapes the poem more than any other element. The level of abstraction Chaucer achieves is remarkable. Not least of all because he maintains the upward momentum without the Chartrian toolkit of flying chariots, baptized pagan Mercurys, and long conversations with Lady Nature. Even so, at long last when the poem resumes, one can’t help but feel the sensation of looking down from above at the entrance of a fox and a chase that follows. It is a level of abstraction and sophistication predicated, as we shall see, upon both the long view of a Chaucerian Performance and an entire historical tradition. One critical tendency is to classify the dream dialogue as a single gesture of sheer literariness, measured by the extent to which it either effaces social meaning or serves as vehicle for it. 70 For Fehrenbacher, the dream debate is symptomatic of “the illusory safety of literature” and “aims to repress the threat posed by the fox.” 71 But “history will not be so easily evaded.”72 History’s presence places enough pressure on the fantasy of the poem to overcome it in the chaotic fox chase. Straw-as-History punctures literature’s pure present. “By seeking refuge in the realm of the literary, the specter of Jack Straw and his meynee muscling their way into the text demonstrates how such attempts fail, and how history, attempt to contain it as one might, cannot be entirely banished from the realm of literature.”73 Another critical tendency is to find out who the chicken dream-experts ‘really’ are. For Steven Justice, “Chaucer places Gower among the animals who rage through the Vox . . . for Chauntecleer—bird and singer and dreamer of terrifying beast dreams—is Gower, and the tale is book I of the Vox Clamantis in deadpan.” 74 Pertelote is an unfriendly dig at Gower’s expense: “Chaucer is getting personal here, suggesting that Gower’s poetic originated in his psychosexual and intestinal dysfunctions.” 75 Now, I don’t happen to know if John Gower’s life inside the bedroom and bathroom was a living nightmare. Perhaps it was. I’m not concerned with the THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 101 truth-value of such a statement. I am, however, interested in its implications concerning a philosophy of art. Chauntecleer is John Gower. Even Pertelote is John Gower, at least his “psychosexual and intestinal dysfunctions.” The poem is Gower’s poem “in deadpan.” “Chaucer fits him (Gower/Chauntecleer) with Pertelote, makes him uxorious and oversexed in a way that Gower’s persona and, as far as we can tell, Gower himself were not . . . broadly suggesting that Gower’s rhetorical excesses . . . bespeak an excess of unformed, sublimated erotic energy.” 76 To refer to Hotson’s hard sell of the empirical method: “This would take nothing away from the dramatic interest of the main story, nothing from the grave dignity of the characters, nothing from the rich, humorous treatment.” 77 Short of guerilla journalism interviews with John and Jane Q. Public, there’s probably no way to test the idea of whether viewing the Nun’s Priest’s Tale as a “broad suggestion of John Gower’s “excess of unformed, sublimated erotic energy,” “would take nothing away from the dramatic interest of the main story.” It might for some. For others, it could be the Nun’s Priest’s Tale they’ve been waiting for. That said, in the context of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , I’m not sure it’s immune to D.G. Myers’ suspicion: “No effort is made to ascertain whether the design [of historical criticism] really is at odds with anything; it is simply treated as a donn ée of interpretation that it must be.”78 And such a suspicion would apply to any interpretation – historicist or otherwise – whether its design is at odds with the philosophical setting of poem. Meanwhi le, Hotson arg ues that Chauntecleer is Henr y of Bol ingbroke. “When [Chaucer’s] meaning is not plain to us, the fault lies in our ignorance . . . of the smaller and more interesting facts of his life and times.” 79 Though he admits, “A hit is a hit, and must never be pressed too far.” 80 “We are not to think that Chaucer intended Chauntecleer to represent Henry Bolingbroke throughout. 81 Part of the reason that he soft- ens the importance of the direct hit was due to a question: “If this is a political satire, why has the author . . . inserted a learned discussion of dreams, another on predestination and free will, and an invective against Friday.” 82 He concludes, “It is more probable that Chaucer began the Nun’s Priest’s Tale with some occasion for writing and that his interest was attracted only later to elaborating the first part into a matchless dialogue.” I don’t want to petulant, but course, to that effect, “It is more probable that [Plato] began [ The Death of Socrates ] with some occasion for writing and that his interest was attracted only later to elaborating the first part into a matchless dialogue [on the immortality of the soul].” Chauntecleer was Bolingbroke. Then he became Chauntecleer. Socrates was Socrates. Then he became Plato. What I mean is that “dialogue” isn’t some abstract category or “elaboration” of the “sly contemporary hit” 83 we decided at 102 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL some point to call “literature.” Not even Plato’s Dialogues could claim that prize. Writers say things in dialogues. “Dialogues” are only abstract if they say something abstract. A dialogue could say something like, “I’m Henry Bolingbroke.” Another could say, “Once upon a time, beast and birds could speak and sing,” or “before the birth of the Muses when song came into the world, cicadas were human beings.” 84 So, it’s possible, for instance, that what the animals say in the dialogue that follows has a direct impact on what Jack Straw is by the time he appears. The dialogue will tell us what sort of world he arrives to—how much History he has to bring along with him in order to recalibrate the balance between art and life. The representative format of the dialogue is Socratic, picked up by Cicero, and now brought forth into the Canterbury Tales by way of Macrobius and two chickens. Christian literature extends the discursive format in high allegorical mode through works such as the De Planctu, Anticlaudianus, Le Roman, the Consolatio, and Martianus Capella’s de nup- tiis. However, we must keep driving home that Chauntecleer is a chicken in whom mannishness dwells. He’s been sufficiently metaphorized and needs no further work in the form of “Nature” or “Genius.” That the poem so disarmingly generates a metaphysics of dreams through Pertelote and Chauntecleer is accomplishment particular to the fact that they are chickens, which in turn, is part of the accomplishment of the entire tale, a tale that funnels Chaucer’s life work through nonflying members of the avian family rather than through the eagles of high Dantean Platonism. Instead, the poem’s debate pulls this literature back from the psychomachic and toward the spirit of classical dialogues. It’s a simpler, earthier model in which each interlocutor defends a philosophical school. Pertelote, naturalist par excellence , argues from the Epicurean perspective. Chauntecleer takes some Vegas version of the Academic perspective. 85 It is this oscil- lation between the initial fantasy that undergirds the appearance of the rooster and the comic ordinariness with which the dialogue proceeds that makes this possible. Compare what follows to Chauntecleer’s entrance. If anything the story cools down. When someone talks about the chickens it all sounds insane. When the chickens talk about themselves, it’s all rather levelheaded. I have in mind here Chauntecleer leaning against his pillow coolly riffing on the contents of his personal library. There is much to be unlearnt from Chaucerian pillow talks. The Wife brandishes the micro- genre with particular zest. However, there isn’t another pillow talk quite so measured and educated as this between two chickens. The Wife talks sex and marriage. Chauntecleer and Pertelote? Whether dreams can be demonstrated to carry oracular meaning according to a contest between bibliography and recent advances in the digestive sciences. THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 103

Chauntecleer has a bad dream and immediately positions his anxiety according to the available vocabulary of Platonism. “Madame, I pray yow that ye take it nat agrief. / By God, me mette I was in swich meschief/ Right now that yet myn herte is soore afright. / “Now God,” quod he, “my swevene recche aright, / And kepe my body out of foul prisoun!” (2892–2897). Scholars often call it a “learned” discussion. So I think it’s important to point out that Chauntecleer inverts the Platonic categories. And he has a habit of mishandling his literary genealogies. But this is a poem that, generally speaking, does everything well, and doesn’t do anything right. It’s not the body that needs saving from “foul prisoun.” Body is “foul prisoun.” For Macrobius, body is the “prison of the entombed.”86 Cicero w r ites in the De Amicitia , “that the souls of all good men after death make the easiest escape from . . . the imprisonment and fetters of the flesh.” 87 So, Chauntecleer suggests that successful dream interpretation will occur according to a soul/body dualism and botches the appropriate order of the schema. For Pertelote, who Justice rightly calls “the principle of body in the tale,”88 the meaning of dreams is a simple matter of causation. She’s the best naturalist in the poems we’ve considered. She’s the only one that sticks to the logic. The Old Man’s a naturalist who refuses to die. So, I suppose he’s really quite mystical on the subject. He hasn’t really accepted the facts. Nicholas is a naturalist who gets sidetracked by an antiart installation about the nullification of the Deluge and the death of God. He turns out to be a metaphysical ideologue. The Manciple gets spooked by his own day job as a euhemerist and ends up babbling to an invisible friend he calls “mother.” Pertelote essentially cuts the crap and argues the following.

1. The meaning of dreams depends upon their causation. 2. Dreams are manifestations of bodily functions. 3. The body has no interpretation outside the body. 4. Dreamers’ anxieties are best interpreted by laxatives.

It is methodologically significant. The broader reach of the logic is that wherein a natural cause is posited for the figural, interpretation is no longer necessary. Thus, when a dream tells a story, the story carries no significance outside of natural causes. The story of a dream is an embel- lishment of the original fact of indigestion. Put another way, you could dream that Jacob and Homer’s Golden Ladder descended from heaven or that Scipio escorted you to a bird sanctuary on Valentine’s Day. It’s all well and good but the pressing question of Pertelote’s empiricism is the “sly contemporary hit” 89 of what you had for dinner last night. Because 104 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Chauntecleer’s dream occurs in poetry, as does the Dream of Scipio , we recognize the dilemma for dream poetry writ large and for Chaucer’s dream poems in particular. Should we find a natural cause for dreams, something like a natural occasion, then the poems are incidental except as they forensically serve those causes. Occasion trumps interpretation, or, occasion is form. It’s not a matter of body rising to the top of a tri- partite ontology. The argument is simply that there’s no partition in ontology. There’s a more satisfying word for “ontology.” The word is “body.” Of course, in our cultural context, “body” is not indicative of half of an entire aporia, but in Chaucer’s intellectual context it is a “foul prisoun.” Therefore, Pertelote’s bodily remedy to dream poetry is the act of an ontology sublimating an epistemology, or absorbing intuition into experience. This may seem a cheap trick, but it forms part of the main discussion of the tale, ‘What is poetry?’ Body imprisons soul. Soul is the memory vehicle of our knowledge of God. Successful rhetoric in the Phaedrus is “leading the soul by means of speech.” 90 The ontological problem in Macrobius is the same for Augustine: that the soul cannot remember what it knows of God by virtue of the fact that it is “dispersed” 91 into history via the body. For Macrobius, “The realm of the perishable begins with the moon and goes downward. Souls coming into this region begin to be subject to the numbering of days and to time.” 92 According to this argument, the “realm of the perishable” where souls “begin to be subject to the numbering of days and time” is not a fit location from which to interpret the rhetoric of poetry. If there is a fundamental obstruction to a historicism satisfied with the poetic event-historical event model, then it comes from the medieval Platonic tradition itself. Put simply, do not interpret a poem from the cognitive perspective of the “realm of the perishable.” The fact that Chaucer chooses laxatives to represent physicalism’s solution to oracular dreams is no ringing endorsement, but it is wildly reductionist and, like every ad absurdum , pretty funny and probably true. Pertelote is formidable. Chauntecleer’s argument is more ambitious but it lacks the clarity and consistency of his wife’s. Her argument is in four parts. The first part of Pertelote’s argument links up with the last. It begins and ends as a bedroom discussion. It is the middle sections that progress a marvelous and meandering naturalism. Really the only thing she does wrong is cite Cato, which leaves a wide flank unguarded for her pedantic husband. Mind you, it’s a costly mistake because she loses the floor and accidentally subjects everyone to Chauntecleer’s rococo bromides on the various Pythian possibilities of his dream vision. Until then, Pertelote makes her case. THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 105

Argument I: Causation The body is original cause of dreams. It is also the cause of their symbols. “Certes this dreem, which ye han me to-nyght, / Cometh of the greet superfluytee / Of youre rede colera, pardee” (2926–2928). That’s why Chauntecleer dreams of “rede beestes” (2931). But his beast had black fringe on the tail and ears. Pertelote’s got it covered. “Right as the humour of malencolie / Causeth ful many a man in sleep to crie / For feere of blake beres, or boles blake, / Or elles blake develes wole hem take” (2933–2936). In truth, the beast was actually “betwixt” yellow and red (2902). Pertelote would have no trouble accommodating yellow by the logic of humours. But she cuts her discussion short. “Of othere humours koude I telle also / That werken many a man sleep ful wo; / But I wol passe as lightly as I kan” (2937–2939).

Argument II: Diagnosis Pertelote offers a technological solution for oracles: “For Goddes love, as taak some laxatyf” (2943). There you have it, Chaucer’s career-long enquiry into dream literature, solved. Cause: bodily. Remedy: “laxatyf.” There’s only one problem. “Though in this toun is noon apothecarie” (2948). Pertelote’s lives in a town without a pharmacy and has been driven to home remedies. The assumption seems to be that there exist other more cosmopolitan Nun’s Priest’s Tale s with better shops and services and a thriving business culture. Despite these big city dreams, Pertelote makes the best of her rural whistle-stop. “I shal myself to herbes techen yow” (2949). “I’ll teach you myself.” Soon Chauntecleer will possess the power to interpret and cure his dreamer’s anxiety, to ‘make his own medicine’. And the place to begin, according to Pertelote, is “in oure yeerd” where he shall find all manner of herbs and flowers (2951). Pertelote attempts to transform her coop back into the Widow’s farm. When Apollo goes rogue in the Metamorphoses , one of the last things he screams at Daphne is that, “The whole world calls me the bringer of aid; medicine is my invention; my power is in herbs.” 93 But he doesn’t seem to trust what comes out of his mouth. The next thing he says is, “But love cannot be healed by any herb, nor can the arts that cure others cure their lord!” 94 This is the Golden Age of the General Prologue ; nature comes to life in service to poetry’s pilgrimage back “through yonder wicket gate.”95 It teems with flora and fauna that cannot serve the natural remedies produced by Pertelote’s failed system of rhetoric, any more than Daphne’s golden laurel could have. The only thing Daphne’s leaves were ‘good’ for in the end was to crown 106 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Apollo for all eternity. The coop becomes a capital of artistic abstraction dependent upon the Neoplatonic literature that forms the poem’s foundation. Pertelote’s naturalism takes ultimate refuge in the symbolic order of the widow’s farm. A ‘real’ farm. Herbs that work are a necessary premise. “The which han of hire propretee by kynde / To purge yow bynethe and eek above” (2953–2594). In this particular monistic 96 vision of man, herbs cure what ails dreamers in poetry literally from the bottom up. If Chauntecleer addresses his indigestion, “bynethe,” then his soul, “eek above,” would follow in suit.

Argument III: Prescription At last Pertelote turns to the specific remedies.

A day or two ye shul have digestiyves Of wormes, er ye take youre laxatyves Of lawriol, centaure, and fumetere, Or elles of ellebor, that groweth there, Of katapuce, or of gaitrys beryis, Of herbe yve, growing in oure yeerd, ther mery is;

(2961–2966)

Paulina Aiken comments:

Among Chaucer’s characters, second only to the imposing Doctour of Phisyk as an authority on practical medical science is little Dame Pertelote of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Her lecture to her husband on dreams, their causes, and the antidotes which should be taken to avoid further complica- tions reveals an undoubted familiarity with certain medical theories of the time, and, in particular, indicates that she had been reading the Speculum Naturale and the Speculum Doctrinale of Vincent of Beauvais. 97

The resemblance between the two is convincing, Vincent even includes a chapter titled “De Regimine Purgatonis Colere, Melancolie, et Flegmatis .” Among other striking similarities, “Vincent gives directions for prepar- ing the stomach for purging ‘binethe and eek above’: ‘Ex hac enim dispo- sitione accidit stomacho ut desideret expellere quod in ipso est aut superius aut inferius .’”98 These are two possible physical sorties by which humanity might be healed of ‘dreams’. Pertelote knows her stuff. Which isn’t to say there won’t be a few blind spots when you’re self- taught. Corinne E. Kauffman writes, “Of the seven herbs, only one could have been gathered in May so that Chauntecleer could hardly have followed her nonchalant advice to ‘Pekke hem up right as they growe and THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 107 ete hem yn.’” 99 So the science is askew. It’s one of Chaucer’s general habits. Pertelote’s herbs are out of season. Soon the poem will twist horology into submission. The poem distorts any empirical coordinate it touches. But what happens here is better than bad science. It’s possible Pertelote isn’t quite the long-suffering Lucretian voice of reason we made her out to be. According to Aiken,

Not content with prescribing the strongest drug in the list, Pertelote adds the second in potency, and then, to make results triply sure, one of the two which share third place in Vincent’s catalogue! It is indeed fortunate for Chauntecleer that he is a skeptic in regard to the materia medica . His stub- bornness in the matter saves him. 100

Kauffman elaborates the potential harm of Pertelote’s cocktail according to historical herbals and determines, “Not only is her proportion of hot to cold quite wrong; her compound is so powerful as to endanger even the most virile and durable digestive system. 101 She concludes, “In truth, Pertelote is at least as sinister a threat to his (Chauntecleer’s) life as the cunning fox. Dan Russell would have killed him instantly and probably painlessly. Pertelote would have unwittingly killed him torturously.” 102 Cooper agrees: “The list of purgatives and laxatives she describes . . . might well have done Chauntecleer more damage than the fox: it is just as well that he defies the whole lot.” 103 We go from a close reading of Vincent of Beauvais to outright poisoning. Chaucer’s audience might have recoiled in real horror. It’s chemotherapy for stomach flu, herbs like “katapuce” that “ ſ etteth on fire, ſ corcheth and fretteth, not only the throte and mouth, but also the ſ tomacke, liuer, and the rest of the entrails, and inflameth the whole bodie . . . it draweth out . . . laſ t of all bloud, not without great quantitie of teares.” 104 Premeditated manslaughter becomes an absurd and pleasing possibility. Faithful Pertelote: murderer, literary relative of Salome, in cahoots with the fox. Perhaps her evil suffocates the fox’s rather pedestrian desire for a chicken dinner. This is probably not the best interpretation but it strikes me as the liveliest. “To kill art seems to me the most urgent task too, but we can hardly operate in the full light of day.” 105 Fehrenbacher accuses the tale’s Art of “patrolling the boundaries between literature and history.” 106 But maybe both are guilty in this poem of trying to “shatter” each other’s frame. 107 Here, dreams are a healthcare issue and healthcare is an issue of National Security. Perhaps she too has it out for her “helio- tropic” husband, wants to ‘send him packing’ for history, and the symbols of the poem along with him. Certainly her philosophy does. Neither, according to some forms of criticism, would history mind welcoming poetry’s figures back into the fold. 108 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Divertimento: “What Women Want” How did this happen? Let’s rewind. Chauntecleer has a bad dream. “Shame!” said she, “fy on yow, hertelees!” (2908). “Have ye no mannes herte, and han a berd?” (2918–2920). Pertelote has a light touch, no doubt. By comparison, a twentieth-century response lacks fire: “Whatever your dream was, it wasn’t a very happy one, was it? . . . Is there anything I can do to help? . . . You’ve been a long way away . . . Thank you for coming back to me.” 108 Pertelote’s just tells him to act like a man. ‘Walk it off.’ More specifically, “I cannot love a coward” (2911) and “have you no beard?” (2920). This gives way to a classic Chaucerian deliberation: ‘What Women Want.’ Like the Wife, Pertelote’s narratological naturalism is intellectually ambitious. It isn’t built upon a singular desire for literal domination over her man, though such a thing probably would not go entirely unappreciated as collateral. She tells Chauntecleer, “For certes, what so any womman seith, / We all desiren, if it myghte bee, / To han housbondes hardy, wise, and free, / And secree—and no nygard, ne no fool” (2912–2915). Everything in the sequence is reasonable. There’s only one oddity. What women want is a husband, “hardy, wise, and generous, no miser, no fool . . . and secret.” That she wants a husband who is “secree” is where the philosophy begins. “Secree” and its relationship to love. It’s the Miller’s Tale and our old friend Nicholas. “Of deerne love he koude and of solas; / And therto he was sleigh and ful privee” (3200–3201). Let’s look down from above. It’s a strategy that appears in Ovid, Jean de Meun, and Chaucer. Poetic narrators rewrite the definition of love in the vocabulary of sexual experience. Most importantly, it all has to happen without God knowing. If love can be kept secret from God then human knowledge can finally form a separate enclosure for itself. From there, it will generate coeternal definitions solely on the basis of language and experience—read its own story like everyone reads the good bits of Arabian Nights : by flashlight under the covers. In the Wife of Bath the old bawd’s artful dodging in the old = young, foul = fair debate deploys the meaninglessness of language as smokescreen in order to guarantee that a philosophy of love will always be improvisational. If language cannot achieve a stable enough form to define an Art of Love, then she is free to define it as she pleases. In her formulation, the etymology of human language safeguards rhetoricians from its eschatology, from the possibility that it could align itself with the eye of God. The fallen world is the Tower of Babel. “Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 109 We no longer speak God’s language; we barely speak each other’s. It is safe for rhetoric to marshal meaning within itself. THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 109

Put another way, Pertelote’s personal attack on Chauntecleer’s man- liness, like the old bawd’s apparent (and I mean, ‘apparent’) desire to be loved at any linguistic cost conceals something altogether more impressive. Pertelote’s ‘problem’ with Chauntecleer is about reality control—the exhaustion of naturalism under the “governaunce” (2865) of a self- obsessed noumenal tendency to absorb all particular phenomena into a universal singularity. Sometimes a constipated nightmare is just a constipated nightmare. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to escrow the meaning of language to a third party that will only pay out upon the fulfillment of nonlinguistic conditions. In other words, we should be able to write our own checks. The Fall happened. We won the lawsuit for our early inheritance. It’s our money. We earned it. These two strategies— husbandly inadequacy and the contest to define love secretly—are more like one strategy with two parts: a diversion and an attack. The entire operation joins up with another from Jean de Meun. What happens here is the scientific outsourcing of a religious discussion that ends in an invalid logical pivot. It is the same category mistake that forms Pertelote’s discourse on herbs. The Roman dramatizes Nature’s exemplary desire for a technological rereading of mysteries. Jean de Meun writes,

If Mars and Venus, who were captured together as they lay in bed, had looked at themselves in such mirrors before climbing into bed, and if they had held their mirrors so as to be able to see the bed in them, they would never have been caught and bound in the fine thin net that Vulcan had put there, and of which they were both unaware.110

In this instance, the science of mirrors will generate an optical parlor trick capable of hiding Mars and Venus from the eye of Vulcan. Pelen comments,

To develop her (Nature’s) view, she adduces the Mars-Venus exemplum: with better technology—that is—better mirrors to detect Vulcan’s fine nets (II. 18031–61)—the adultery would have gone undetected. Since Nature has an interest in frequent sexual acts to further the species, her appeal to technology in the natural world is in character with her aims, for her unstated thesis here is that, with sufficient technological sophistication in optics, one can hide one’s purposes (in this case, adultery) from the mirror of providence. 111

The original question concerns the sacramental status of cosmic adultery. Nature’s scientific antisolution is to simply avoid getting caught in the act with the help of mirrors. Chauntecleer’s original question is whether oracular dreams can sculpt a face from the unhewn marble of the future. 110 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Pertelote’s scientific antisolution to is to prescribe a cocktail of herbal medicines as a remedy for constipation. The pattern is the same for both. Universal enquiry + technological solution + feathering. To sum up, a technological solution for the cosmic anxiety of poetic interlocutors has as its aim the natural suffocation of larger symbolic questions, whether the solution is mirrors, laxatives, or the Miller’s elaborate system of pul- leys for tiny arks. But it always occurs en route to a private venue of sexual knowledge hidden from the Absolute. A possible solution to some elements of this arabesque emerges in the Amores (I:XIII). Ovid’s paraclausithyron is a lover’s complaint against Eos. He wants her to take the day off and stay next to Tithonus. Her sunrises send him out of bed, back to the oversaturated daylight of divinity’s police state. Ovid’s young man takes the side of Tithonus. “If Tithonus would tell what he knows, no goddess in heaven / Ever deserved more blame; you flee him because he is old . . . Is it my fault that you married this tiresome old man?”112 Of course if Tithonus could “tell what he knows,” he might tell us after we have a few drinks to go find a tree and die. Still, if sunrises could be prevented by a better sexual performance from Tithonus, the “secree” can finally enjoy the time and space to become “pryvetee.” In it we also see the outline of Nicholas, “poure scoler” and maker of secret love. Ovid writes, “Little joy do you bring to either attorney or student. / Each of them has to rise, starting all over each day.” 113 The problem for attorneys and students for Ovid’s lover is not that they have to go to work and lectures in the morning, but that they too are forced to sneak out the window and have to begin their seductions anew, right when a new natural definition of love was near at hand. Five minutes more and man would own his own private epistemology secure from the eye of divinity. More important to Pertelote, Ovid’s lover also manages a short discussion of ‘what women want’ from the lover’s perspective. “You, when the women might rest from the toil- some spinning and weaving, / Call the hand to wool, never let them a pause. / I could endure all that—but to make girls get up in the morning, / Who but a man with no girl ever could stand this at all?”114 Buried not very deep within the Ovidian lover’s concern for the drudgery of manual labor is the idea that women desire the same thing in art that he desires for them. They all want to be bad poets and failed rhetoricians of love. The artistic meaning of their incarnation is to stay in bed (with him) hiding from God. In a rather significant slipup, he tells us what women do when they can’t enjoy a lie-in with him: spinning, weaving. “Calling to hand the wool.” 115 Assuming that what women want in Neoplatonic art would be somewhat the inverse of this young man’s phallic coding, then we can THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 111 appreciate that what women want is to spin; and of course they want to spin because they spin in memory of the Fates, who themselves spin. Especially the Fate Clotho who weaves life itself and whose name is literally, “she who spins.” According to Hyginus, Clotho, along with the other Parcae, and Mercury contributed to the divine gift of language while “Apollo on the lyre added the rest.” 116 This is the same mythological tradition Joyce evokes in Ulysses :

One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. HeHo. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought one. 117

If there is an ironic unity to discredited Chaucerian discussions of ‘what women want’ then it is this: that female rhetoricians in art should desire to spin in memory of the Fates, to weave successful rhetoric, to be poets, to praise the origin of language and life as properties of the Fates and things that came into being in search of an eternity we do not understand but to which we are nonetheless held responsible. The men should try it too. In Hyginus’s account of the origin of language, he tells us that seven letters were the gift of the gods and the Parcae but he only lists six, as though language, divinely inspired, is only partially revealed. 118 The ironic unity is similar for all failed rhetoric. It doesn’t have to accept total failure. It could be otherwise if it would commemorate the knowledge of God and the Fates rather than the knowledge of the body and mind in history. Poetry does not become theology, but it figurally negotiates according to its own power the regions of knowledge that the soul is ‘always still forgetting’ while in exile in history with only Brother Ass and indicative language as companions. “If Plato’s teaching erreth not, / We learn but that we have forgot.” 119 It is language searching for its lost letter.

Argument IV: Sexual Solution Pertelote isn’t terribly nostalgic for that lost letter. One gets the impression that Chauntecleer is anxious because he’s not clever enough to understand oracles. On the other hand, one gets the impression Pertelote is angry because she’s too clever to ignore their import. So she shuts them out. The final component of her pedagogy also concludes Chauntecleer’s response. Until then, though, we can appreciate how it reorients the initial textural idiosyncrasy of ‘medicinal’ naturalism back toward the typical 112 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL base of operations: another pornographic aubade under a swift sunrise. “Real he was, he was namoore aferd, / He fethered Pertelote twenty tyme” (3177–3178). Why is Chauntecleer no longer afraid? Perhaps he should be. She calls him a beardless coward, tells him his nightmare was a sour stomach, and then tries to kill him with an overdose. And he refuses her arguments in a drawn out literary review. Still, she must have said something right. He finds temporary relief in the ‘arms’ of his wife. Her empiricism adequately oversimplifies the larger question of the poem in which he lives. But it won’t last. I suspect the poem is feeding two ideas at once. The first is that “art has no mortal enemies.” 120 The second is that the divide between Pertelote’s medicinal and Chauntecleer’s biblio- graphic strategy is simply not as great as the rooster imagines. Eventually, the poem will try and connect them.

Chauntecleer’s First Mistake Pertelote hands over Cato ‘on a platter’ to her bibliophile husband. Her argument concludes, “Lo, Catoun, which that was so wys a man, / Seyde he nat thus, ‘Ne do no fors of dremes’?” (2940–2941). The reference is to Cato’s Distich II.31: “Trust not in dreams, which make seem real and true / Just what awake was most desired by you.” 121 It seems an unlikely source from which to complicate a naturalist’s argument. What we understand of Pertelote’s system would make any reference that promotes the phenomenal as the skeleton key to the noumenal a good fit, relegating the oracular power of dreams to the conditions of waking existence. The conversation begins. Like in Ciceronian dialogue, Pertelote’s naturalism is resolute. Chauntecleer enters in defense of the Academic perspective.

By God, men may in olde bookes rede Of many a man moore of auctorite Than evere Caton was, moot I thee That al the revers seyn of this sentence, And han wel founden by experience That dremes been significaciouns As wel of joye as of tribilaciouns That folk enduren in this lif present.

(2974–2981)

Chauntecleer finds a new wrong angle in the poem; he practically invents it. The formula is literature + experience + the future. It occurs in a nearly identical manner to his earlier request to have his foul prison of a THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 113 body released from foul prison. He’s always pretty close to getting it right. The problem is that he’s always ‘pretty close’ but only likes discussing absolutes. So, how do you liberate dreams from the power of Cato’s “Just what awake was most desired by you?” You turn to the “olde bookes,” in which, “many a man moore of auctorite” argued the “the revers . . . of this sentence.” The exit from experience in art is the door marked “olde bookes.” What Chauntecleer does is to simply square the circle by referring his argument to the “olde bookes” through which men of greater authority than Cato “han wel founden by experience” arguments to the contrary that reify in the “lif present.” Put simply, he argues that the opposite of “experience” is literature, because it teaches “from experience” that “dremes” are symbols of present and future experiences. The question inside the question is, in what manner do “olde bookes” constitute the solution to dreams? and it hangs upon the power of experience to become the dominant mode of knowledge in art. Cato’s proverb designates dreams as false apparitions of waking desires. This fails to satisfy Chauntecleer’s backward request to “kepe my body out of foul prisoun!” in several important ways. The first simply is that it begs the question of which dreams are oracular and which are natural, a distinction upheld by Macrobius’s ascendant categories. Some dreams do “make seem real and true / Just what awake was most desired by you”; neither are they the only species of dream nor the particular species that describes Chauntecleer’s. Which brings us to our second point. Paul R. Thomas explains:

The type of dream Cato is speaking of represents wish-fulfillment. Following the words of Cato’s distich quite literally, we see no evidence that Chauntecleer either “desires” or “hopes” to be seized or possibly even to die in the jaws of the fox, a beast he does not even know from past experience, according to the implications of the text (2898–2901 and 3279–81). Clearly Cato is not speaking of Chauntecleer’s sort of dream. 122

It is true enough that Chauntecleer did not go to bed Thursday night hoping to be brutally murdered. But the point must be made that if Chauntecleer does not want to be eaten by a fox, he does little to try and convince himself that his dream does not belong in the family of oracles, or that oracular dreams are not sufficiently well represented in history and literature. He does not take the naturalist’s exit like Scrooge does when he sees Marley.

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost. “I don’t,” said Scrooge . . . “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a 114 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” . . . “Humbug, I tell you; humbug!” 123

Instead, the bird spends some two hundred lines defending the idea that his dream, like others of a species, is a Delphic one. It is as though the bird is willing to uphold what he perceives to be the highest mystical function of dreams for the sake of either vanity—he may not want to believe that his best images are an “underdone potato” rather than a Macrobian inevitability—or because he possesses genuine literary curiosity and is attempting to unconsciously grapple with the questions of the poem in which he lives. At the very least, he does not quickly warm to his wife’s suggestion that the beast of his dream is more likely something he ate rather than something that will eat him. And the fox does appear after all. Chauntecleer’s faith in dreams pays off. This is why the final and most difficult paradox to manage is that Chauntecleer’s dream is not oracular even if it predicts the future . The purpose of dreams in the poem, and throughout Chaucerian dream poetry, is not to announce a future event. As Fumo argues, “the Thracian prophet Phineus, also given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, [was] punished by Jove for revealing the future too clearly.” 124 The future is not more artistic and abstract than the past. Perhaps it just seems that way to the chicken because it has not happened to him yet; it seems as good a place as any to achieve a theory win. But if the future has happened at all, according to Augustine, it already happened to God. The past is ‘happening’ to Him now as well:

A long time cannot become long, but out of many motions passing by, which cannot be prolonged altogether; but that in the Eternal nothing passeth, but the whole is present . . . all time past, is driven on by time to come . . . and flows out of that which is ever present. 125

In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , Art will not “quyt” History when the oracular powers of dreams are limited to the eventual reification of symbols in a historical future. Nicholas and the crow predict storms. For the crow this ability to predict future events is part of his final judgment for trespass- ing his augural function. For Nicholas it’s the priestly power of the failed natural interrogation of a universe governed, against his will, by “Goddes pryvetee.” The Old Man predicts the golden death of the rioters, but refuses to face the fact of his own life beyond death. The magician in Franklin’s Tale predicts the tide, though the one that arrives is neither the natural tide nor the promised show-stopping two-year miracle. Dreamt into existence, a fox tries to kill Chauntecleer and only manages to bite THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 115 him. The deliverance by History never comes. Always deferred, arriving too late, sick from the voyage, it fails to satisfy the philosophy of a poem and the anxieties of its occupants. Instead symbols share in the expansive Realism in which symbols ‘always already happen’. That is to say, the reification of symbols does not occur in an impending historical future, rather the reification of history is potentially possible in an impending poem. The epistemology is inverse: Chauntecleer’s yeerd is real. Jack Straw is only a candidate for the real. In Augustine’s appraisal of God and Substance, time occurs at the fringes of reality. “Thou not precede all times. But Thou precedest all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and surpassest all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past . . . ” 126 For Augustine it is difficult to understand in what sense, if any, time is real. Reality is ‘pure present’, a “future surpassed.” The paradoxical possibility of the logic is that if time does not exist in God’s will, it is not real, or does not possess Substance. It is according to this philosophy that we arrive at the most aggressive possible end of literary Platonism: history evaporates altogether. Epistemology destroys rather than sublimates ontology. History is only depicted . It strikes me that the most interesting question of method regarding Chaucer is to what extent his literary Neoplatonism antagonizes history, not whether. Chauntecleer’s nimblest abstractions are based in the expectation of deliverance by history. This prevents him from apprehending the means by which to marshal the literature that could guide his enquiry. It com- promises his ability to achieve a more powerful release from the naturalism of Pertelote’s and Cato’s dream skepticism. Even the arrival of the prophesied fox is not able to recalibrate the balance of the poem’s narrative toward its form. Instead, his first act as mythographic reformer is to make experience the centerpiece of literary fame. “And han wel founden by experience / That dremes been significaciouns” (2978–2979). Who “han wel founden by experience?” “Many a man moore of auctorite / Than evere Caton was” (2975–2976). This misstep is significant. The ros- ter doesn’t simply champion the authority of experience (“though noon auctoritee”). 127 “Experience” nourishes a uniform interpretation of “olde bookes” that occupies the next 216 lines, all of which have as their rudder one single, unworkable point: that the proper interpretations of dreams in art is the prediction of future events. An anagogical ‘future’ is aporeti- cally related to ‘the future’. What do dreams signify for Chauntecleer? Things “that folk enduren in the lif present .” But Chaucer’s dream poems do not take as their object the prediction of future events in the “lif present.” Instead they are dialectical explorations for lost definitions via “olde bookes” that could deliver his dreamers from 116 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL the epistemological weakness of experience. The dreamer exits waking history into a fantastic world of symbols. The Parliament of Fowls exists in a preposterous, meditative, and harmless eternity, an epithalemic grind show in which talking birds place the philosophy of marriage on trial. Chauntecleer’s right that access to the interpretation of his dreams is by virtue of the “verray preve” (2983) of “olde bookes.” In the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women , “These bokes, ther we han noon other preve” (28). Chauntecleer argues, “The verray preeve sheweth in dede” (2983). True enough, but the “dede” is the one to which “wordes moote be cosyn.” The “dede” that the General Prologue and Manciple’s Tale inherit from Calcidius’s Timaeus , the Consolatio , and the Roman . In the Parliament of Fowls Chaucer’s dreamer contradicts Chauntecleer’s coupling of the present life and art. “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne” (1). There is neither enough life—for one man or all of them put together—to learn the infinitely “long” craft of art that operates in the eye of eternity. Longevity remains an ironic problem and an ill-advised poetic solution. Tithonus may be beginning to realize this. More time simply means that more things happen, and “poetry makes nothing happen.”128 And yet a young dreamer with no experience of love is still held responsible for its definition.

For al be that I knowe nat Love in dede, Ne wot how that he quiteth folk here hyre, Yit happeth me ful ofte in bokes reede Of his myrakles and his crewel yre. There rede I wel he wol be lord and syre; I dar nat seyn, his strokes been so sore, But “God save swich a lord!” I can na moore.

( Parliament of Fowls , 8–14)

In the end, the historical Platonic Art of Love discovers that there was never an experience of love and that a dreamer’s anxiety over his fitness as a discussant of love is an Orphean gaze back toward life. And life is the wrong origin story. At least ours is. Emmet T. Flood writes, “The key may reside in Augustine’s appropriation of the Platonic conception of anamnesis. If all true knowledge is memoria , and memory is ultimately of God as Origin, then genuine knowledge, and with it valid rhetoric, is contingent upon a recovery of the Origin.” 129

Chauntecleer’s Stories There’s righteous little in the way of logical progression. It is a one- point sermon made ten times, elaborated and amplified with occasional THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 117

divertimenti . The argument devolves. Or at the very least it stalls; it stalls because of a limited starting point in which “olde books” do not function for the rooster beyond their promotion of experience to the conceptual heart of literary “auctorite.” They’re hopeless as stories. They aren’t utterly hopeless as gestures. Even as vaudeville, they inaugurate the genealogy of poetry that will save him in the end. It will continue to expand even when he tires of the project, takes a break to praise his wife’s good looks, mistranslate some Latin, and give her a good feathering. Until then, he aims big.

The Murder of the Pilgrim Chauntecleer’s stories are structured “like Russian nesting dolls” 130 and the Platonic references coalesce to form thematic miniatures of the tale itself. It is photo-mosaic at the level of content, with ‘pictures forming Picture’, and an impressive theoretical mise-en-abyme at the level of form. The medieval mise-en-abyme , “the object depicted within itself,” becomes “the Idea depicted within itself.” 131 Chauntecleer’s first story, apparently from “oon of the gretteste auctor that men rede” (2984), concerns two travelers at an inn. One of the travelers appears to the other in a series of dreams. He tells the sleeping traveler that he has just been murdered. The cause of the murder is not unfamiliar to the Pardoner’s audience: “My gold caused my mordre, sooth to seyn” (3021). The troubled dreamer wakes to find his companion missing. He later discover his dead body in a dung cart. An analogue to Chauntecleer’s story is found in Book I of Cicero’s De Divinatione . It is not the most gripping story to be sure, but Cicero’s philosophical finish is a tour de force.

Then shall we listen to Epicurus rather than to Plato? . . . “But,” you retort, “Epicurus says what he thinks.” But he thinks nothing that is ever well reasoned, or worthy of a philosopher. Will you, then, put this man before Plato or Socrates, who though they gave no reason, would yet prevail over these petty philosophers by the mere weight of their name? Now Plato’s advice to us is to set out for the land of dreams with bodies so prepared that no error or confusion may assail the soul. For this reason, it is thought, the Pythagoreans were forbidden to indulge in beans; for that food produces great flatulence and induces a condition at war with a soul in search of truth. 132

There are two philosophers to whom we refer the interpretation of dreams, either the Epicurean bodily orbit of poetic content or the spectral 118 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Platonic irony of form. Epicurus “says what he thinks”; Plato and Socrates “gave no reason.” Epicurus speaks plainly because body is understanding. Chauntecleer figures this out in the end. As for the form of knowledge that “gives no reason,” it probably doesn’t because it’s an unreasonable form of knowledge. Bodily preparation for “the land of dreams” isn’t a bean-free body. That’s great advice. It’s Pertelote’s advice. A fart-free body is probably in a better position to meaningfully evaluate Eleatic Being. Bodily preparation for “the land of dreams” is the eradication of the body altogether. Platonic humor will always dissolve an eminently worthwhile discussion of the effects of beans on the “soul in search of truth” by doing away with the entire premise of body. It continues: “But on the other hand, when the man, whose habits of living and eating are wholesome and temperate, . . . then will the thinking and reasoning portion of his soul shine forth and show itself keen and strong for dreaming.” 133 Finally, “I have reproduced Plato’s very words.” 134 In Platonism a diet can only wield the philosophical power of the body. It’s clear where that logic leads. However, a reasonable diet is the very substance of Epicureanism. Though the mistaken word-of-the-day in our own time that describes acute hedonism related to food and drink, Epicureanism was an ethics of temperance and culinary restraint. For Epicurus, the well- balanced bodily experience free from pain was sufficient grounds of philosophy. Epicurus writes, “For it is not continuous drinkings and revellings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life.” 135 The absence of pain—such is the pleasant life, the “blis” sought by the Franklin’s narrators for whom it is “no disport / To romen by the see, but disconfort” ( Franklin’s Tale, 894– 895). So often Chaucer’s Epicureans conceive of pleasure as “non-pain.” “Blis” and “ese” are Archimedean points for the naturalism of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Pain is the confused contact with an art that “gives no reason.” Chaucerian narrators see Epicurean presuppositions through to expansive literary conclusions. The more they speak the “ese” and “blis” of physical understanding into existence, the more the metaphysical vacuum between rhetoric and form grows, becomes unstable, and starts to overheat. It will always find some “greet forneys” inside a poem. In that sense, Chauntecleer was right. In art the body needs protecting from the soul. “Foul prisoun” is under constant attack from eternity—the looming threat of a governor’s pardon and a commuted sentence for “the life under the sun.” That’s a pretty idea. But here, the soul is under attack by beans. One day, perhaps, someone will answer the people’s cry and write a book about high Platonism and indigestion. Such a book might quiet reserva- tions concerning how to include Chaucer’s bar jokes within a tradition of such impenetrable elegance. Somehow the two are linked throughout THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 119 art history. They have comingled in the best discussions since Plato. Aristophanes has a hiccup attack in the Symposium . It’s with a fart “as loud as a pig’s bladder when it bursts” 136 that Horace disperses the witches from the Gardens of Maecenas. There may exist the perception that literary Platonism is too austere for a writer of such earthy medieval humor as Chaucer. Perhaps it’s because Dante and Petrarch were unusually aristocratic in style when their turn came. But perhaps the dialectical school of thought accomplished what it set out to do: cloak the ineffable in a shroud of common failures. One would be hard-pressed to locate a representative Platonic discussion uncluttered by ironic misappropriations and philosophical exasperation. One could very well argue that it would be a breach of the entire Platonic perspective toward language that there could exist a representative, rather than a misrepresentative, human discussion. Chaucer’s poetry takes those misappropriations to heart and places them in the mouth of a chicken. When that chicken’s wife tells him oracles are the product of constipation, it is merely an extension of an old joke, a joke that would be a tired one were it not so ingeniously and incongruently paired with the world of knowledge it seeks to protect. In this very particular way, Chauntecleer begins his refutation of naturalism unwittingly in the pay of Ciceronian irony. Cicero’s dialogue somehow understands that telling a story of dreams predicting an actual murder is really only a prelude to a discussion of how dreams relate to the ontology of the soul, even if forced by rigorous and harassing measures to complement a discussion of beans. Chauntecleer seems content with the easier fact that the dream does, in fact, predict a future event. It is a simple case of missing the point, like being satisfied that one’s subtraction tables check out in the middle of a discussion of whether mathematics refers to an absolute order independent of mind. ‘Did we invent or discover mathematics? 30–10 = 20, so yes.’

Divertimento: Moral against Murder To taste, the poem’s structure continues to resuscitate the dialogue-story- moralization model and prefigures the literary effect of the concluding moralitas.

O blissful God, that art so just and trewe, Lo, how that thou biwreyest mordre I! Mordre wol out; that se we day by day. Mordre is so wlatsom and abhomynable To God, that is so just and resonable,

(3050–3062) 120 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

The tone, buoyed by generic expectations, assumes the logical valid- ity of its relationship to the murdered pilgrim story. But the dissonance between this moral and Chauntecleer’s argumentative needs in the panel is vast. Yes, God is “just and true.” He does not suffer murder to remain hidden in Scripture. David repents for Uriah. Cain, it turns out, was his brother’s keeper. Desiring these concepts of moral justice to speak to a pilgrim story that serves as cover for fart-free dreams, which itself serves as cover for a piece of high Platonism in which we “set out for the land of dreams with bodies so prepared that no error or confusion may assail the soul,”137 asks a lot. Nathan’s famous prophetic whipping of the king, “Thou art the man,”138 is a hermeneutic finish that curdles on contact. Whether murder is always uncovered in a universe governed by God’s justice is somewhat of a red herring to the fact that dreams predict death. Conceivably a dreamer could foresee death and take his secret to the grave, and not all deaths are murders. Chauntecleer’s own story about a drowning sailor is not a tale of murder. God cannot “mordre out” a non-murder. The only moral of the story that could function would have to be identical to the point of the story: that dreams predict death. And it is barely a moral, but it is at least an idea, one to which Chauntecleer’s argument clings for dear life. We might detect the literary voice of the Monk’s Tale , the single- mindedness, the topical fidelity. For the Monk, great men fall because Fortune’s wheel tramples them. For Chauntecleer, they fall because it is foretold in dreams. But Chauntecleer does not really fall; he escapes. In doing so, he demonstrates somewhat the opposite of his thesis. Dream prophecy turns out to be weaker than Fortune, or at least weaker than a little bit of good luck. At any rate, their symbols do not crush the vari- ables by the corpulent force of destiny. But that is not how Chauntecleer’s stories make it seem. The dreams in his stories are designed to match an impending future. Chance is not meant to upend them. What is crucial to note is that when Chauntecleer escapes, he may demonstrate the opposite of his thesis but he does not demonstrate the opposite of his dream. His dream was broad and simple and it comes true: a fox will arrive that “wold han had me deed” (2901). The problem seems to be that the facts of his dream do not suit his philosophical tastes regarding dreams. His dream lacks the precision and palpable apocalypse of the real nobles songes . His argument is about a different class of dream than the one that put him in a cold sweat in the early morning hours. Chauntecleer’s unfinished biog- raphy is related only by strained analogy to visionary deaths and their reification. That is why the philosophical question, and the central dupe of Chauntecleer’s argument, is not whether his dream is like the dreams in his stories, but whether his stories about dreams can be domesticated THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 121 to the extent that their literary histories and evocations will inductively support his artificial thesis.

Death by Drowning and Saint Kenelm “And certes in the same book I rede, / Right in the nexte chapitre after this- / I gabbe nat, so I have joye or blis” (3064–3066). The Riverside’ s timely note on the text reads, “This statement does not apply to Cicero, Valerius, or Holcot. Manly remarks that Chauntecleer is perhaps deceiv- ing Pertelote by a pretense to scrupulous accuracy.” 139 The loss of Cicero for the drowning panel is our loss. To that effect, Apuleius might have been a fine source, too. He mentions that Phrixus was saved from drowning by a swimming goat, which is a better match for the fate of our chicken rhapsode than any story in which the drowning actually takes place. “You too will have your place among the wonder-tales of old, cited as an example from real life to inspire our belief that Phrixus swam across the sea on a ram.” 140 Phrixus goes on to live a happy life and fathers the Argonauts. We can only hope from the peaceful tone of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ’s final scene that Chauntecleer lives out the rest of his years in the “joye and blis” that so generously peppers his rhetoric. But that is not how Chauntecleer’s drowning story ends. Instead, two travelers by sea sleep a final night in port. “But herkneth! To that o man fil a greet mervaille: / That oon of hem, in slepyng as he lay, / Hym mette a wonder dreem agayn the day. / Hym thoughte a man stood by his beddes syde, / And hym comanded that he sholde abyde” (3074–3080). What does the “marvaille” of this “wonder dreem” say? What patient wisdom makes the bumpy journey from eternity to the dreamer’s mind? “And seyde hym thus: ‘If thou tomorwe wende, / Thow shalt be dreynt; my tale is at an ende’” (3081–3082). Thanks specter. Of course the ship’s bottom breaks open and Chauntecleer intuits a win. “And therfore, faire Pertelote so deere, / By swiche ensamples olde maistow leere” (3105– 3106). He’s feeling pretty good. He doesn’t seem to mind the fact that the prophecy offered a choice. It wasn’t a rigid death warrant from Dame Fortune. It’s probably worth mentioning what the specter said directly prior to, “You’ll drown tomorrow if you travel.” He “commanded” him not to travel. (3080). One of the sailors simply chooses to stays ashore. Imagine a story where a chicken simply chooses to not get eaten by a fox. We might pause for a moment, picture the palsied face of Pertelote, and remember her towering naturalism. No one else in the poem seems to. Next Chauntecleer begins the story of Saint Kenelm. I say “begins” because that is all he does. Kenelm, seven-year-old boy king dreams he will die. He is too young to heed the import of his vision and he dies. 122 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Chauntecleer wraps, “By God! I had levere than my sherte / That ye hadde rad his legende, as have I” (3120–3121). Perhaps Chauntecleer himself will read the story to Pertelote. He is not Kenelm. He did not dream of death and he will not die. He has all the time in the world. Chauntecleer is stuck in a tree inside a poem talking to a fox that cannot kill him.

Literary Review: Macrobius Macrobius is a sponsor of the poem and the Dream of Scipio serves as an intellectual history to all Chaucerian dream discussions. Scipio is the subject of the opening of the Parliament of Fowls . Scipio meets the dreamer and acts as guide. He’s the pro bono boatman for the drowsy prelapsarian bird sanctuary. This is why Saint Kenelm gets twelve ragged lines and an unfinished story while Macrobius receives the following close attention.

Dame Pertelote, I sey yow trewely, Macrobeus, that writ the avisioun In Affrike of the worthy Cipioun, Affermeth dremes, and seith that they been Warnynge of thynges that men after seen. And forthermoore, I pray yow, looketh wel In the olde testament, Of Daniel ( . . . )

(3122–3128)

If ever defeat was snatched from the jaws of victor y, this is it. Chauntecleer lands upon the most significant source that would resuscitate his argument and he gives Macrobius fewer lines than Saint Kenelm. In fact, he dedicates to Macrobius less than half the lines of Saint Kenelm. There’s a reason that Macrobius has loomed larger than Kenelm for the audience of Chaucer these last six-hundred plus years, but it is no thanks to Chauntecleer’s study. If there is a theoretical reason that Chauntecleer does not spend more of his literary review on Macrobius it has to do with the fact that the language of Scipio , in the Platonic tradition, is at odds with its meaning. One of the highest stated functions for dreams in Macrobius’s translation is the prediction of future events. But Macrobius’s “future” is a faux ami in the strictest sense: “Words that have a common root but which have taken on quite different meanings over the centuries.” 141 In the Ciceronian tradition, Scipio is an emissary of the soul’s immortality. He glimpses through futures rather than at them. THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 123

Human souls were of God; that upon their departure from the body a return to heaven lay open to them . . . Scipio held this same view, for only a few days before his death . . . he, as if in premonition of his fate, discoursed for three days on the commonwealth, and devoted almost all of the conclusions of his discussion to the immortality of the soul, making use of arguments which he had heard, he said, from Africanus the Elder through a vision in his sleep. 142

Scipio receives the verdict of impending death and his immediate response is to spend the next three days discoursing about “the immortality of the soul.” Put another way, when he discovers that his life’s purpose is to save Rome, his first question is ‘what happens next?’ In even simpler terms, his life’s purpose is really his afterlife’s purpose. Scipio saves one city and departs for another. The rescue of Rome by the Scipios is a feat charged with the same philosophy as the Aeneid; Aeneas, agent of Fate, fulfills the will of the gods, achieves disembarrassment from the natural mandate of Carthage, and founds Rome, a natural mandate sponsored—appropriately enough—by Dido, its resident Pertelote and (like here) probably the most interesting person in the poem. It shares in the same literary history as the Rome that Augustine adopts as the eternal city. Rome has two histories. One them is an ahistory. “Rome” is an eschatological domino effect. In Cicero’s Republic , Scipio looks down from above and proclaims, “These starry spheres were much larger than the earth. Indeed the earth now seemed to me so small that I began to think less of this empire of ours, which only amounts to a pinpoint on its surface.”143 For Africanus, the judgment on human time and the “future” is as follows: But can you not understand that the earth is totally insignificant? . . . Scorn what is mortal!”144 To Chauntecleer’s credit, saving Rome from Carthage or at least knowing that you’ll die trying seems to suffice at the level of language and action. For any reader ‘Chauntecleer’ and any treatise that presents the ‘prediction of future events’ as an ultimate category for dream visions, we find an easy friendship. On the same token, for any reader ‘not Chauntecleer’ and any Neoplatonic treatise that elides ‘future events’ with ‘oracular’ we recognize an impasse. Apollo, god of poetry, governs prophecy. The Manciple’s Tale is fairly persuasive concerning the fact that poetry and prophecy cannot take up residence on earth. These great city epics: the Dream of Scipio , Plato’s Republic , Virgil’s Aeneid , and Augustine’s City of God share a common bloodline. Prophecies about the founding and rescuing of cities partake of an uncreated order of knowledge. Scipio does not just save Rome from Carthage; he saves Heaven from Earth, saves an unbroken thing from a broken one. The city Aeneas 124 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL founds on earth is a shadow, in the Platonic sense of the word, of Ideas both larger and smaller—because a man is smaller than Rome, but the City of God is larger than the world. But Augustine’s argument is that what is inside a man is still larger than Rome, because in substance it shares in the same eternity as the City of God. A Republic in men and the Republic to which men travel in death exist in unbroken continuity inside a symbol. “For it is from this earthly city that the enemies spring against whom the City of God must be defended.” 145 To confuse them is to understand them. “What they have forgotten is just that it is an ideal republic for which Plato is legislating, ‘a city which is not anywhere on earth,’ one that is to be for us a pattern laid up in heaven.” 146 Macrobius argues, “With a deep understanding of all human affairs Plato advises throughout his discussion of the establishment of a republic that a love of justice must be instilled in men’s minds . . . nothing was quite so effective as the assurance that one’s enjoyments did not terminate with death.” 147 Macrobius continues,

Cicero proved to be equally judicious and clever in following this method of treatment: after giving the palm to justice in all matters concerning the welfare of the state, he revealed, at the very end of his work, the sacred abodes of immortal souls and the secrets of the heavens and pointed out the place to which the souls of those who had served the republic pru- dently, justly, courageously, and temperately must proceed, or rather, must return.148

It is perhaps appropriate to Chaucer’s tone that in the Tales he simply takes a road trip to a city that already exists and does not need saving. Nonetheless, we still intuit the palpable hiddenness of the City behind the city—or the Coop behind the coop—and the responsibility of poetic symbols to negotiate the power of a lost kingdom of God with the fact that the “kingdom of God is within you.”149 The anagogical identity of these city epics is more like a haunting than a hermeneutic in the context of Chauntecleer’s argument. But they will become the hermeneutic. They demonstrate that even if we draw a very straight line between dream and future event, the event remains a ruse to another timeless ‘future’ to which symbols are ultimately referred. The event becomes a shadow of a causal structure that is circularly reinforced. Eternity is the cause of a dream whose symbols praise the inevitability and power of eternity. Macrobius’s categories ironically halt on their way toward an unspeakable reunion of dreams with infinity. But like alta fantasia in Dante, it halts when it reaches a solution because the solution is beyond language. If that sounds like a dissolution rather than a solution, THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 125 then it’s a dissolution of the technology rather than the object of perception. For Macrobius it is a category beyond categories: “the universal.” It stalks prophetic dreams, propels their symbols upward, and evokes the superlunary: “And it is universal since by gazing up and down he was ini- tiated into the wonders of the heavens, the great celestial circles, and the harmony of the revolving spheres, things strange and unknown to mortals before this.” 150 There is more to a prophecy than a happening, there are “things strange and unknown to mortals before this.” Chauntecleer’s “Cipioun,” no larger than the average Kenelm, is a smaller idea of a dream than that which can be found in Cicero and Macrobius.

Literary Review: Everyone Else Things start slipping for Chauntecleer’s argument. The remaining stories are mercifully short. The poem’s ready to move on. Five stories occur within the space of twenty lines. Two lines are dedicated to Daniel. Three for Joseph, three for Pharaoh, three for Croesus, and a generous eight dedicated to Andromache, though Chauntecleer tires of it: “But thilke tale is al to longe to telle” (3149). The stories differ in detail. The same ‘story within story’ phenomenon continues to draw an unspoken order of meaning away from Chauntecleer’s repetitive proof and toward the long philosophical arc of the poem’s form. When the stories do not unfold the larger philosophy of the poem, they often contain too many contending points about dreams to function in the singular manner Chauntecleer’s argument requires. Daniel is a bestiary of dreams. Nebuchadnezzar dreams the rise and fall of empires, and eventually, the end of the world. The final vision is the end of history: “And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words [are] closed up and sealed till the time of the end.”151 Joseph was such an expert dream reader that he probably created more problems than he solved. Like Chauntecleer, he didn’t suffer from low self-confidence. And both had a taste for outlandish fashion. At any rate, Joseph’s so ‘good’ at prophecy that he saves Egypt from famine, sparks a mass migration of Hebrews, and unintentionally creates a 300- year problem that wouldn’t be solved until “Moses took the bones of Joseph . . . away hence.” 152 It could be said that the victory of that story has very much less to do with the reification of Pharaoh’s dream than it does the reification of God’s dream, which is the entire soteriology that runs from Exodus through Revelation. The introduction of Croesus complicates Chauntecleer’s argument in various ways. Cobble together different Croesus stories and they run eerily parallel as a character-study to the rooster. In the bird’s retelling, the Lydian King functions only as much as he dreams of the tree upon 126 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL which he is hanged. “Lo Cresus, which that was of Lyde kyng, / Mette he nat that he sat upon a tree, / Which signified he sholde anhanged bee?” (3138–3139). But in most versions, Croesus’s death is only a near-death, typically depicted at the pyre. In fact, Croesus, rather like Chauntecleer, is famous for escaping death. As Marie Gelbech points out, “Although the versions vary considerably in the amount and character of the details that are given, they always agree on one point, namely that Croesus, though condemned to death, was not actually executed, but his life was saved by some intervention.” 153 In Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium Croesus escapes death. Likewise, Boethius writes in the Consolation , “Did you not know the story of Croesus, the king of the Lydians; how he, not long before such a terror to Cyrus, was soon wretchedly given over to be burnt, but saved by a shower from heaven?” 154 Another pyre version is found in Bacchylides’s Odes. Once again, full disaster is averted and the story reorients itself toward the end of history. Zeus rescues Croesus and his family and transports them from the pyre to the Hyperboreans. 155

What once was hateful is welcome; “tis sweetest to die.” So spake he . . . The maidens shrieked, and threw up their hands to their mother; for the vio- lent death which is foreseen is to mortals the most bitter. But when the bright strength of the dread fire began to rush abroad, Zeus brought a dark rain-cloud above it, and began to quench the yellow flame. Nothing is past belief that is wrought by the care of the gods. Then Delos-born Apollo carried the old man to the Hyperboreans, with his daughters of slender ankle, and there gave him rest, in requital of his piety; because of all mortals he had sent up the largest gifts to divine Pytho. 156

That’s the nicest thing anyone ever says about Croesus. It’s also the only time he’s accused of worshiping Pytho, whose oracle has so far—and just in the poem’s we’ve considered—saved the human race after the Flood, stood watch over the Omphalos, and remains to this day the first and only living eyewitness witness to Apollo’s victory at Delphi and the arrival of the poetic arts to mankind. Even if that’s the best Croesus it’s not only Croesus. He’s as contradic- tory as Chauntecleer. In Herodotus’s Histories, the Lydian King Croesus is a man of gold with a shortsighted eschatology. Altogether, he’s pretty smug, “deeming himself the happiest of men.” 157 Solon rebukes Croesus for his attachment to the present life and for evaluating human happiness without reference to ends.

He who unites the greatest number of advantages, and retaining them to the day of his death, then dies peaceably, that man alone, sire, is, in my judgment, entitled to bear the name of “happy.” But in every matter it THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 127

behoves us to mark well the end . . . The king saw him depart with much indifference, since he thought that a man must be an arrant fool who made no account of present good, but bade men always wait and mark the end. 158

Ctesias, a fifth-century bc physician and historian, casts Croesus as a trickster. Helen H. Law writes, “According to Ctesias, the son of Croesus, given as a hostage to Cyrus before the city was taken, was killed by him because Croesus had used trickery in the negotiations.”159 His son is “put to death before his eyes” and his wife commits suicide by “throwing herself from the walls.” 160 Still, “After the city was taken Croesus fled for refuge to the temple of Apollo; he was three times put in chains, and three times loosed invisibly from his bonds.” 161 The process repeats, Croesus escapes. This time “by thunder and lightning sent from heaven.” 162 Finally, Cyrus stops trying to kill Croesus. Instead he gives him a city and a 15,000 man army.163 In another version by the First Vatican Mythographer, rain merely provides cover for a crafty Croesus to escape. “When Croesus was placed upon the funeral pyre, a storm suddenly rose which extinguished the fire, and Croesus found an opportunity to escape.” 164 Law remarks, “One notes that there is no suggestion that the storm came in answer to prayer or that there was anything miraculous in his escape.” 165 The Vatican Mythographer’s version kills him off in the end due to the fact that “Croesus was rejoicing and boasting of his great wealth.” 166 The Roman de la Rose is another rare mention of Croesus’s death, this time as a hermeneutical judgment for arguing on behalf of a literal view of dreams. The bulk of the Roman ’s Croesus panel, and this may sound familiar, is a deliberation of the status of symbols in dreams. Eric Jaeger writes, “In arrogantly insisting upon a literal interpretation of his dream, Croesus comes under the censure of a long exegetical tradition that ‘the letter killeth.’ . . . Through the spiritual death of his literalist reading, he blindly goes to the physical death represented in his allegorical dream.”167 Croesus argues, “In your foolish response, when you explain my dream to me in this way, you have served me with great lies; for know that this noble dream, to which you want to put a false gloss, should be understood according to the letter.” 168 The dialectical emphasis of the Jean de Meun version guides Croesus’s appearance in the House of Fame where, Jaeger argues, “the Lydian king is held up as a prime example of the misinterpreter. Near the beginning of the poem, the narrator warns the reader not to “mysdemen” his dream “Thorgh malicious entencion” (92–93) and wishes that any misinterpreter may have such a conclusion. “As had of his avision / Cresus, that was kyng of Lyde, / That high upon a gebet dyde” (103–106).” 169 128 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

By the time Croesus arrives in the Monk’s de casibus, the most salient elements of classical myth and medieval rhetoric are boiled down to the problems of pride and Fortune, ethical modes that form the cognitive false exit in the chicken epic. Jaeger argues that “the Monk edits the legend in order to make Croesus meet the requirements of his genre.” 170 “Anhanged was Cresus, the proude kyng; / His roial trone myghte hym nat availle / Tragedi ës is noon oother maner thyng” ( Monk’s Tale , 2759–2761). Of course, the reason the Monk slaughters Croesus is because he already escaped one execution and hasn’t learned his lession. “But swich a reyn doun fro the welkne shadde / That slow the fyr, and made hym to escape” (2731–3732). Despite that lucky break, he “can’t stop starting wars” (2735–2736). And he has a dream, “Of which he was so proud” (2741). In the dream, Croesus sits in a tree. Jupiter gives him a sponge bath. The king of the gods takes his time and washes both Croesus’s back and side. “Ther Juppiter hym wessh, bothe bak and syde” (2744). And then—I can’t make this up – Phoebus arrives to bring Croesus a fresh towel. “And Phebus eek a fair towaille hym broughte / To dryen hym with; and therfore wax his pryde” (2745–2746). Understandably, Croesus gets a little big for his britches after bathtime with the Olympians. So Dame Fortune strings him up. Still, Chaucer’s narrators are intent on killing a character who is notoriously lucky at the pyre. In the end, Croesus is the literalist of Jean de Meun and the House of Fame , the king whisked away from death, a worldly myope who thinks “that a man must be an arrant fool who made no account of present good, but bade men always wait and mark the end,” 171 a trickster, a clever escape artist, the wealthy man of “ese and blis,” a guy who showers with Jupiter, a friend of Apollo, a patron of Pytho, and an immortal resident of the Hyperboreans. Of course Croesus is also the skeletal hangman’s victim of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale : “Lo Cresus, which that was of Lyde kyng, / Mette he nat that he sat upon a tree, / Which signified he sholde ahanged bee?” (31383–3140), but only according to a chicken in whom resides all of Croesus except the one he imagines. In Chauntecleer’s final story, Andromache dreams Hector’s death. The version, without classical precedent, comes to Chaucer through Renart le Contrefait, Guido delle Colonne, and Dares Phrygius. In Phrygius: “When time for fighting returned, Andromache, Hector’s wife, had a dream which forbade Hector to enter the fray. He, however, dismissed this vision as due to her wifely concern.” 172 Chauntecleer might be guilty of vision casting here. 173 Perhaps he’s looking for a smooth landing as he returns to recent local history—wants to polish the truth. He’s the one who had a panic attack. “Yet of his look for feere almoost I deye” (2906). ‘His’ Andromache called him a coward. “‘Avoy!’ quod she, ‘fy on yow, hertelees!’” (2908). It won’t change the fact that Pertelote didn’t dream THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 129 his death, nor did she weep when it was told to her. When Pertelote goes into a frenzy during the fox chase, it’s because she’s a realist. A fox actually eating her husband is a genuine matter for concern. There’s is no parallel for Hector’s masculine dismissal of Andromache’s worries. From what I intuit, the immediate aim of Chauntecleer’s book review and Latin exercise is the vainglorious reinforcement of his medieval and Sentimental Education rather than fearlessness in the face of death. But he will attempt the time-honored one-two punch of responding to emas- culation with misogyny. All considered, in the Iliad Patroclus foretells Hector’s death before his own at Hector’s hands. “And put away in your heart this other thing that I tell you. You yourself are not one who shall live long, but now already death and powerful destiny are standing beside you, to go down under the hands of Aikos’ great son, Achilleus.”174 Hector goes to his death in the Iliad in service to the Fates. Once again the end of Hector’s story is the beginning of another. Hector’s cousin Aeneis, a soldier in his army, survives the Trojan Wars and founds Rome—that Rome lives on in Chauntecleer’s references, saved by Scipio in the Punic Wars and prophesied in the dreams of Daniel to endure until the stone “cut out of the mountain without hands”175 consumes the empires of man leaving only Augustine’s Rome beyond Rome. 176 “And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron . . . And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” 177

The Story of Chauntecleer’s Stories What has yet to be mentioned is that another structural story-within-a story governs these stories. It governs the entire poem. It may seem idio- syncratic to read Chauntecleer’s stories as romances that meet at the end of the world, or the world that ours replaced. However, one finds that it is in the very nature of metaphor—the building block of poetry—to constitute itself in movement teleologically, but, as W.H. Kalaga argues, “without telos.” 178

Within the realms of signs, i.e., the realm of cognition (construed in the nonmental, nonactual sense) both teleology (as the principle) and telos (as the objective) are contained in and involve movement: At each moment of the interaction between the sign and the semiotic universum , a telos is constituted and with each moment it is annihilated—via the continuous movement of teleology—into another telos—never an ultimate one. 179 130 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

“Metaphor must be what erases itself, indefinitely constructs its own destruction.”180 In the same spirit, Travis writes. “I believe that these poets (Chaucer, Alanus, Machaut, and Froissart) all situate their prized poetic figures in a special ‘other’ world, a world that Alanus terms a ‘place apart.’”181 “The quintessential poetic metaphor appears to be retreating as far as possible toward the domain where words and things are one, or even further toward a preverbal and prelogical iconicity where res simply represents res .” 182 Alfred David writes, “The very success of the medieval poet’s fiction, therefore, will tend to distance us from any reality that is not of his own making.” 183 Chaucer writes in the moralitas on jangling Manciple’s Tale , “Thyng that is seyd is seyd, and forth it gooth” ( Manciple’s Tale , 355). We understand its shared philosophy to one of the literary misdiagnoses at the end the Nun’s Priest’s Tale: “That jangleth whan he sholde holde his pees” (3435). “Not speaking” becomes an antiphrastic metonym for poetry, a language that is silent in history. Alain muses, “It is no cause for wonder if Prudence withdraws from the lists, faced with matters that are so far beyond the dominion of mother Nature that they rise above her course, cause the mind to fail, the intellect to come to a standstill, the reason to grow numb, wisdom to totter, Tullius himself to be silent, Maro’s Muse to fall dumb, Aristotle to droop, Ptolemney’s sense to grow dull.” 184 Where does a “thyng that is seyd” in poetry go? It goes along the path of Kalaga’s symbol, a symbol that steamrolls each successive telos through its own teleology, annihilating every predicate on its way back to being. At some point, but in a single instant, history runs out of predicates, a sign marches on to a new world, and a silence falls. It is a paradox, though. Metaphor does have a telos in medieval Neoplatonism, but that telos is a “special other world.” That “special other world” is an unspoilt infinity that bookends a contingent finity. The paradox is this, if something has a telos in the Mind of God, then it only has teleology. There is no final resting place in a never-ending place. Thus at the micropoetic level, metaphor “retires or retreats from the field of proper semantics into a space of its own.” 185 At the next level, Chauntecleer’s stories within stories have an insecure purchase on the “lif present.” Instead they are poetic eschatologies in miniature. Finally, at the macropoetic level, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a tapestry woven of small threads of infinity that, when one steps back to observe the whole, tells a story about infinity never lapsing. The teleological poem is teleological at a cellular level—all of its parts moving the whole toward an unreachable telos. As Cooper writes, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is, “A tale that can claim to be the Canterbury Tales in miniature. Its layering of stories within stories makes it a story collection itself . . . Its rheotrical pyrothechnics and THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 131 its inclusion of almost all the significant themes found in the rest of the tales . . . make it an epitome of the larger work.” 186 In this sense the patch of fabric that is the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is identical to the world-sized cloth of the Canterbury Tales . When we do Chauntecleer’s work for him, the ghosts inside of his references either end up looking like him and tell his story, or they tell another story altogether, one in which dreams in art pave a road out of history that begins at Scipio’s advice to “Know thy-self first immortal” and ends in “that place dere, / That ful of blis is and of soules clere” ( Parliament of Fowls , 73b, 76b–77). Whatever “The New Jerusalem” is, it’s a moving target—the telos of all teleologies. Chauntecleer can tell a bad story and still manage a good plot of land there because he happens to live inside in a good story, and that good story is really what his bad ones are about, if we understand that Nun’s Priest’s Tale is at every instant a poem about the Nun’s Priest’s Tale . As a final comment on these dream vision panels, if we hear the noise of static running through Chauntecleer’s visionary literature, it is the voice of Lady Philosophy: “Ye, too, creatures of earth, have some glimmering of your origin, however faint, and though in a vision dim and clouded, yet in some wise, notwithstanding, ye discern the true end of happiness.” 187 We might also perceive in the poem’s background a growing confidence in the idea that, “The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents.” 188

The End of the Argument: Pertelote and Chauntecleer Agree to Agree Having squeezed the last holy drops from a stone cut without hands, his stories end: “But thilke tale is al to longe to telle, / And eek it is ny day; I may nat dwelle” (3147–3150). Earlier we considered the argument that some elemental but “repressed historicity” bursts through the fussy but highly professional manicuring. Chauntecleer, like the “ roi des jardainiers et jardinier du Roi, ” Andr é Le N ô tre, “ donna ses lettres de noblesse au jardin à la fran çaise .”189 According to Fehrenbacher, “When the Nun’s Priest’s Tale does return to the fourteenth century,” 190 it “shatters the ahistorical frame” 191 and “fragile ahistorical enclosure of Chauntecleer’s barnyard.” 192 As Chauntecleer’s long argument sputters to a stop, the idea of history and fantasy at this point seems to be executed in pantomime. If his ‘high literature’ is the gesamtkunstwerk through which history so suddenly breaks, then the rupture of that absolu is, “I gotta’ go. It’s ‘nigh day.’” Real life calls. The pressing “ny day” closes in and he retreats: from the frostbitten borderlands of intuition to the equatorial cotillion 132 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL of understanding. Neither literature nor history flies too close to the sun in this permutation, but Chauntecleer’s rather important 200-line fili- buster has something that “ny day” doesn’t: the wordless behavior of the source material that he fails to marshal as An Apology for Poetry , sources that imagine oracular dreams as agents of a pure present Reality and not the realities of the “lyf present.” To his credit what he does right, he does by accident. His argument releases stronger philosophies into the poem. Macrobius calls “time” an “oblivion,” “that begins silently to creep into the recesses of the soul.” 193 Souls “retain in their descent to bodies the memory of divine concerns, of which they were conscious in the heavens . . . But all, indeed, in descending, drink of oblivion.” 194 Chauntecleer has unleashed the real force of the poem by dumb luck. Human history has a new-tense, the “future-oblivion.” “Experience” is some virus that “creeps into the recesses of the soul.” That’s the nervous prostration behind the entrepreneurial terribleness of his book report. To the credit of “ny day,” what it does right, it does on purpose. Pertelote knows what’s she talking about. And that’s the only bad thing anyone can say about what she says. One way to imagine it is that behind the image of this particular “ny day” and all the others that combine into a “lif present” is a bottle marked “katapuce.” “Laxatyves” are as serious an image as the spheres. They represent the toast of Alan de Lille’s “false day” of nature: that all “descending, drink of oblivion.” It’s the big sleep of poetry. That is perhaps the reason for the verses that immediately follow:

Shortly I seye, as for conclusioun, That I shal han of this avisioun Adversitee; and I seye forthermoor That I ne telle of laxatyves no stoor, For they been venymes, I woot it weel; I hem diffye, I love hem never a deel!

(3151–3156)

Chauntecleer catches his breath and gathers the force of his “olde bookes,” the ones he ‘reads’ upside-down when he needs to impress the prettiest in his harem of illiterate “fatal sustren.” “I renounce laxatives!” We can tease a few things from this philosophical victory. The first is that sufficiently proves (to himself) his singular, unwavering, and indispensible thesis: “I shal han of this avisioun adversitee.” But “death” rather than “adversitee” was the omphalic point of his dream dialogue. So, either “adversitee” is simply the broad category under which ‘deadly fox attack’ falls or it is an unconscious softening of his conclusion. This could be due to the fact that many of his sources escape definite extinction. One of his THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 133 heroes, Croesus, is classical myth’s Houdini. It could be because some of his dream panels barely predict death. Pharaoh dreams about a food shortage. Whatever the case, he refuses laxatives because they are poisonous and it’s something he determines literature-independent, that is, he seems to have arrived at that opinion due to his knowledge of laxatives rather than his knowledge of Saint Kenelm. These lead to the main problem of Chauntecleer’s rebuttal: even if the bird refuses Pertelote’s solution to dreams, the refusal takes place at an insufficient level of abstraction. Because of this, it does not contribute, except by way of reversal, toward the poem’s art of poetry. The philosophy that counter-defines the poem’s bodily rhetoric doesn’t exist any easier in his library than it does Pertelote’s pharmacy. For both, there’s “worse poison to men’s souls . . . Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.” 195

Mistranslated Latin Therefore, at the very literal level, Pertelote recommends laxatives and Chauntecleer refuses them. At the level of method, Pertelote offers a naturalistic solution that Chauntecleer counters through literary Argumentum ad Verecundiam . However, at a higher level in pursuit of the poem’s form we realize that Chauntecleer’s hard line against laxatives lacks definitive disembarrassment from the rhetorical premium on history and experience that travels through the Monk, Widow, Pertelote, and other narrative voices of the tale. It begins when he transfers Cato’s authority to the authors of those “olde books” who, so the argument goes, “han wel founded by experience that dremes been signifigaciouns.” The argument, not necessarily dead on arrival, then fails to achieve lift-off despite the literature of Macrobius, Cicero, and the Major Prophets. The conclusion, hardly the product of the inevitable force of logic, ends with an ironic victory in which Chauntecleer upholds the figures of dreams and against natural interpretation. It is an ironic victory because the philosophy of the poem also denies the candidacy of laxatives to act as foil to the anagogical future glimpsed in dreams. But it does so in spite of the bird, not in tandem. None of this would be possible without the simpler fact that Pertelote wins the argument. She locates symbols as bodily modes and Chauntecleer retreats from literature back to the body.

Now let us speke of myrthe, and stynte al this. Madame Pertelote, so have I blis, Of o thyng God hath sent me large grace; For whan I se the beautee of youre face, 134 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Ye been so scarlet reed aboute youre yen, It maketh al my drede for to dyen;

(3157–3162)

Chauntecleer aims for heaven itself, falters, and retires for some “myrthe” and “blis.” Perhaps there is a faint whiff of W.C. Fields,’ “I’d like to see Paris before I die . . . Philadelphia will do.” 196 Chauntecleer exchanges one Socrates for another and cedes the speculative attack on “the unexamined life” 197 for the “philosopher’s cheese.”198 As Cicero’s interlocutor says in De Divinatione , Socrates and Plato “gave no reason,” while Epicurus “says what he thinks.” 199 Chauntecleer settles back into the jog-trotty world of understanding, the “myrthe” and “blis” of the Franklin’s narrative strategies. “To lyven in delit was evere his wone, / For he was Epicurus owene sone, / That heeld opinoun that pleyn delit / Was verray felicitee parfit” ( General Prologue , 335–338). However, Chauntecleer interrupts his Epicurean retirement with one last (somewhat) academic gasp. “For al so siker as In principio , / Mulier est hominis confusio. / Madame, the sentence of this Latyn is, / Womman is mannes joye and al his blis” (3163–3166). This is the point at which we finally wave farewell to Cato. The mode of wisdom represented by the Distichs bookends Chauntecleer’s literature. Pertelote loses the floor to her husband when she references him. By no fault of its own, Cato’s practical wisdom fuels the philosophies of both birds and magnetizes them with the dominant rhetoric of literalism. Chauntecleer launches his own antithetical investigation by referring himself to men of greater literary authority than Cato. The argument is unsuccessful and Chauntecleer returns to the world of practical wisdom. The way he checks back in is with a Latin exercise, Latin he probably learned copying Cato’s Distichs . This is not an interpretation of the bad Latin, merely a signpost that it is harder than the average poetic narrator might think to free one’s speculation of non-waking and non-volitional being, from “Just what awake was most desired by you.”200 One can take many views of Chauntecleer’s Latin. Stephen Manning argues that “surely it is funnier if, after such a magnificent display, he has totally exhausted his learning.” 201 George R. Petty Jr. argues that the garbled Latin is “illustrative of Chauntecleer’s na ï veté .”202 Others critics argue the mistranslation is deliberate. 203 Pelen emphasizes the philosophical provenance to Genesis. 204 Travis and Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno take the problems of language and translation as central interpretive obstacles. Travis writes, “In my judgment the most productive way of beginning to respond to the translation exercise is to read it as a heuristic parody THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 135 of the very activity of translation itself.” 205 Elsewhere, quoting Joseph Dane, “by the late fourteenth century, the words confusio and confuse were technical terms referring to referential ambiguities of language.” 206 He concludes, “Thus it is apparent that the more carefully we read this innocent-looking Latin tag, the more resistant it proves to be to any kind of truly ‘accurate’ translation.” 207 Pizzorno’s focus on the problem of translation takes a different route. “Employing Varro’s and Isidore’s method of voluntary derivation, the anthropomorphized cock deconstructs—so to speak—confusion .208 She identifies a strategy that one could hardly call farfetched when held up to the iconography of the Miller’s Tale : “Joy and bliss” obviously cannot be a direct translation of confusio; rather it is the translation of its etymologia composita: “Con/fusio,” that is, con (OF “woman’s genitalia” [Latin cunnus , “wedge”] and foison (OF “extreme abundance”) [Latin fusio , “a pouring out”]. 209 Perhaps it is possible to see in Chauntecleer’s Latin all of these perspectives, even if doing so makes it difficult to find a unified way out. For instance, whether the mistranslation was accidental or deliberate, Chauntecleer’s mistake occurs according to a larger and unobserved philosophy. Beginning at the bottom and working up, Chauntecleer could have accidentally or professionally botched the Latin in service to a rather nauseating seduction. As concerns “Chauntecleer, Latin lover,” either scenario is satisfactory, though if we fall on the side of a deliberate mistranslation, the sheer meanness of it inflates, which is a pleasant effect. There is nothing barring us from imagining Chauntecleer in a more or less unscrupulous light—manipulative sé ducteur or bumbling first date—as we advance abstractions toward the emerging epistemology of the mistranslation. Along the way we encounter the problem of literary misogyny. Wheeler writes, “Chauntecleer’s ‘translation’ of the traditional misogynistic maxim—woman is man’s ruin—is a gross but purposeful misreading of the Latin, since he has already demonstrated his familiarity with both Macrobius and Virgil.” 210 Besides representing a familiar literary topos that appears throughout Chaucer’s poetry we also recognize a theological misstep, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” 211 And if we observe in the misogyny the common Chaucerian interlocutory retreat from poetic speculation, then we also understand that Chauntecleer jumps from one sinking ship to another, from a stalled literary defense to the psychological comfort of a flawed theological perspective and an ironic trope in literature. Jeremy Dimmick writes, “Several constituencies could regard Ovid’s books as fit for burning. Christine de Pizan (c. 1363- c. 1430) takes them as a threat to the 136 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL dignity of women: for her, Ovid is the father of a tradition of clerical misogyny in love poetry whose chief modern son is Jean de Meun in the Roman de la Rose .” 212 But in Ovid the trope is permeable. In Amores (I: XIII), Ovid’s lover wants to keep women in bed to stop them from spinning like the Fate Clotho, whose day-job is to weave language and life. In which case, the misogyny of the Ovidian lover, upon which Jean de Meun and Chaucer repeatedly draw, is a strategy of reverse alchemy that turns Clothos into sex toys. Misogyny becomes a tactic deployed to subli- mate those responsible for language’s unspoilt origins to a world governed by failed love rhetoric. In as much as we detect misogynistic strategies in the language of Chauntecleer and other narrators, we also recognize their instability in the face of the symbolic power of the female poetic mission they attempt to disrupt. Thus when Wendy Harding argues that “He (Chauntecleer) is a devoted servant of Venus, ‘goddesse of pleas- ance,’” 213 I understand it not according to the conflict she proposes: “The clash between sexual drive and learned reasoning.” 214 I understand it to function in a like manner to the traditional irony of Ovid’s Clotho- caging lovers who forgo a universal language of love, an art of love, in the tergiversatory attempt to reify a laughable and ultimately tubercular virility as the soul’s new contract with eternity. “Learned reasoning” is, at once, too benign an interpretation of the genocidal cosmic potential of literary misogyny and too generous a grade-inflation for Chauntecleer’s flagrant palm-checking during the oral exam on the history of Western Literature. There is narrow but dependable rhetorical destiny for language in art when it is sponsored by the less-illustrious Venus of the double tradition. It helps to redirect our critical focus and assimilate the moment as another analog extension of a recurring oxymoron in the Chaucerian performance: erotic eternity. Put simply, Chauntecleer is servant of Venus. Both of them. One Venus makes the blood of men and gods, in Ovid’s words “grow hot.” Another Venus “ordered Psyche to be brought by Mercury and introduced into heaven.” 215 This “Venus Urania” was, according to Pausaniaus, “the most ancient of all” the Parcae “and presided over the birth of men.” 216 According to John Lempriè re in his thunder- ously eccentric “primer for sedition,” 217 “A Classical Dictionary, Containing a Copious Account of All the Proper Names Mentioned in Antient Authors : With the Value of Coins, Weights, and Measures, Used Among the Greeks and Romans; and a Chronological Table ,” a favorite of Keats from which he “created the modern arcadian world” 218 (“such were the consequences of his first look into Lempriere,” 219 ) “Some suppose” that this original Venus, along with her sisters, “were subjected to none of the gods but Jupiter, while others support that even Jupiter himself was obedient to THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 137 their commands.” 220 The question of Chauntecleer, and he is a question, is how he renders unto Venus that which is Venus’s, and not just because there are two of them. Neither does the difficulty derive simply from the literary fact that the Venuses represent opposite forces. As we’ll see, the real ‘question of Chauntecleer’ is how he can serve Venus Pandemos at all when she hasn’t come into existence yet. It seems to me that a strong interpretation would elaborate all of these assumptions and take place at the cross-section of Travis and Pizzorno’s concern for language and translation and Pelen’s position that the Latin travels back to a time before Genesis 3. If it is as Pizzorno argues and the “con/fusio” of a woman is metonymously the “wedge pouring out” and thus co-epistemological to Chauntecleer’s eventual “joye and blis” then we see further reinforcement of the rooster’s typical Chaucerian withdrawal from the speculative to the sensual. Like Dorigen, the path goes away from art and toward natural understanding: “But, Lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake, / That semen rather a foul confusion” (Franklin’s Tale 868–869), to “Hire freendes sawe that it was no disport / To romen by the see, but disconfort / And shopen for to pleyen somwher elles” (895–897). Then the quick jump from natural understanding to physical pleasure: “And with that word he fley doun fro the beem . . . He fethered Pertelote twenty tyme” (3172, 3177). The “joye and blis” of the Franklin’s Epicurean experience ends at the foot of the Wife’s bed, intellectually and practically reborn in Pertelote’s unconcern for the Boethian “glimmering of your origin, however faint,” 221 and her rather literal interpretation of “Defraud ye not one the other,” 222 to which John Gill adds the following gloss, “refusing to pay the conjugal debt.” 223 Thus it is possible that “In pricipio, Mulier est hominis confusio ” becomes a split reference, a fork in the road; one path is a return to the world and the other the return to a lost one. Both happen at once in the poem. Both have to happen at once for either to exist. Poetry begins in exile. There isn’t much to say for the human preoccupation with pilgrimage independent of the premise that something better for the soul lies at the end of a long walk. Edmond Reiss writes, “The necessary inadequacy of language made its manipulation an ironic craft. Man’s understanding of his limited understanding, his recognition of his inevitable ignorance, is ironic in itself; even more ironic is man’s attempt to evaluate himself and his world; but most ironic of all is man’s attempt to create art.”224 When Travis and Dane remark upon the fourteenth-century’s deployment of confusio to interrogate the “referential ambiguities of language” Reiss’s position begins to make sense of the irony’s necessary and, in a way, heroic push against the futility of reference. 138 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

If there is a way out of Chauntecleer’s Latin, one must work backward from “joye and blis” to “ Mulier est hominis confusio ” until we arrive at “In principio ,” because reading a sentence backward takes us back to its beginning. And reading this sentence backward takes us back to the very beginning. Pizzorno argues, “With his In principio , the cock recalls the Edenic life when Adam conversed with angels and language was whole and perfect.” 225 Travis writes, “Augustine’s heart-wrenching difficulties derive in a large part from a host of metaphysical complexities concerning the nature of time and eternity, since both modalities meet at the precise point of the world’s beginning, its in principio .” 226 This is why Pelen’s initial position holds in spite of the dramatic, sexual, social, grammatical, and logical stuff of the rooster’s Latin, “That Chaucer should be concerned with man’s fall seems clear from the reference to ‘ In principio ,’” 227 because history in the poem, like language itself, is saturated with the exit from its own death, its contractual inability to philosophically exist and reconstitute itself in the foreign vocabulary of eternity. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale , by referring itself to In principio sets itself up as both the first poem ever written and the last. Eden lies at the end of history, not just the beginning. Anamnesis recovers knowledge that predates visceral existence in order honorably to retreat from it, to “the place which souls,” according to Cicero, “must proceed, or rather, must return. 228 There is a second philosophy in the poem that carries through Monk, Widow, and tale that is not naturalistic. It cuts the Monk’s history short, it unfolds an invisible Golden Age out of a widow’s farm, and causes a simple one-point sermon to spring so many leaks that join up with the river at the end of the world. A bird cannot even mistranslate a throwaway piece of Latin without the poem juggernauting onward toward the unknowable. The shuttered Golden Age continues to “measure the disappointments” 229 of the world that replaced it. When Chauntecleer flies “doun fro the beem” (3172) he flies in the wrong direction: away from the beginning of his Latin toward the end, from In principio to confusio : “For it was day, and eke his hennes alle” (3172–3173). “He fethered Pertelote twenty-tyme” (3177). The poem dis- proves the principle before the principle existed: “The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts,” 230 which might also involve a general observation by Ian Bishop: “There is more than a hint or two that the author of this tale was, in certain respects, a Darwinian by prolepsis.” 231 The dream discussion begins and ends as a Chaucerian pillow talk. Two seemingly opposite theories of dreams turn out to be part of the same narratological strategy, united by a final feathering. Bishop writes, “Having ‘mastered’ her in academic debate, he feels entitled to master her sexually.”232 It is THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 139 oft remarked that Pertelote never speaks again in the poem. This must be because she has earned her rest. She taught Chauntecleer to delay the inevitable; the rooster is ready for the early and more luminous era of his Tithonian eternity. “And from her touch . . . Tithonus [could] freshen up like a brand new Dawn.” 233 Chauntecleer can “reclaim the forever deteri- orating but never dying Tithonus, as an emblem of his erotic longevity.”234 That is how I understand such a heroic intellectual finish to a career-long defense of dreams: “I am so ful of joye and of solas, / That I diffye bothe sweven and dreem” (3170–3171). Taken as a whole: “I renounce laxatives. They’re poisonous. And I’m so goddamned happy that I renounce vision and dreams.” Perhaps he is weary, tired of interpreting the world over which he presides. Many generals, I’m sure, become pacifists in old age and learn to love peace and quiet. In a sense, we’re back to where we started and everything’s changed. It’s a world whose arguments can’t be established by argument.

The New Widow’s World and the Rusty Golden Age When Phaeton grabbed the reigns of his father’s chariot the whole world burned. 235 In typical Chaucerian fashion, Chauntecleer’s attempt to steal a sunrise fails to catch fire and ends with a morning stroll and a sitting ovation from the audience of art. It is as though the poem briefly rewinds to the beginning. Once Chauntecleer renounces vision and dream he lives out a short life of natural bliss: eating, clucking, feathering.

And with that word he fley doun fro the beem, For it was day, and eke his hennes alle, And with a chuck he gan hem for to calle, For he hadde founde a corn, lay in the yerd. Real he was, he was namoore aferd. He fethered Pertelote twenty tyme, And trad hire eke as ofte, er it was pryme.

(3172–3175)

Chauntecleer’s chickenness is palpable. If we imagine that the Widow has been occupied with her daily exercise until this point, it might also be useful to imagine that she peeks through her window to check on the coop. Because the tale unevenly juxtaposes two rhetorics here, one in which Chauntecleer struts like a lion and another in which it is twice mentioned that he clucks because he has found a seed. It recalls the incongruous “bour” and “halle” of the Widow’s cottage. According to Barr that was “grounded in social difference.” 236 Here, the gesture is grounded in 140 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL ontological difference—dimensional misunderstanding. “He looketh as it were a grym leoun, / And on his toos he rometh up and doun; / Hym deigned nat to sette his foot to grounde. / He chukketh whan he hath a corn yfounde” (3179–3182). In fact, we might detect three distinct strategies here. The first carries over from Chauntecleer’s new Epicurean lease on life since his descent from Parnassus, “Real he was, he was namoore aferd.” The second carries over from Herodotus’s Croesus, the man of gold who retreats from the speculation of ends and takes comfort in the perks of nobility. Jaeger writes, “Chauntecleer is also like Croesus in lapsing into a complacency based in present comfort and, in animal terms, wealth . . . Like Croesus who futilely trusts in his ‘roial trone,’ Chauntecleer is reassured by his own sense of royalty.” 237 Jaeger sees a “repeated linking of Chauntecleer’s “royalty” to his sense of invincibility.” 238 The third seems to partake of those stories in which toys come alive at night and drop dead in their tracks when someone walks in the door. Chauntecleer, lecturer in literature, flies down from a high beam in victory, summons his hens to his side . . . and then clucks over a corn. In take two, Chauntecleer, grim lion, roams up and down his kingdom, deigns not to set a foot upon the ground . . . and clucks over a corn. The panel ends swiftly with a mixed message. “Thus roial, as a prince in his halle, / Leve I this Chauntecleer in his pasture” (3184–3185). The poem is performing for two audiences. For one Chauntecleer is bathed in noble fearlessness. For the other he is hungry for a corn. Neither of these permutations kicks very strongly against the growing sense that the history narrative is coming in spurts now rather than as a sustained philosophy. Thus for the second time an aborted quotidian unfolds a Golden Age. Chauntecleer’s brief tenure inside the “joye and blis” at the end of his Latin gets the hook and “ In principio ” enters to pick up the pieces. Throughout criticism, the term “mock” precedes almost every other word used to describe the genre of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale . It is especially useful at this important turning point, because now that the long argument on dreams has come to so satisfactory a close the real dada begins, or what Piero Boitani describes as a “succession of verbal fireworks.” 239 In this new “Eden raised in the waste Wilderness,” 240 Chauntecleer and his seven stargazing wives stand very momentarily transfixed.

Whan that the month in which the world bigan, That highte March, whan God first maked man, Was compleet, and passed were also, Syn March [was gon], thritty dayes and two, Bifel that Chauntecleer in al his pryde, That in the sign of Taurus hadde yronne THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 141

Twenty degrees and oon, and somewhat moore, And knew by kynde, and by noon other loore, That it was pryme, and crew with blissful stevene. “The sonne,” he seyde, “is clomben up on hevene Fourty degrees and oon, and moore ywis.”

(3187–3199)

For our purposes, we need not linger long on Travis’s detailed deconstruction of this inconclusive chronographia that yields multiple dates. Those critics working with editions that read “Syn march was [gon]” “thrittty dayes and two” were passed, calculate May 2 and May 3. Pearsall and Travis maintain a “Syn March [bigan]” reading. Still, Pearsall chooses May 3,241 while Travis argues the date lands somewhere between April 1 and 2. 242 May 3 is, perhaps, the most intellectually satisfying of the possible dates, certainly the most elegant. Besides being “the all-time favorite among Chaucerians,” 243 occurring in the Knight’s Tale , Troilus and Criseyde , and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , it thematically recalls Ovid’s Fasti . John P. McGall argues,

Ovid assigned May 3 to the goddess Flora and her celebrations. Ovid and many other writers make it amply clear that the festivities of Flora were especially wild and libidinous . . . The festival attracted to the Circus a multitude of prostitutes, for Flora “warns us to use life’s flower, while it still blooms; for the thorn, she reminds us, is flouted when the roses have fallen away.” . . . Finally, the festivity included hunting “the unwarlike roes and shy hares” rather than the Libyan lionesses, for as Flora tells Ovid, the woods are not her province, “but gardens and fields, where no fierce beast may come.”244

This is a transitional moment in the poem and McGall’s reading dances easily with it. Chauntecleer’s hurried exit from oracles “to use life’s flower, while it still blooms,” the “blis,” “revel,” and “solas,” the ticking clock and “ny day” of this rusted Golden Age’s flora and fauna: “Madame Pertelote, my worldes blis, / Herkneth thise blisful briddes how they synge, / And se fresshe floures how they sprynge;? / Ful is myn herte or revel and solas!” (3200–3203). Flora is “the ministress of Venus”; 245 in her gardens and fields “no fierce beast may come.” Chaucer inherits the aporetic sensuality of Ovid, luring interlocutors into a false sense of security based in the knowledge of body. But other considerations complicate a sure May 3. A lament later in the poem reads, 142 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

O Venus, that art goddesse of plesaunce, Syn that thy servant was this Chauntecleer, And in thy servyce dide al his poweer, Moore for delit than world to multiplye, Why woldestow suffre hym on thy day to dye?

(3342–3346)

This might confirm or confuse matters. Flora is a servant of Venus, and Ludi Floralis took place between April 28 and May 3. But “thy day” of Venus was the Veneralia on April 1. Thus Travis and McGall’s dates coin- cide with festivals of Venus. Meanwhile, in keeping with both the willy- nilly sacramental imagery and the poem’s more consistent primitivism, the narrator twice claims the poem takes place on Friday. “And on a Friday fil al this meschaunce” (3341). Pearsall writes, “Friday is chosen for many reasons: it is the day of Venus . . . and traditionally an unlucky day. It is a day of change and the unexpected . . . It is also the day of the Crucifixion and therefore, in the synchronized dating beloved of biblical exegetes, the day of the Fall.” 246 As for Good Friday and the Easter cycle, this could suggest any date between the vernal equinox and a full moon, which provides a window of March 22 to April 25—unhelpful to May 3 and accommodating to April 1 and April 2. It should be noted that calculating the date of Easter, a moveable feast, is itself a notoriously tricky affair based in a soft landing point between lunar and ecclesiastical calendars, the difference between a full moon and a Paschal full moon, various historical interventions by the Church to unify celebrations, and the differences between Julian, Gregorian, and Jewish calendars. 247 May 3 has the best literary arsenal. But if the edition contends thirty-two days “syn March [bigan]” then we can’t really lean our entire weight upon it. Instead, Travis argues, “For it should by now be clear that Chaucer’s major point is heuristic: that is, his parodic incipit/destinit sophism is meant first and foremost to raise questions about the nature of time and the complexities of its mensuration, rather than to posit a date upon which the Nun’s Priest’s Tale happens. 248 Our immediate interest is to collect the following important philosophical structures from any possible date. The first is that we observe language and time to be insufficiently determinative in a poem. It cannot transmit lost object. Language cannot define eternity, simple enough. But here, something’s happened. Here, language cannot tell time . It can’t do something it does every day. It is like running in a dream: our legs always fail, gravity’s weight doubles, the ground goes doughy. Poetry is the fever dream of language. It doesn’t know what day it is. Everything’s all-wrong. THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 143

A very precise date, like May 3, is not conclusive in itself to steer the poem’s form back toward the literal tools by which it was determined. What I mean is that Ovid’s Flora is a sponsor of Chauntecleer’s new Eden whether the chronographia falls exactly on May 3 or not. It is by something nearer to creed than mere habit that Chaucer’s pleasure gardens parade themselves as contradictions. The poem’s literary sensuality was a figural fact long before the narrator catches up with it by calculation. The common classical and medieval literary misadventure of a bodily Golden Age sustains this chicken’s Yeerd Regained as much as it would Amant’s jardin . Even a sure date for the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (none such seems to exist) would be a very small voice amidst the loud clash between content and form. Of course there is a ‘date’ to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale . Irony hangs ripe on a low branch in any chronological account of eternity. “Whan that the month in which the world bigan, / That highte March, whan God first maked man” (3187–3189). April 1 and 2 or May 3 assigns a date to a time before time. The fictive present of the tale is a pure present. Naming dates is a game of pin the tail on the donkey, though the donkey here is Balaam’s. It is not, as has been argued, because the poem is a new Fall—a new Genesis 3—that it takes place in the unknown epoch of Genesis 1 and 2. It is because art in its medieval Neoplatonic designation never makes it to Genesis 3, only artists do. In this sense, any confusion concerning whether this is a poem about the Fall might be resolved with the simple recommendation that this is a poem about the Fall never taking place. It is a poem that pivots between two dates, but they are the same. In Chauntecleer’s stories the date is the end of history. Here it is the long day before history began, Alain de Lille’s “true day” before which “the actual day grows dull.” 249 In both, “the city had no need of the sun.” 250 Language looks in the mirror and doesn’t recognize its own face. In a panic, it attempts to reestablish its link to truth.

But sodeynly hym fil a sorweful cas, For evere the latter ende of joye is wo. God woot that worldy joye is soone ago; And if a rethor koude faire endite, He in a cronycle saufly myghte it write As for a sovereyn notabilitee. Now every wys man, lat him herkne me; This storie is also trewe, I undertake, As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, That wommen holde in ful greet reverence. Now wol I torne agayn to my sentence.

(3204–3214) 144 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

But desiring rhetoric to marshal its power in literal service to the narrator’s tragic drama partake more of the technê of sophism than of Dante’s hopeless hope for an apotheosis of poetry and alta fantasia. Desiring rhetoric to “faire endite” that the “worldly joye is soone ago” enjoys a profes- sionalism missing from Dante’s poetic helplessness when he stares into the sun: “How scant is language, all too weak to frame / my thoughts! And these are such, that, set beside / my vision, ‘faint’ is word too weak for them.” 251 The Nun’s Priest’s Tale ’s sudden shift to a rhetoric aimed toward truth is a curious move. How is this “storie” as “trewe” as Launcelot de Lake? If it is simply that a story is as true as another story, then we must grant that the point coheres with Canterbury metapoetic in general in which, “the premise upon which every metaphorical construct is grounded is, simply, another metaphor.” 252 Art is the history to which art must be referred. This is how Chaucer’s poems “repay” Ovid’s and Homer’s “with art for art,” 253 in an unbroken intellectual exchange of poems that don’t say what they mean in order to tell the truth. It is also in this way that poems and poets with no shared history are drawn toward each other as friendly verbal and philosophical icons. If Augustine’s ideas hold and, “the truth of art depends upon the falsification of the artists,” 254 then it is in the very job description of artists to lie to each other in an everlasting single thought, a treadmill scat exchange of poetic goods—something like a functioning House of Fame. Even if the formal gardens are pockmarked by the gophers of Rumour, at least it stays in the family. So it could be that a flawed chronographia is as true as a story about Launcelot, or the truth of Launcelot is only as good as a flawed chronographia. If the failure of the chronographia , by which I mean its “lie,” is as true as Launcelot, then we are back in the same place, with the lies of history constituting the first principles of artistic truthfulness. If the chronographia is simply an equivalent human use of language to Launcelot, then we recognize a different strategy. In one, the chronographia reifies itself to the status of art; the other depicts art as co-epistemological to the language of astronomy. It is Nicholas’s boast. Whether the astronomy moves up or the art down, the strategy is the same: somehow equivalence means that history consolidates linguistic power through a standard of utility. Yet, timekeeping in the poem is flawed. The chronographia doesn’t work. Its only chance at truth-telling depends upon the claims of Launcelot de Lake’s truth. And there is a species of truth the Nun’s Priest’s Tale shares with Launcelot. In the Roman , “I shall tell no lie, unless the worthy men who wrote the ancient books also lied.” 255 And those worthy men lied. As such, perhaps an antithetical system of reification runs through the passage wherein the Edenic era, “the month in which the world bigan,” THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 145 and the incalculable nonlinear epoch to which art refers itself is as true as the Launcelot de Lake story. The chronographia is true because it is wrong, because it is not able to calculate the incalculable. This seems sturdy tautological ground. Once again, poetry and eternity provide each other with the means by which they refer to each other, by referring to each other. To my mind, the narrator’s big finish—that women hold it “ful greet reverence”—only reinforces its epistemological worth if we understand that Ovidian misogyny is a clown car for the early-born and ironically protects the Fates while parading them dressed in the uneven social rhetoric of sexual domination. F. Anne Payne make the timely comment, “The song and speech of the chickens disturbs [or continues to disturb] him into throwing his setting back to the golden age”: “For thilke tyme, as I have understonde, / Beestes and briddes koude speke and synge” 256 This, along with an Ovidian Genealogy of Misogyny continues the whirlpool like pull of form upon content toward the dawn of the age of Clotho, her satisfaction so far uncluttered by bad love poems.

I eat chickens, therefore, I am From the original explosion from the widow’s world to the end of the dream exposition, the poem’s theory sings at a high pitch. It seems momentarily, and comedically, to sputter in the clucking for corn/victory lap panel and the narratological confusion of how best to achieve a second lift-off into the Golden Age: astronomy, Epicurean “blis,” dramatic turns from “joye to wo,” rhetoric, epistemology, and a misogynistic relapse scrap over the twenty-seven lines given to them in order to reassert, at the level of content, the art of the “yeerd” according to the newly minted naturalistic machinery of Chauntecleer and Pertelote’s dream debate. And then the col-fox appears. “A col-fox, ful of sly iniquitee, / That in the grove hadde woned yeres three, / By heigh ymaginacioun forncast” (3215–3217). His arrival is invested with dramatic expectation. It builds on the similar sense of mystery that surrounds the grizzled but recogniz- able form of Tithonus rambling through a plague-riddled Flanders on his neverending pilgrimage to nowhere. The fox has been here the entire time, a lurking “bustle in your hedgerow.” 257 “Yeres three” he’s dwelled in a symbolically connected grove, neither in the coup, nor as far outside it as the Widow’s cottage. He knew Chauntecleer’s father. He was “by heigh ymaginacioun forncast” (3217). It is important that we take a position regarding whether the fox that appears is “by heigh imaginacioun forncast,” whether it travels through the Macrobian universal to glimpse “things strange and unknown to mortals before this.” 258 Because it is true that Chauntecleer dreams of a 146 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL beast that he has never seen. To what extent is the fox something “strange and unknown to mortals before this?”

Withinne our yeerd, wheer as I saugh a beest Was lyk an hound, and wolde han maad areest Upon my body, and wolde han me deed. His colour was betwixe yelow and reed, And tipped was his tayl and bothe his eeris With blak, unlyk the remenant of his heeris; His snowte small, with glowynge eyen tweye.

(2899–2905)

Even if we know a fox from experience, Chauntecleer does not. Descartes ponders the problem in his First Meditation .

For clearly even painters, when they try to imagine the most unusual sirens or satyrs, cannot assign natures to them which are completely new; rather, they simply mix up the parts of different animals. Even if they happen to think up something so novel that nothing like it was ever seen before—so that it is therefore very clearly fictitious and false—nonetheless, at least the colours from which they paint it must surely be real. In a similar way even if these general things—the eyes, the head, the hands and so on—were imaginary, it must still be admitted that at least some other things are real.259

It is true that Chauntecleer’s beast vision “mix(es) up the parts of different animals,” uses colors from nature, has eyes and a head on which to put them. Descartes would not fault him for it. “Physical nature in general and its extension seem to be of this kind; likewise, the shape of extended things; also the quantity, or their size and number; similarly the place in which they exist, the time through which they last, and similar things.” 260 Shape: “lyk an hound.” Quantity: “eyen tweye.” Place: “Withinne our yeerd.” Nevertheless, Chauntecleer, “never erst hadde seyn it with his ye” (3281). Chauntecleer manages something mysterious. He possesses an idea of something he has never seen. In the cause and effect of the Meditations only God possesses the ontology—the infinity of substance—by which finite minds necessarily perceive him. “Thus the idea of God is the only one left about which to ask the question: does it contain something that could not have originated from me? . . . And even though I have an idea of substance from the very fact that I am substance myself, it would not, however, be an idea of an infinite substance because I am finite, unless it originated from some substance that is genu- inely infinite.” 261 Chauntecleer’s perception of the fox occurs to a certain THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 147 magic that perhaps would not be accounted for by first principles. The fox does not possess the infinity that would act causally on Chauntecleer’s mind; he is a fox of finite substance that inhabits the world of extension. Nevertheless, he appears to Chauntecleer a priori . So ruling out the fox as the prime mover, we are left with some other power by which he is perceived. Whether the beast Chauntecleer sees is photographically our col-fox matters little. A col-fox appears, just as his dream predicts. It resonates in a rather literal manner with the poem’s Macrobian intellectual heritage. At first glance, it is more impressive than Scipio’s dream. For Scipio’s dream to have equal predictive power, he would have been raised in a city-less world and then one day dreamt of a vast concentration of white things along the Tiber, tall as trees, carved out like grottos, with families living in them, beset by a foreign army that he was somehow destined to save. Initially, Chauntecleer’s predictive purchase on reality is stronger. But does it reflect the medieval tradition of “heigh ymaginacioun” by which the text claims the fox is “forncast”? A clarification of terms is desirable. I want to mark the upward movement and the growing crisis of fantasy in the phrase itself. It’s the same crisis we’ve been tracking throughout. Karl P. Wentersdorf writes, “In light of the comments on predestination which follow only a few lines later (VII 3232–53), most editors take forncast in line 3217 to mean ‘foreordained,’ while heigh ymaginacioun is interpreted as ‘the foreknowledge of the One on high. This interpretation is questionable.’” 262 That said, the temptation is understandable. It does prefigure the upcoming freewill dilettantism. But Wentersdorf is right. The “interpretation is questionable.” Bishop comes deadly close and describes the aporetic contours of the problem. He writes, “‘Heigh ymaginacioun’ is a technical term of medieval psychology . . . faculty that enables one to experience a somnium coeleste or ‘avysioun,’ as opposed to a natural dream. In sleep, the ordinary imagination was indeed (as Pertelote argues) subject to illusions caused by vapours rising from the stomach.” 263 Then he takes Chauntecleer at his word. “But the ‘exalted imagination’ could, as the result of divine inspiration, experience either a vision of eternal verities or a warning of things that will happen ‘in this lif present.’ So Chauntecleer’s apprehension about his dream seems to be vindicated theoretically as well as in practice.” 264 However, as we observed there remains an impasse between “vision(s) of eternal verities” and “a warning of things that will happen ‘in this lif present.’” The difference, perhaps, is the same that separates psychology and psycho- machy. If it’s really “heigh ymaginacioun” than it won’t sit any easier with the “lif present” of the poem’s plot than it will the “lif present” 148 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL human history’s plot. As for “heigh ymaginacioun” and dreams: not all “dremes” are “heigh ymaginacioun” but all “heigh ymaginacioun” is a “dreme.” A satisfactory exit presents itself if we imagine that the phrase as another incantation of the poem’s unbroken philosophy rather than a thematic prelude to the Priest’s or the Fox’s narrative. According to Wentersdorf,

The imagination has been associated by many writers, including Plato and St. Augustine, with prophetic visions in the form of dreams; furthermore, the dream visions in Dante’s Divina Commedia are twice referred to (Purgatorio XVII.25, Paradiso XXXIII. 142) as alta fantasia , and this phrase is, in Hamm’s view, “the exact Italian equivalent of Chaucer’s “heigh ymaginacioun.”265

“For Dante, alta fantasia is the human imagination working at its most exalted level, as poetry borders on mystical vision.”266 Nevertheless, the baptized Icarian art of Dante is overcome. “In the Purgatorio , through a dream, Dante’s alta fantasia fails to conjure up an image through which it might apprehend the mind of God.” 267 Even so, “He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are , and it was changing him.” 268 In Paradiso XXXIII language fails: “How scant is language, all too weak to frame, my thought!” 269 The image before him has no access point outside itself. “O Light that aye sole in thyself dost bide, / sole understand’st thyself, and being self-known, / self-knowing, lov’st thyself, self-gratified!”270 Dante arrives to the noetic paradox of poetry’s mission. He sees a “Light” that “sole understand’st thyself.” There, “before that marvel strange and new,” he, “wishe(s) to discover how the image lay / within the circle.” 271 What happens when you “wish to discover” the “self-known” and “self-knowing?” You discover a “flight too sublime for my own wings to essay.” 272

To the high fantasy here vigour failed, but now, as a wheel’s turned that never jars, Were my desire and will by love impelled, the Love that moves the Sun and th’other stars.273

There comes a point at which even “heigh ymaginacioun” and alta fantasia cannot artistically define the soul’s intuition. But that point is very much beyond the prophecy of a hungry fox. What’s more important is that “Here powers failed my high imagination.” The “high imagination” didn’t fail. We failed “high imagination.” It works. It delivers us to “the quiet limit of the world.” 274 It’s anyone’s question what to ‘do’ once we THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 149 get there. But it’s poetry’s job to make sure we get there. We may grant, at once, that Chauntecleer predicts the future and that “heigh ymaginacioun” travels beyond it—to “the Love that moves the sun and other stars.” To be fair, Dante is a poet of ascensus and Chaucer, by appear- ances, descensus . But where some critics read a retreat from epistemology back to ontology, from Fame to Rumour, and heaven to earth, I see only a traditional Platonic topos of flippancy toward the various de rigeur images of human happiness not entirely dissimilar in method and voice to Hart’s “Hates California, it’s cold and it’s damp.”275 Travis, who is less impressed than I with Chauntecleer’s palmary piece of oneiromancy, nevertheless recognizes that if the fox prophecy and “heigh ymaginacioun” are depicted as co-epistemological, then “at its highest, “heigh ymaginacioun” would seem capable of decrying only the most general kinds of truth. It is not very high after all.” 276 Of course, it is “heigh ymaginacioun” in one important sense. Chauntecleer doesn’t live in human history. If Cartesian first principles don’t work here, the deeper truth may be that Chauntecleer and his “thilke tyme” are the first principles. There is no causal mechanism that acts upon him. Nothing he’s ever dreamed came from the waking world. The Manciple’s Crow “saugh it with his yen” ( Manciple’s Tale , 258–261). Chauntecleer’s never seen anything “with his ye” (3281). Strictly speaking, he’s never been awake. It’s something of a Schoolman’s jeu de mots , but you can’t arrive to Route 66 by taking Route 66. What I think Chaucer’s experimenting with here is a truly progressive form of entertainment that, unfortunately, wasn’t destined to become a major hit. Epistemological comedy. If we “wish to discover how the image lay / within the circle,” all we need to do is look closer. Dante made some broad suggestion that the circle “Seemed to be painted with our human likeness.” 277 But he admits that it was something like a “reflected light.”278 Dante returns to earth. Chaucer made it through. “Within the circle” there’s a chicken. And there’s a fox about to tap him on the shoulder.

Unmaking the Tragic Hero And so the fox arrives, even if he is not brought forth from the Empyrean by high imagination. During the night—sometime over the last “three years” (3216)—he creeps into the “yeerd” and hides in the cabbages. But even after a bucolic intermission and a patient chronological resumption of eternity, biblical and literary histories continue to unhorse the story of the chicken. The first idea we draw from this is what Fehrenbacher describes, “And even when the ‘col-fox, ful of sly iniquitee,’ finally bursts through the hedges surrounding Chauntecleer’s demesne, his threatening 150 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL presence is again erased by the literary, as the narrator introduces a long digression that makes a rhetorical mountain out of a fox lying in some cabbages.” 279 “O newe Scariot, newe Genylon, / False dissymulour, o Greek Synon, / That broughtest Troye al outrely to sorwe!” (3227–3229). And this is nothing new. The tale makes Camelot out of a coop the moment Chauntecleer appears and it never lets up. Narrative agendas begin to form alliances. In the Miller’s Tale rhetorics blur and a branded ass begins to look like a philosophical timeshare. Here too we observe parallel rhetorics, now between Chauntecleer’s high literature and this new narrative voice of divertimento , one that begrudg- ingly relates the rest of the story in between lovingly drawn intercul- tural excursus. The present machinery is the same as Chauntecleer’s: the treachery of murder, the witness of bibliography and dreams. The narrative use of the “God wol mordre out” theme pivots from the ratifi- cation of oracular dreams to the dramatic framing of hunter and prey. “As gladly doon thise homycides alle / That in await liggen to mordre men” (3224–3225). Immediately after it pivots in service to a tragic mise- en-scè ne : “O Chauntecleer, acursed be the morwe / That thou into that yerd flaugh fro the bemes! / Thou were ful wel ywarned by thy dremes” (3230–3232). A curious contradiction takes place: first the smothering of a poetics that operates in the eye of eternity in the dream panel. To that effect, the poem’s collected rhetoric at the level of content endorses Chauntecleer’s flight down from the beam. Once he does, he is a grim lion; his feet do not touch the ground. He is “namoore aferd.” He vaca- tions on the “softe syde” of life. Now Chauntecleer, tragic hero, has been “full ywarned by thy dremes.” Fehrenbacher writes,

This rhetoricization continues for about the following fifty lines, allowing the reality of the fox to recede as the text plunges into the world of literature, alluding to, among others, St. Augustine and Boethius on simple and conditional necessity, the textual tradition of anti-feminism, and the bestiary of Physiologus. At this moment, at the center of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the Canterbury Tales are as far from the historical world as they ever get. 280

It is abstract territory to be sure, though not particularly more seraphic here compared to when a chicken relies on a French apocrypha of Hector’s death to prove one of the finer points of Macrobian philosophy. How the poem arrived here is probably not as important as the fact that the poem keeps arriving here. Various and increasingly creative narrative strategies attempt to control the poem and the poem seems to push back, always by pregnant comedy, in the direction of otherworldliness. The truth is that THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 151 everything that goes into the poem comes out literature. In the words of Socrates, “For now, as I look at the things we have said since daybreak, they seem to me to be very like literature of a sort.”281 This moment is only more abstract as the entire poem is “trewe as Launcelot de Lake.” For next comes a very brief foray into the freewill and determinism debate to reinforce the new mood fatalistic mood. Whatever the narrators intuit, Chauntecleer’s dream in broad strokes, his unwritten third act, the suspended chords of his life story, and his inconclusive literature require a more liberal reading of determinism than the de casibus affords. And if the Monk’s notion of fate is shortsighted it is because he assigns to it more power than it can wield in the epoch of Providence. Boethius writes, “Whereby it is that all things which are under fate are subjected also to providence, on which fate itself is dependent; whereas certain things which are set under providence are above the chain of fate— viz , those things which by their nearness to the primeval Divinity are steadfastly fixed, and lie outside the order of fate’s movements.” 282 Medieval theology problematizes matters of freewill according to the aporia between chronological cognition and omniscience. It does not argue, up and down, human mortification to Fortune’s wheel. Tensions between Bradwardine and Augustine occur on a sliding scale rather than the Monk’s closed-loop. That sliding scale never includes outright determinism, which complicates a lament on tragic inevitability. In Wood’s estimation, “Chaucer had the Nun’s Priest group Bradwardine with St. Augustine and Boethius because of his similarity to them, not because of his differences with them.”283 As Pearsall writes of Boethius, “The concept of God’s ‘foreknowledge’ is a fictitious product of man’s limited understanding, since God’s knowledge of all things is in eternity, uncon- strained by time.” 284 Pelen argues the Roman and the Consolation ’s shared philosophy that celebrates

the insufficiency not only of earthly goods themselves, but even of the rational mental process by which they are evaluated. In the end, Philosophy says, the freedom we have, as humans, cannot be based on nature but is found only in God’s supernatural order of being, which cannot be known, let alone preempted by our “natural” freedom, as La Vielle would wish. 285

Any question of freewill and predestination contributes to the larger and most illustrious family of diversions in the poem that draw the eye toward the Mind of God, wherein is housed the inscrutable truth of the matter. It’s stretching the poem apart. At any rate, it’s slippery ground and the narrator makes quick work of changing topics. “I wol nat han to do of 152 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL swich mateere; / My tale is of a cok, as ye may heere” (3251–3252). Yes, this “tale is of a cok,” plain and simple. Don’t bury the lead.

Causal Misogyny But there must be some way to make this a good tragedy. Fate’s insecurity in the era of Providence will not provide the foundation. Foreknowledge divides the physical world too recognizably from eternity. And Providence, if you remove all the bunting, is essentially a guaranteed happy ending for the universe. Tragedy in the era of Providence has to be local. It needs to work more like a sniper than a general and pick off whom it can, even while the top brass loses the war. And when the going gets tough, a tough man finds a woman to blame. “My tale is of a cok, as ye may here” (3252), and without a skip, “That tok his conseil of his wyf, with sorwe” (3253). Far from returning to the tale from the lawless borders between art and life, here we are, no further then literary misogyny. But going “no further” than literary misogyny means that we are once again on familiar Ovidian bog, which of course means that the poem’s metapoetic energy has yet to wane. We have yet to observe any trace that “repressed historicity will return with a vengeance.” 286 I said earlier that one could not accuse the poem of shadowboxing when it comes to defending its metaphors against history. The poem’s naturalism continues to break up and re-unify. Pertelote and Chauntecleer’s perspectives submit to the power of feathering in a unified Epicurean funeral for dreams and visions. Now, Chauntecleer’s misogyny, situated in Genesis 3, makes another more thoughtful postlapsarian comeback through another voice. “Wommannes conseil broughte us first to wo / And made Adam fro Paradys to go” (3257–3258). It is the same theological misstep as earlier, only this time directed toward some surprising illogic. In this new mood, part of the focus becomes Chauntecleer’s place in the tradition of the medieval de casibus . The poem looks back once again toward the Monk. Jahan Ramanzi writes, “The Pardoner, the Wife’s Jankyn, and Chauntecleer all resemble the Monk in telling de casibus narratives to exploit the power of the tragic, hoping to command through its force greater authority, but their extortionate use of the tragic vitiates its power.” 287 Chauntecleer’s stories continue the literary concern for the fall of great men. However, the men of the Monk’s stories meet their fate according an inevitability that partakes of the larger determinative power of a pagan fate. Chauntecleer’s attempt to depict the reification of death prophecies in a similarly steadfast vocabulary collides with the persistently unkillable Croesus and the bird’s own extension of the king’s luck at the pyre. The THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 153 indeterminacy of Chauntecleer’s dream of the fox that “would han had me deed” renders the most important elements of the de casibus somewhat moot. The lost story of Caesar dreaming that one-day someone “would have had me dead” in a subjunctive possible world and then escaping one random March morning, “quite like any other,” is altogether imprecise in visionary detail to add much to the genre. For guys like Chauntecleer and Croesus, the Ides of March are little more than the best time of year to take a short respite from being the richest, happiest man on the face of the earth. Maybe escape a few executions and ride a first class lightning bolt to the Hyperboreans. First the narrator portrays Chauntecleer as a pawn of tragic oracular forces. Here he is like the charter member of the de casibus whose demise cost the entire universe its constitutional charity. He is in trouble because he listened to his wife’s advice. The only manner in which Pertelote could be held accountable for this particular catastrophe is if the original deduc- tive misogynistic premise holds: that Eve is utterly, and not symmetrically, responsible for the loss of Innocence. But what sort of Golden Age was lost? “There as he was ful myrie and at ese” (3259). Again, according to precedents in the Roman and elsewhere, the poem offers two contending prelapsarian visions: the traditional literary defect of a bodily Golden Age propped up against the Golden Age itself. And one can hardly claim that Chauntecleer is anything but “ful myrie and at ese” when he allows himself to shut the books and enjoy Pertelote’s company. The contradiction compounds. First by virtue of the un-deconstructed misogyny, the fact that the narrator’s rhetoric places philosophical good faith in it rather than its victims—the caged “fatal sustren” of the Amores (I:XIII). Second, it bemoans the loss of the physical experience of innocence, apparently the halcyon days when chickens had sex without feeling bad about it as opposed to the Ovidian age when “valleys unplowed gave many fruits” 288 and “spring was everlasting, and gentle zephyrs with warm breath played the flowers that sprang unplanted.” 289 To that effect Payne offers the pithy, “The Fall of Man is the descent from the hen house.” 290 All the same, the narrator takes us back, yet again, to the place that both form and content in the poem tend in antiphrasis: the persistent astrological, chronological, predestined and freewilled, misogynistic hellscape of Epicurean ease and mirth, which only Jean de Meun’s Nature would be happy to call Paradise. Like the narrator, “She [Nature] is bound to the discussion of a lesser world,” instead of “the better time of the Incarnation and Redemption . . . which she cannot pursue. In all, she too seems bound to the contrary of what she claims to seek.” 291 “Bound to the contrary.” True enough, for the poem’s narrators, the group effort to imagine Elysium under nuclear winter does more to draw attention 154 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL to its opposite. Ovid, joking on the level, writes in the Ars : “Now is the true Golden Age: gold is all men value, gold is what buys you love.” 292 The narrator compares Chauntecleer to Adam according to philosophical premiums on misogyny in order to represent him as a victim of the primordial Wily Woman. That is to say, in order to rhetorically establish the imperial see of The Good and Perfect Man, he blames women for the spiritual death of the world and then makes them predators of the defenseless Good and Perfect Man. How a dream about a hungry fox became the seed for the loss of the Golden Age at the hands of women is a question for a subtle mind. If there is a common denominator in all this, it is that the narrative persona in the Tale are desperate to see this chicken experience the Fall, rather than continue to bathe in the “yonge sonne.” And ill will cannot entirely explain it. Instead, it is probably due to the fact that the only chance of reversing the Fall according to this comic vision of literary Pelagianism is if Chauntecleer actually falls. How else to reenter Paradise simply by hiding in its trees? Put simply, even if the answer to a literal Fall is a literal return to Paradise, it will not obtain in the unfallen world of art. It is in this sense that the greatest joke the Golden Age ever played was convincing the Nun’s Priest that it didn’t exist. Chesterton puts it this way:

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachts- man who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. 293

The best and broadest irony of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is that it treats the Golden Age as something whose existence depends upon the poem’s arguments rather than something upon which the entire poem depends for existence. Thus by whatever means possible, the poem’s various narratological perspectives will have Chauntecleer fall despite the scant evidence of definite demise in his dream. First according to the death warrant of dreams, then Fortune’s wheel, divine foreknowledge, and THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 155 now the “conseil of women”—corrupt no sooner than it is spoken by these original practitioners of human cupidity. But the philosophy behind this new Fall may speak to more definite concerns. Because if Chauntecleer really does fall, expatriates from art to history, brings the whole Golden Age down with him, the verbal icon disperses into verbs. Art becomes incapable of symbolically regenerating itself independent of human history. If Chauntecleer reenters art from the history of the chase when he flies into the tree, reestablishes paradise by walking back through the front door, the point is the same: poems are toll roads between history and art—enter from either side. So there is much to be gained as an interlocutor from the rhetorical and typographical representation of Chauntecleer as Adam, even if it that representation is not entirely stable. And when I say, “not entirely stable” I mean that in the narrative portrait of this new(ish) Adam, the first thing we learn about him is that he’s a mermaid.

The Mermaid Tavern “Souls of poets dead and gone, / What Elysium have ye known- / Happy field or mossy cavern / Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?” 294 Either Keats loves pubs or Keats loves poetry. At any rate, never to be upstaged by the “tale of a cok” the narrator takes a final maritime detour before the plot resumes.

Faire in the soond, to bathe hire myrily, Lith Pertelote, and alle sustres by, Agayn the sonne, and Chauntecleer so free Soong murier than the mermayde in the see (For Phisiologus seith sikerly How that they syngen wel and myrily).

(3267–3272)

Depicted in subtle sexual tones as Les Baigneuses , 295 the set-up for the sirens’ song seems obvious—except that Chauntecleer sings it. Peter Meredith comments, “Elsewhere he crows and clucks. Between lines 3270 and 3320, however, the word synge or its derivatives appear eight times; four times in relation to Chauntecleer, three in relation to his father, and once to the mermaids.” 296 The nature of Chauntecleer’s song comes into sharp focus in the final act, culminating in the mythology of Boethius’s De Musica. Yes, Chauntecleer’s remake of “My lief is faren in londe” comes earlier (2879), but the discussion of the poetic identity of music begins in earnest with the mermaid’s song. This is when the Art 156 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL of Poetry starts to unify. Put another way, the moment Chauntecleer becomes a mermaid the poem gets deadly serious. In the Manciple’s Tale , we only learn through circumstantial evidence that the crow was once a singer instead of a journalist. “What, bryd?” quod Phebus. “What song syngestow? / Ne were thow wont so myrily to synge / That to myn herte it was a rejoysynge” (Manciple’s Tale , 244–246). And in the tradition of medieval dream gardens, birds otherwise musi- cally bankrupt sing more beautifully than nightingales. “Therwith in al this world no nyghtyngale / Ne koude, by an hondred thousand deel, / Syngen so wonder myrily and weel” (Manciple’s Tale , 136–138). The same is true in the Roman , except that “These birds [among them both nightingale and the improbably gifted parrot] . . . sang as though they were heavenly angels . . . So sweet and lovely was that song that it seemed not to be birdsong, but rather comparable with the song of the sea-sirens, who are called sirens because of their pure, sweet voices.” 297 As for the narrator’s comparatio in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , we already know that Chauntecleer sings “murier than the murie orgon” (2851). Now he sings “murier than the mermayde in the see” (3270). The movement from a heavenly song to a siren’s song is instructive. The narrators in both poems seem to imagine angelic song / “murrie orgon” as equivalent praise to the mermaid’s song. At some level they may be, and perhaps in the same manner by which Strohm equates the historicity of Jack Straw’s with the song of the mermaid, “Introduced in a decidedly minor key, as a comparatio designed to convey the racket in the widow’s farmyard upon the abduction of Chauntecleer, the reference to Jack Straw’s incitement to kill Flemings is placed on the same plane of reference as the songs of the mermaids in the sea.”298 To a great extent this is true: they function co-epistemologically in the poem, representing equal historical referentiality in a poem of such “literary supersaturation.” 299 But if we want to draw any real power from the mermaid’s song it will come from a literary tradition rather than sheer literariness. And as literary traditions go the song of the mermaids is a sinister one. It encodes three paths: dramatic, ontological, and epistemological. In the dramatic, “There’s always a siren singing you to shipwreck.” 300 Geoffrey of Vinsauf warns, “Take the example of the Sirens; be taught by them always to fear that the good conceals the worse. Trust not in things; after the honey comes the poison.” 301 Sirens flatter: “Hither, come hither, renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Acheans.” 302 Of course, foxes are flatterers too. “Þ e fif þ e synne is whan flaterers defedeþ and excuseþ and hele þ þ e vices and synnes of hem þ at þ ei wole flatere . . . þer - fore þ er beþ wel likened to foxes tailes for here hauylones and sley ʒ tes and wrechednesses.”303 THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 157

But if Chauntecleer sings the mermaid’s song, it seems that flattery becomes a solipsistic matter. It is also appropriate to the poem that Sirens know the future. “For lo, we know all things, all the travail that in wide Troy-land the Argives and Trojans bare by the gods’ designs, yea, and we know all that shall hereafter be upon the fruitful earth.” 304 Like Chauntecleer, their foreknowledge culminates in the events of the “lif present.” And there is an expiration date to “all that shall hereafter be upon the fruitful earth.” In the end, it’s all “tempest and rayn” ( Manciple’s Tale , 301), a tempting but dislocated description of human destiny in the artistic vision. When one stops to listen to their song or their wisdom, it is as Meredith describes: “The mermaids sang their victims to sleep so they could seize and devour them; Chauntecleer is induced to sing himself and ‘sleep’ so that he can be seized and devoured. He almost, in fact, becomes his own mermaid.” 305 To that effect, argues Meredith, “The simile of the mermaid, then, is not only a joke but a tragic-comic anticipation of Chauntecleer’s fate.” 306 Carried over from classical literature, medieval depictions of sirens and mermaids (the two were often confused, or considered equivalent) 307 emphasize the calamitous fate awaiting the unlucky sailor. Donaldson writes, “When the rooster’s singing is compared with the singing of mermaids, the expert on mermaids’ singing is named—Physiologus, whose authority presumably makes the simile respectable.” 308 And as Physiologus “seith sikerly”: “Sirens are born of the sea, and the strains of their marvelous voices / Oft come to listening ears in many melodious measures, / . . . Thus by them not only ships, but also men’s lives are imperiled.” 309 The Book of Vices and Virtues describes the grislier finale.

Þ er is a þ ing þat scheweþ out of þ e see or of o þ ere waters þat men clepen mermaydens, þat hauen body of womman and tail as a fesch, and þ ei synge þ so likyngly þat þ ei haueþ power to brynge men o-slepe þat here þ hem, as schipmen and o þ ere þ et vsen þ e water; and whan þ ei haue brou ʒ t a man aslepe, þ ei slen hym and deuouren hym.”310

The implications for Chauntecleer are clear enough, when the final note of the mermaid’s song sounds, prepare to be eaten. Likewise the ontological element is clear. Many of literature’s pilgrims have diverted their soul’s course from the mandates of Fate and Providence to pursue the possibility that human desire can be satisfied in the bodily world sponsored by the sirens. But any Maritime Sensualist meets another ignominious end: condemnation to a philosophy without ends. Ailene S. Goodman writes, “The concept of a mermaid or merman whose 158 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL body was human above the waist with a fish’s tail below suggests sexual deprivation . . . and the unfulfilled dream.” 311 If the mermaid/siren is a representative of the philosophy of experience, than we appreciate that experience is incapable of generating its own solution to human desire. It raises up a contingency as an infinity. It then takes this new “infinite” sexual desire and directs it toward sexual impossibility. Walter Copland Perry writes, “Their song, though irresistibly sweet, was no less sad than sweet, and lapped both body and soul in a fatal lethargy, the forerunner of death and corruption.”312 The siren’s song is high praise in the Garden of Idleness. Nonetheless, it is a special twist that Chauntecleer sings it himself. A resolution to the paradox presents itself in the Consolation by resusci- tating the experimental epistemological discord of Plato’s Republic .

And when she saw the Muses of Poesie standing by my bedside, dictating the words of my lamentations she was moved awhile to wrath, and her eyes flashed sternly. “Who,” said she, “has allowed yon play-acting wan- tons to approach this sick man—these who, so far from giving medicine to heal his malady, even feed it with sweet poison? These it is who kill the rich crop of reason with barren thorns of passion, who accustom men’s minds to disease, instead of man whom your allurement were seducing, as is usually your way, I should be less indignant. On such a one I should not have spent my pains for naught. But this is one nurtured in the Eleatic and Academic philosophies. Nay, get ye gone, ye sirens, whose sweetness lasteth not; leave him for my muses to tend and heal!” 313

Here the Consolation equates poetry with the “barren thorns of passion,” a “sweet poison” that is of a particular stench to Philosophy by virtue of the fact that the present prey is “nurtured in the Eleatic and Academic philosophies.” “Poesie” is the fleeting siren’s song, sensual impermanence awaiting the balm of Philosophy’s muses. Chaucer one-ups Boethius in Boece when he calls the Muses “comune strompettis” ( Boece , Prosa 1, 49). 314 Nevertheless, as Alfred David remarks, Philosophy does not “reject poetry altogether, affirming divine Providence in some of the most beautiful Latin meters of the Middle Ages.” 315 The Consolation is a piece of poetry, an imaginary walk through forever with a lady named “Philosophy.” Given the poetic setting of the Consolation and Platonic aesthetics upon which it depends, we understand the inevitable appointment of all human arts with the Muses. The Muses are the aetiology of the human arts. This strengthens the literary double-dealing of the passage, especially as it concerns sirens antagonizing Eleatic Idealism, something that defined itself against Pre-Socratic physicalism. Put another way, the Muses of poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy are modes of eternity, THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 159 part of the family of Ideas. It is unlikely that they would compromise the Eleatic philosopher’s push against the physicalist. Some other solution is at work. Chauntecleer as “rhethor” sings the mermaid’s song, a song so dangerously seductive that Odysseus, pilgrim by sea, plugs his companions’ ears with wax and ties himself to the mast so they might safely pass (while he listens. It’s good to be captain.) 316 The mermaid’s song has victims, should the entire poem plug its ears with wax and save itself from the rooster? David S. Chamberlain writes, “His singing ‘murier than the mermayde in the see’ is pointed and amusing, since these creatures, or Sirens, were almost universally considered irrational and destructive.” 317 However, any failure on the part of Chauntecleer’s rhetoric is a blessing to be shared amongst the other naturalistic voices in the poem. If rhetoric toward an earth-bound poetics is the problem, then the poem is full of sirens. This brings us to a second and more probable thought. As Meredith argues, Chauntecleer essentially sings himself to sleep; he is the victim of his own song. Meanwhile, according to Travis, at a level of abstraction independent to his rhetoric, Chauntecleer remains the poem’s “heliotrope” with an “uncanny affinity with the sun,” 318 and a “narcissistic self-assurance [that] is preeminently a celebration of poetry’s luminescent and self-generating beauty.” 319 In the Consolation the sirens whose “sweetness lasteth not” are the Muses of poetry. If I have been too hard on Chauntecleer up to this point, then perhaps it is boon to admit that the rooster-mermaid, by way of Boethian/Platonic irony, is Art itself. And antiphrastically art has only sweetness and infinity according to a passage that says, “Nay, get ye gone, ye sirens, whose sweetness lasteth not.”320 The conflict is this: Chauntecleer may be a poor poet but he is poetry proper. He may sing the mermaid’s song according to his naturalistic ships-run-aground rhetorical perspective but he sings the mermaid’s song in his very being by way of Boethian reversal. Chauntecleer’s coop is at least as good a house of fame as the House of Fame. Fehrenbacher argues, “The crisis of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale begins after the fox, singu- larly unimpressed by attempts to refigure him rhetorically, steals off with Chauntecleer.” 321 It is persuasive because his attempt to reassert himself historically by demetaphorizing the rooster calls upon the entire widow’s world as back up. Attacking Chauntecleer may be a rather human or foxy response to the tedious bird. It may be an appropriate logical counter to the bird’s incongruous hyper-literariness and rhetorical sensuality. But it remains an attempt to steal art from art, to kidnap poetry and eat it. Chauntecleer does not simply stand-in for art; the idea runs deeper. Expressing it as responsible criticism is difficult, but the idea of Chauntecleer as lunch is going to be as tall an order as interrupting the eternal chase by pulling down Sirius in order to light a smoke. Sirius 160 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL is appropriate too, because Zeus had to bring about a hound whose prey could never elude it in order to chase an uncatchable Fox out of musical Thebes. 322 “Zeus, pondering the dilemma of the uncatchable fox being chased by an inescapable hound, turned the pair to stone, and placed them in the heavens as the Constellations Canis Major and Minor. In so doing he froze their contest or set it to play out for eternity in the heavens.” 323 Lealaps and the Fox simply chase each other forever. The fox and Chauntecleer might sit and talk with each other in the shade of that tree forever. They might repeat the same chase every Friday. But they remain distinct. The constellation has yet to collide. Boethius is right that the “barren thorns of passion” must be done away with so the Eleatic man can heal. What the Consolation and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale do is counter-define the barren thorn as that which belongs to the rose of the present world rather than that of the siren Muses of poetry. The following can be said for the idea of Chauntecleer-as-mermaid. Chauntecleer’s siren song begins as the grounded rhetoric that would devour his own infinity but it becomes the Boethian art that would consume history. The fox revolts against metaphor for his daily bread in order to reassert his historical being. He does this because Chauntecleer sings as merry as the mermaids in the sea in a self-reflexive act of artistic being. Chauntecleer is becoming inedible. So Like Canus Major and Minor, they will hunt each other forever inside this poem without understanding that they have been fated to private lives. The only unevenness in the equation is that one is Major and the other Minor. As the story goes, Zeus preserves the chase in celestial syrup just as Lealaps, somehow, overtakes an uncatchable fox. 324 The fact that it is not the other way around helps to illustrate a Platonic perspective, with the Apollonian brightest star in the night sky325 hunting the Dionysian. The fox may be the pursuer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale but the tale reads nearly everything backward. And in a thoroughgoing Platonic framework, Art does not antagonize history; it annihilates it. History is pastiche. Medieval Christian Neoplatonism would finish off Zeus’s work with an apocalypse. Eventually the constellations collide. “And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll.” 326 The only thing missing after the universe is rolled up like a scroll is the universe, leaving Dante’s “Love that moves the sun and the other stars” rather than the sun and stars themselves. Scipio’s original night sky comes back into being as the final one. Chaucer participated in a tradition that was pervasive enough to leave fossils. On the Portail Royal of Chartres, John writes the apocalypse using a feathered siren for a stool. Sirens appear carved in stone throughout THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 161 the cathedrals of France – as birds: “ Des sirè nes-oiseaux .” According to Édouard Jeauneau, pervasively “‘ en couple’ : homme-oiseau barbu et femme- oiseau. ” 327 In that sense, Pertelote is a real iconoclast when she says things, “have you no beard?” She’s trapped in stone for the rest of time next to the burly mermaid who’s loved her since she was seven nights old. For Boethius in the Consolation , the sirens, “comune strompettis” they may be, are the only thing standing between the primordial harmony of prehistory and what replaced it. “Indeed, Plato himself says that each of the moveable spheres has a siren to sound its note.” 328 According to Macrobius, The “nine muses are the melodious songs produced by the eight spheres.” Strictly speaking, either the sirens guard the Muses or they “are the nine muses, their chief Apollon le Musag ète ,” 329 “Apollo, conduc- tor of the Muses.” The illogical progression is this: all mermaids are sirens are birds are Muses. What sort of garden are the siren-birds guarding? What “note” are they protecting? In the supernature of the Parliament , the poem pays France the highest compliment: “The note, I trowe, maked was in Fraunce; / The wordes wer swich as ye may heer finde.” One, “That cometh of thilke speres thryes thre, / That welle is of musyk and melodye / In this world heer, and cause of armonye” ( Parliament of Fowls , 57–63). All considered, Boethius inverts the most aggressive literary threat of the mermaid/siren/ oiseau barbu —those “comune strompettis” who would poison our philosophy. Now the poem’s siren, Chauntecleer, is on his way to singing the universe to sleep so that he might devour it. And when history in the poem is rolled up like a scroll, we might imagine that the Nun’s Priest’s Tale will stand there in naked Golden-Spangled Hamburg glory clucking over a corn the size of the brief epoch of the fallen world.

Le Papillon est une Fleur qui vol, la Fleur un Papillon fixé 330 Sex is a philosophical Rubicon in Chaucer’s poems and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is no exception. It is the quixotic culmination of narrative theses conducted at the summit of historical agency. Next comes the habitual quickening and narrative frenzy toward a rhetorical free-for-all. As the drama of the poem transforms, we look briefly to the Miller’s Tale whose philosophy crests when Nicholas and Alisoun bed each other while John sleeps in a skiff.

Ther was the revel and the melodye; And thus lith Alison and Nicholas, In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas, 162 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge, And freres in the chauncel gonne synge.

(3652–3656)

It is the surest footing of the poem’s atheistic poetic cosmos—a Flood sublimated to the language of appetite, signifying nothing, except as it provides room and board for the “bisynesse of myrthe and solas,” within clear earshot of one of God’s new tombs. 331 But even the more aggressive antipoetry of the Miller’s rhetoricians leaves a little room for some “myrth and . . . solas.” Likewise the abstract territory of Pertelote and Chauntecleer’s dream debate collapses when materialist rhetoric and an aborted Academic perspective call it a “ny day” and feather each other twenty times. There, too, lovers in art breathe the free air of “myrthe” and “solas” after an anxious contact with infinity. Both poems, after rather luxurious seductions, become hyperactive, impatient with their own material. In the Miller the energy finds darker expressions. The same can be said for the other poems we have discussed. When the curtain falls on the Pardoner’s Tale three rioters are left dead at the hands of one of the walking dead. The Manciple’s Tale ends in murder and mutilation. But Chauntecleer’s poem is a merry one. Even its typically Chaucerian disaster of a third act is merry. Thanks to divertimenti the story goes missing in between the feathering and now. When it returns it continues to “pley” where the Monk’s does not. It is a piece of Horatian talk that as we discovered could quiet Harry Bailey and be “worthe a boterflye.” “Sire Monk, namoore of this, so God yow blesse! / Youre tale anoyeth al this compaignye. / Swich talkyng is nat worth a boterflye / For therinne is ther no desport ne game” (2788–2291). And that is right where Chauntecleer finds the fox, when he casts his eye on a butterfly. “And so bifel that, as he caste his ye / Among the wortes on a boterflye / He was war of this fox, that lay full lowe” (3273–3275). This is still a poem about a butterfly, even after a long experiment in natural modes. Enter the fox to disrupt the meditative balance of eternity and reanimate the psychomachic scream of art. For a moment, Chauntecleer was happy. It was the corporeal bliss of “foul prisoun.” Then his very own winged soul lands an inch away from the animal about to eat it. This is the natural chicken, thrust back into the poetry from Epicurean retirement. “The day I lost my butterfly net; I remember the silence.” 332 Rough and uneven worlds await beyond that butterfly, worlds condemned by the excitable Saint Prosper of Aquitania: “Thence our inherited mortality, thence the manifold corruptions of body and mind, thence ignorance, distress, useless cares, illicit lusts, sacrilegious errors, empty fear, harmful THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 163 love, unwarranted joys, punishable counsels, and a number of miseries no smaller that that of our crimes.” 333 More sensibly, Conrad writes,

“We want in so many ways to be,” he began again. “This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on this heap of mud keep still. He want to be so, and again he want to be so . . . ” He moved his hand up, then down . . . “He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil—and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow—so fine as he can never be . . . In a dream.” 334

It is metaphor-in-pantomime: men cannot see the psyches for the butterflies. As always Chaucer’s style contorts elegant questions of philosophy and spirit to fit behind the shape of narrative farce. All ill-fitting costumes are good for a laugh. Chaplin knew this. One way to look at it is that Chauntecleer acts like a man because it is funny. The deadly serious and sacramental fact about Chauntecleer is that he’s a butterfly. After the four trails in the Golden Ass , Psyche—literature’s immortal butterfly—gains access to eternity by special dispensation from Venus. Chauntecleer’s comedic single trial restores him to an eternity that has yet to lapse by the sheer force of his ‘wit’, a vaudevillian wit about as experimental as asking someone, ‘What’s that on your shirt?’ and flicking their nose when they look down. “Sire, if that I were as ye, / Yet sholde I seyn, as wys God helpe me / ‘Turneth again, ye proude cherles alle!’” (3408–3410). When Chauntecleer sees the fox, the supernatural crooner and Boethian traitor to the mermaid race is at rare loss for Middle English. “He was war of this fox, that lay ful lowe. / Nothyng ne liste hym thanne for to crowe, / But cride anon, “Cok! cok!” and up he sterte / As man that was affrayed in his herte” (3275–3278). The problem is of similar nature to the Manciple’s Tale . When presented with the ‘facts of life’—in Chauntecleer’s case, the cognitive possibility of death—the language in the poem scrambles into sound. We’ve heard this sound before. “Allas, what song is this?” (Manciple’s Tale , 247). The narration applies the broad strokes of this idea and represents the sonic irregularity according to the conflict of beast and prey in nature rather than according to earlier and more literary strategies. “For natureely a beest desireth flee / Fro his contrarie, if he may it see” (3279–3280). Stewart Justman writes, “It is with sounds that symbolize nothing, mere onomatopoeia, that we come closest in this tale to the reality under the overlay of words: At these “moments of truth” language is not symbolic.” 335 Justman takes this as another proof for the fact that “the Nun’s Priest’s Tale really concerns the authenticity of the commonplace, the chaff, and of the literalist perception. It shows that high 164 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Latin culture has no place in the barnyard.” 336 And while the poem’s onomatopoeic experiments seem to problematize in a definite manner the delicate problem of the representation of the historical in art, of depicting reality in the language of Realism , the finality of Stewart’s judgment of Chauntecleer’s very chicken moment—itself compliment to his earlier clucking—is complicated by what follows. “Though he never erst hadde seyn it with his ye” (3281). The shift from natural to preternatural is immediate. Chauntecleer is back to his initial employ as an oracle. The poetics of animal noise comes into sharper focus in the chase, but this small eruption foreshadows the poem’s climax and begins the whiplash cycle of noise-conversation-noise-conversation. For now, we see the first sign of the clash between two languages, like the first static that comes over the radio prior to a storm outage. The art of the “yeerd” resumes though with reference to the bolts of an earlier discussion—the prediction of the fox, and his urbane overture to the chicken. “Gentil sire, allas” (3284). Chauntecleer fails to recognize the fox despite having dreamt up something very like Russel just that morning. The reason for this belongs to the impasse between the manner in which the Macrobian vision of somnium coeleste manifests in life as opposed to art—the dimensional difference between a “lif present” and a “‘lyf so short’ but a ‘craft so long to lerne.’” It is one thing to predict a future event in the setting of historical agency and another to do so in the setting of art. The first, says Cicero, is “a splendid and helpful thing,”337 and a verifiable miracle. In art the prediction of a future event does not provoke the same sense of wonder because wonders in art come cheap. Prophecy in literature only discloses a deeper set of symbols. For example, in Macbeth the ripest element of metaphorical surprise does not seem to be the premonitory power of witches. Nor is this the case in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. I have yet to come across a critical reading whose singular interest is to celebrate Chauntecleer’s mystical purchase on the future. Usually, critics dispute the accuracy of the prediction, or convict Chauntecleer for disregarding the import of his dream, or deconstruct the perplexing fact that his dream comes true and that he does not recognize it when it happens. All of these approaches, any such approach that considers Chauntecleer’s dream en route to other more pressing matters of interpretation ratifies a simple idea: that we expect different things of oracles in art than we do in life. We expect meaning rather than event. This unfolds a simpler idea: that we expect art to mean more than life, or to mean differently than life. If the palm reader at Coney Island told me that one day I would fall in love with the girl under the apple tree and it happened, I would be content to praise the mystery and raw talent of the Coney Island palm reader. If I THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 165 read that story in a book I would want to know what it means to fall in love with a girl under an apple tree. One particular difficulty has to do with the irony of context, for instance, if one praises the power of prose in verse. Chauntecleer, a talking chicken in a poem, argues that dreams predict the future in life. His dream comes true. He fails to recognize it when it does. What has happened is that Chauntecleer proves a point about reality that does not obtain in Reality. The fact that he cannot recognize the reification of his dream is because it is not really the reification of his dream. The reification of his dream is the Nun’s Priest’s Tale that he does not know he’s in. “One of the major dramatic ironies of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ,” Travis argues, “is that Chauntecleer, who reads his own dream as if it were a typical dream of literature, the somnium coeleste , isn’t himself aware that he is actually living inside a piece of literature.”338 What Chauntecleer has done is “wel founden by experience / That dremes been significaciouns / As wel of joye as of tribulaciouns / That folk enduren in this lif present” (2978–2981). But when the time comes to witness his dream come true in the “lif present” it does not happen. It happens in a magical barnyard and was brought forth by a history of literature that withdraws the reification of dreams from the “lif present” to Croesus’s plot of land in the Hyperboreans. Chauntecleer’s noise is philosophically consistent with the aporia that runs through the entire poem. “Metaphors speak of what remains absent.”339 “Cok! cok!” is the sound of a dream coming true in the wrong world.

The Dialogue It is because this world is an argument. Because of this it is a trick. The question is not whether dreams come true; the question is whether dreams are true. In the former, what happens is true. In the latter, what’s true is true. We might not know what is true in a poem like the Nun’s Priest’s Tale save for the fact that all of it is true, or, as Charles S. Singleton says of Dante, “the fiction of the Comedy is that it is not a fiction.” 340 Chauntecleer’s reading of his own dream was no help to him. He does not understand what he sees. This is not because of an ethical violation. It’s not pride. It does not owe to stupidity. He remains one of the smartest chickens in the universe. It is because he was waiting for Godot, waiting for history to happen to his poem, like a ghost at a diner who doesn’t know he’s dead and wonders why the waiter never takes his order. Thus, the fox comes but Chauntecleer’s philosophy cannot tell him what it means. He simply emits a sound that reverberates off the fox’s two selves—animal and anima . So he will hear this nice chap out, his new “freend.” 166 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

According to Boethius, that which is true is “released from its earthly prison, and seeks heaven in free flight.” 341 The push and pull of the dialogue between the fox and Chauntecleer has to do with prison and free flight, referent and symbol, “Cok! cok!” and “synge.” Chauntecleer, once “namoore aferd,” returns for one sonic moment to the bald terror of “kepe my body out of foule prisoun!” Just as quickly, the poem tells us that “He wolde han fled, but that the fox anon” (3283) greets him in good Middle English. “Be ye affrayd of me that am youre freend?” (3286). The speed and ease with which the chicken resumes laconic debate vacillates between the literal and antiphrastic meanings of his Platonic request. As though echoes from history were audible, he cries “Cok! cok!” for fear of the destruction of body. As though he intuits the nugatory status of body in this epistemology, he sticks around after the “Cok! cok!” to give a command performance. Both seem to take place at once. The fox tells Chauntecleer, “I am nat come youre conseil for t’espye, / But trewely, the cause of my comynge / Was oonly for to herkne how that ye synge” (3288–3290). Once again we observe the Canterbury con- tinuation of Latin and French themes of things “secree.” The Ovidian birds transgress the secrets of Minerva and Apollo. Phoebus’s crow does the same. In Amores (I:XIII), the lover wants to delay the sunrise to practice his prose in the dark. In the Roman Nature instructs Mars and Venus in the science of optics so they might hide from Vulcan. Nicholas sets up “deerne love” as heir to the vacant throne of “Goddes pryvetee.” In the Pardoner ’s Tale , Death is a “privee theef” (675) and the executioner of the young men who consume a cynical Eucharist of “breed and wyn, ful prively” (797). Pertelote wants a husband who is “secree.” Chauntecleer experiments repetitively with Nicholas’s “deerne love” to tremendous effect. Now the fox arrives “not” wanting to spy on Chauntecleer’s secrets, which have, at this point, become metonymous for a poetics of both experience and form. In either case, the chicken’s secrets are so secret and so split between his language and his being that he does not know them himself. Chauntecleer’s most important secret is his artistic identity. That is why the fox’s mode of language would guarantee that Chauntecleer’s rhetoric is identical to Chauntecleer’s being—that naturalism causes a thing to be natural, that idea (or more precisely, ideology) entails existence, or, in simpler terms, that we are what we say. Illogically, he has the rooster “syng” better than the angels in order to facilitate the inevitable destiny of natural things: death, either by nature or by accident, and the fox is happy to be the accident. From what the fox hears and sees he makes an intellectual judgment about Chauntecleer: ‘natural(ist) rooster’; not “candle of the sun [that] banished winter’s shade, forcing all cold to THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 167 suffer exile.” 342 Conclusion: ‘good for eating’. Such a rhetorical perspective, like any idea of a fox taking a rhetorical perspective, is thanks to the fact that this happens to be “thilke tyme.” The farce is as follows: In order for a talking fox to prove that a talking chicken is only as good as his word and fit to be treated as a natural chicken – due to the fact that his rhetoric and action are “secree” rather than part of the Macrobian Universal – that fox should have the chicken sing like the spheres for him “For trewely, ye have as myrie a stevene / As any aungel hat that is in hevene” (3291–3292). It’s the original confusion of the poem. Somehow, this natural chicken’s crowing is merrier than the organ, more accurate than the church bell, like the mermaid’s song, and now, it’s better than the angels. It even has “moore feelynge / Than hadde Boece, or any that kan synge” (3293–3294).

Music as Myth Boethius’s De Musica receives less attention than it deserves as a Platonic myth. The philosophy of the myth has to do with the relationship of music to human ontology and, of course, to Form. Boethius’s aetiological focus is the discovery of music by the “night owl” (nocturnus ) and stargazer Pythagoras. In De Musica , the myth unifies the math, so to speak, and not the other way around. The ascensus begins according to the Platonic tension between epist êm ê and techn ê , in this case musical theory and musical performance. Musical theory belongs to the speculative and performance to the sensible. Boethius sides with the higher end of larger the paradox rather than the lower. Boethius’s supercilious tone is similar to Philosophy’s toward the poetic Muses in the Consolation —“comune strompettis” they may be—which is itself borrowed from Plato’s narrative method in the Republic when the poets are banished from the Ideal State. Boethius writes,

He indeed is a musician who wins the science of singing through intellectual meditation, not in the servitude of performing but in the sover- eignty of speculation . . . Those whose sole task is performance, such as singing lute-players (citharoedi), are far from the scientific understanding of music, for they are servants . . . as has been said: they bring nothing intellectual to it, they are quite unspeculative . . . There are the experts at judging, who can scrutinize rhythms and songs and entire poems. As this is wholly based on reason and speculation, theirs can truly be called the province of music. 343

Peter Dronke comments, “This was all very well for Boethius the critic. Chaucer the poet could not take it solemnly. With a single deft touch he 168 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL intimates that on this point he found Boethius as insensitive, as quaintly wrongheaded, as most of us would today.” 344 Such is the irony of the fox’s compliment to Chauntecleer’s father—“Certes, it was of herte, al that he song,” (3303), an irony that Dronke identifies with Chaucer’s push against Boethian austerity. Dronke reads a premium on theory rather than practice in the De Musica and the opposite in Chaucer’s poem due to fact that the poet is a performer. One cannot deny that Boethius, along with Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and Macrobius would consider “the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive.” 345 Augustine’s own De Musica , an imaginary Platonic dialogue between magister and discipulus and another stroll under a sun that never sets, “deals not with practical music making but with music as a speculative science . . . the work betrays the influence of both the Neo-Platonic and Neo-Pythagoreans traditions.”346 The same “rational art of music,” of Cicero and Macrobius is an “organizing principle in the Parliament of Foules .” 347 The idea resurfaces frequently in Chaucer, Jean de Meun, and Dante. 348 This traditional perspective is part of the larger history of philosophical Platonism that locates knowledge outside the deciduous phenomenology of experience. However, Dronke’s antinomy of “performance and theory” does not conclude the matter of the musical representation of the philosophical. In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale opposition takes the form of “herte” and “wisedom.” But like its poet-banning predecessors it is the beginning rather than the end of philosophy. Because just as one must accept the irony whereby the poet of the Timaeus elsewhere is the philosopher who banishes the poets, so too must we understand the Boethian condemnation of singers who are “quite unspeculative” according to the fact that Boethius “quite literally . . . did compose and sing music in the poems of the Consolation .”349 In the Consolation , “‘Music’ is a ‘little servant’ of Philosophy,’ that is, of reason, but actually it is Philosophy herself who composes, sings, and accompanies on strings the poems of the work, so music is really an aspect of her own powers just as ‘Rhetoric’ is.” 350 This is the same maneuver we observed in the Phaedrus : Rhetoric, elsewhere discredited as she serves sophism, travels to the Muse of Poetry, elsewhere discredited as she serves sensibility, in order to join Philosophy at the world’s end, free of the noetic defects of time and extension. In this sense, the fox’s comparison of Chauntecleer’s song to the angelic song represents an unconscious mistake, a crack in his rhetorical perspective. Chamberlain argues, “The singing of the angels to which the Fox alludes was traditionally a rational music that imitated both the melody of the spheres and the exemplars of all music in the mind of God.” 351 If he sings like the angels according to the medieval tradition, then he sings like “Ye, where the day eternal hath THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 169 its source / keep watch, so that from you nor sleep nor night/ can steal one step of the ages in their course.” 352 In Dronke’s reading, Chaucer’s irony convicts Boethius’s overly rational vision of music. Chamberlain corrects this by identifying the medieval Platonic elision of “rational music” as that which praises the soul at the expense of the body. Boethius is a singer of the soul because music, understood by number, “is perfect and has its origin in the One.” 353 This is why Chamberlain concludes that Chauntecleer, singing from the “herte, al that he song,” steady servant of Venus, sings the song of prurience. 354 But the reference to Boethius travels further yet. The object is not simply to further ironize Chauntecleer’s well-documented attachment to mind and body, though that does seem to come as collateral. Boethius’s De Musica sets its sight on the origin of music as it is understood epistemologically, as it is understood as Form. And any good Platonic epistemology is a mythology. Platonic “myth serves as the medium through which is made possible any discussion of the ‘first principles’ of philosophy.” 355 This is because Form exists prelinguistically. It is mediated to language symbolically and not literally. Calvin M. Bower writes, “Boethius intended to treat only peripherally the actual theory and practice of music; his focus was knowing.”356 He continues, “Even musical details essentially independent of mythic and mathematical elements are made to blend in with the Pythagorean background.” 357 Boethius’s Platonic starting point is that “there happen to be four mathematical disciplines, the other three share with music the task of searching for truth.” 358 The reason this is so, according to Boethius is that “What Plato rightfully said can likewise be understood: the soul of the universe was joined together according to musical concord.”359 But music fell along with the Golden Age. “It (music) has been squandered in various promiscuous ways, it has lost its measure of dignity and virtue; and having almost fallen onto a state of disgrace, it preserves nothing of its ancient splendor.” 360 Once again, human will-as-technology rather than will directed toward Form or the Mind of God is to fault. “Thus, when Timothy of Miletus added one string to those that were already established, thereby making the music more capricious, a decree was drafted to expel him from Laconica.” 361 Adding a string in this instance shares in the same epistemic mythology as Eden’s forbidden fruit, the departure of caritas and the arrival of Justice, and the mining of the earth for the metals 362 of war that brings down Elysium. Palisca argues,

Music began in a state of grace, as it were, with four strings sounding intervals of the octave divided by a fourth and a fifth, intervals embody- ing the tetractys discovered by Pythagoras at the smithy. In the age of 170 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

gods and demigods, nothing discordant was found in music. The historical allegory reaches back to the most ancient of Greek prehistory, naming the inventors of strings who had been associated with the invention of the modes. 363

Boethius tells the story of world-weary Pythagoras, a man who had given up hope that the mutability of musical perception could be reconstituted as true knowledge. “Granting them (instruments) a minimum of trust, yet remaining curious for some time, Pythagoras was seeking a way to acquire through reason, unfalteringly and consistently, a full knowledge of the criteria of consonances.”364 One day, Pythagoras, “by a kind of divine will” 365 passes a blacksmith. He over- hears the beating of hammers that “somehow emit a single consonance from differing sounds.” 366 Pythagoras, impending philosopher of music, supposes that the strength of the men hammering is the principle behind the consonance. “But the property of sounds did not rest in the muscles of men, rather, it followed the exchanged hammers.” 367 The principle of tone exists independently. Were that hammer to melt in the man’s hands the note would simply continue on wherever it came from, silent to us, until we fashioned the next one that could percuss it back into our air. And so Pythagoras intuits number to be the language of music. Boethius tells us that in doing so he “was the first to ascertain . . . by what ratio the concord of sounds was joined together.” 368 When number is established as the pure mode of musical reference the soul’s judgment sublimates the senses. Brennan writes of Augustine’s De Musica ,

The perfect numbers in the soul are those termed by Augustine judicial. Within the soul these numeri judiciales , unlike other transient numbers, are alone immortal. They establish that which is rightly pleasing in musical sound, but may however be judged and evaluated by “more hidden” numbers. The completed series of numeri form a hierarchy of ascent by which one may rise “from the consideration of changeable numbers in inferior things to the unchangeable numbers which are already in unchangeable truth itself.” 369

Thus when we encounter a Neoplatonic numerical theory of music, we understand that the numbers are an effect of the soul’s knowledge rather than the scientific application of experiential knowledge. We do not learn numbers. We know them, or we anamnestically recover them. We percuss them back into our air. Performance is a shadow of the truth of music. Like other disciplines, it awaits its grace and is insufficient according to THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 171 its own power to lay claim to it. Augustinian and Boethian numeri judiciales become the mystical artistic judge of sound. That judgment is what makes a sound a musical sound. Put another way, music happens to sound, just like poetry can happen to language. The myth of Pythagoras is in the spirit of Platonic and biblical literature: one man living in the epoch of the Fall reemerges from a cave with the truth. Chesterton supposes that

something like it might have been attempted in the more archaic and decorative medieval art. But the more the artists learned of realism and perspective, the less they could depict at once the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been best conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when they wheeled about the streets a theater with three stages one above the other, with heaven above the earth and hell under the earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth. 370

It has an elemental appeal: Plato’s Myth of the Cave, Pythagoras in the smithy, as Chesterton calls the Nativity, “The God in the Cave,” 371 Christ in the tomb, Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. The descent to a place lower than the earth in order to reclaim the world above the earth is a persistent intercessory vision of anamnesis. And though it may seem too elite a company in which to include Pythagoras’s trip to the smithy, the extent to which, for Boethius, music negotiates the soul’s knowledge should be understood because, “Indeed no path to the mind is as open for instruction as the sense of hearing.” 372 Because, “Whoever penetrates into his own self perceives human music.” 373 That is why, “It appears beyond doubt that music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free of it even if we so desired. For this reason the power of the intellect ought to be summoned, so that this art, innate through nature, may also be mastered, comprehended through knowledge.” 374 And this is not a piece of Enlightenment style rationalism, as Dronke posited as the focus of Chaucer’s irony. Rather it is the territorial reconditioning of art from experience, the submission of song to symbol and ultimately to Symbol. Harmony is not simply a matter of arranging sounds to please; it is also a matter or arranging all human knowledge in symphonic unity with our memory of God’s. “If a certain harmony did not join the diversities and opposing forces . . . how would it be possible that they could unite in one mass and contrivance?” 375 Put simply, inside each of us is a soul, inside that soul is music, the soul and its parts must be brought into harmony with the order whence it came. For Augustine, 172 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

Behold the heaven, the earth, the sea; all that is bright in them or above them; all that creep or fly or swim; all have forms because all have number. Take away number and they will be nothing. From whom have they their being if not from him who has made numbers? . . . Ask what delights you in dancing and number will reply: “Lo, here am I.” . . . Examine the art which produces all these things and you never anywhere find in it either space or time, but it is alive with number. It has neither place in space nor length of days. 376

Boethius’s philosophical vision of harmony and consonance governs the noise in the poem, from the “Cok! cok!” to the shrill dissonance of the fox chase, because “Dissonance . . . is a hard and unpleasant percussion of two sounds . . . For as long as they are unwilling to blend together and each somehow strives to be heard unimpaired, and since one interferes with the other, each is transmitted to the sense unpleasantly.” 377 In this spirit Travis argues,

A fundamental question the fox chase asks is one that Chaucer has been addressing since the beginning of his career: do the sonorities of poetry bear any resemblance to, and do they bear any responsibilities toward, the noisy realities of the world? Much more pointedly, does poetry have anything to say about the (dis)harmonics of human justice? 378

In Boethian terms, can the two sounds “unwilling to blend together” that both “strive to be heard unimpaired” be brought into harmony? In the terms of this book, can the song of the world outside the Nun’s Priest’s Tale harmonize with the song of the world inside the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ?

I knew your father; / These hands are not more like. 379 Chauntecleer’s Family Tree When we consider the De Musica and bring that musical mythology to bear upon Chauntecleer’s father a different perspective becomes possible. To appreciate that perspective, we must first realize that the direct appeal to Chauntecleer takes only one line and comes at the very end, “Lat se; konne ye youre fader countrefete?” (3321). The fox’s total argument is the story of Chauntecleer’s mother and father. Roger Ellis writes,

He (the fox) presents himself as a friend of the family and a lover of good music. Whatever men may say about singing, he knows that no human agent can compare with Chauntecleer in singing. Only the angels in heaven could stand the comparison and, of course, Chauntecleer’s own father, who was unsurpassed in his own time.380 THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 173

Payne calls Chauntecleer an “orphan” and such an idea would make for an interesting mood. Chauntecleer’s most tragic moment could occur unconsciously in the poem rather than as the fruit of the narrator’s bibliography. It is a somewhat sad picture: Chauntecleer hearing for the first time about his dad and wanting to emulate him. The rooster fails to understand that the fox did not have his parents to dinner: “My lord youre fader—God his soule blesse!— / And eek youre mooder, of hire gentillesse, / Han in my hous ybeen to my greet ese” (3295–3297). The fox’s “ese” (indeed, every voice in the poem wants some) is the same as the Widow’s: chickens are for eating and not for speculating on the tones of the spheres. Not that “ese” is ever narratologically represented in Chaucer’s poetry as the soul’s first breath without lungs; “ese” belongs to the phenomenal. One need not read it so dramatically, of course. Chauntecleer could listen to the story and hear further proof of what he already knows to be true: that he is a very fine chicken indeed. He could be thinking about corn. Nevertheless, the argument that convinces Chauntecleer to sing for the fox is a Thumb Bible that tells a cyclical generational history of fox and chicken. We do not know if the fox ate Chauntecleer’s parents. The fox insinuates it, but Chauntecleer also insinuates that he is destined for death. Insinuations run amok in the tale. At any rate, if the Old Chauntecleer was eaten, a new one replaced him. The story, the characters, the world rehearse the same play into perpetuity. Though we cannot know the history of Chauntecleer’s parents we can understand its representation in the fox’s rhetoric. And the fox represents the parents according to the confusion that runs through the entire poem: Chauntecleer is a royal prince grazing in a pasture. So was Nebuchadnezzar once. 381 Here, the fox tells a story of the natural battle between hunter and prey, the subtext of which is that he ate Chauntecleer’s parents and he will eat him too. The curiosity by which he represents this natural sisyphism is to demonstrate that Chauntecleer, like his late father, was the best singer in any region and the wisest man to boot. “Save yow, I herde nevere a man so synge / As dide youre fader in the morwenynge” (3301–3302). “Ther nas no man in no regioun / That hym in song or wisedom myghte passe” (3310–3311). Further instability saturates the fox’s language. He never calls chickens “chicken.” He calls them “man.” “I herde nevere man so synge” (3301). “That ther nas no man in no regioun” (3310). Thus two ideas of mimesis occur in the fox’s speech, one literal and one by antiphrasis. In the first, mimesis is the imitation of nature. Within this natural mimesis the fox makes a general and a specific point. Generally, the fox urges Chauntecleer to imitate the natural ontology of his father and mother—to be a chicken, to get eaten by a fox. Specifically, he provides the literal template for how to do so. 174 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

And for to make his voys the moore strong, He wolde so peyne hym that with both his yen He moste wynke, so loude he wolde cryen, And stonden on his tiptoon therwithal, And strecche forth his nekke long and smal.

(3304–3308)

As Meredith argued, “Chauntecleer sings himself to sleep to be eaten by someone else with his own mermaid song.”382 After painting the picture of Chauntecleer’s father, eyes closed, on tiptoes, neck outstretched, wail- ing his swansong, the fox follows with the eminently cohesive, “And eek he was of swich discrecioun / That ther nas no man in no regioun / That hym in song or wisedom myghte passe” (3309–3311). At one level, it is a fairly pedestrian mode of humor. Step 1: Tell story about someone doing something stupid. Step 2: Call it smart. Result: humor. At another level, there is a lingering case of the shakes in the argument that can be forensically traced to the reference to Boethius’s De Musica. Chauntecleer’s father sings from the heart rather than from Pythagorean speculation (3303). So much so that he closes his eyes and cranes his neck, hungry fox in the cabbages be damned (3305–3308). Next, Chauntecleer’s father’s wisdom is without equal (3311). The tension between musical sensibility and musical form remains unresolved in the fox’s argument. They continue to tend together, to share in a common telos, but the simplicity of the distinction between “herte” and “wisedom” is inadequate to express it. That is where the antiphrastic idea of mimesis in the fox’s story begins. As we observed, Boethius provides a solution to the paradox according to traditional Platonic precedents. “What Plato rightfully said can likewise be understood: the soul of the universe was joined together according to musical concord.” 383 Lorenzo’s thoughts in the Merchant of Venice hold true for the col-fox of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale :

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. 384

Boethius’s idea of musical concord, via Plato, says a lot. At the beginning of all things, even prior to the Golden Age, God creates the universe and gives it a soul through music. The universe has a soul. That soul is THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 175 song. Viewed through Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans in which he says, “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,” 385 we begin to understand conflicts within and without the poem. What I mean is this, man and the world are fallen. Both have souls. The soul of the universe is music and the soul of man is thought. The universe “groaneth and travaileth” (it should be singing) and man cannot know the proper object of his thought. Man has language to describe and remember both the “musical concord” by which God created the soul of universe and the object of his thought. But language cannot describe music without becoming like music. Number can, but number does not describe music. According to Boethius and Augustine, music is number. Number is the soul acting upon sound. Number “is perfect and has its origin in the One.” 386 Therefore, the relationship of number to music is one of being. Language is not number. Language is not being. It is dead to the soul and dead to knowledge. But symbol is soul acting on language and symbol is being. Language must become number; it must become a true symbol in any possible world in order to express anything about ours, much less the better world beyond it. In the same sense, man and nature are dead to their own souls, dead to their own music and symbol. That is why a New Man in Scripture inhabits a new heaven and a new earth. But in a sense they are really the Old Man and the old heaven and the old earth. They just died for a while. “The end of time—the telos towards which the course of history is driving, will be the same as it was in the beginning, but yet greater.” 387 But here we are in the Boethian world of a poem, with music and symbol dancing in an easy pas de quatre. When Chauntecleer is singer, language has being. When language is represented in regression, when symbol ceases to act upon it, it loses being. It goes “Cok!, cok!” and “recalls us to the fallen world.” 388 Thus, we understand any disruption of music in the poem, such as the chase, as a challenge to the musical concord to which even something as sweet and underwhelming as Chauntecleer’s version of “My lief is faren in londe” refers. What then shall Chauntecleer imitate when the fox asks him to “countrefete” his father? The fox’s story of Chauntecleer’s father takes place under a thick mist of Boethian and biblical music myths. “Save yow, I herde nevere man so synge / As dide youre fader in the morwenynge” (3301–3302). It is unclear who Chauntecleer and his father are because it is unclear what a metaphor becomes. But if a metaphor involves the “transaction between two contexts” 389 rather than merely a transaction between the meanings of two words, then part of the context here is the date of musical concord of Boethius. The symbols are unclear but their epoch is not. Chauntecleer is very much like an Adam. But he is not Adam. He has a mother and 176 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL father. They may be dead. Payne argues that Chauntecleer and the fox are Abel and Cain. “The meeting is of course the meeting of Cain and Abel, in the guise now of grain eating rooster and meat-eating fox.” 390 True enough. But Cain kills Abel and wanders the earth cursed and in exile. The fox sits in the shade of a tree talking to Chauntecleer at the end of the poem. If the fox ate Chauntecleer’s parents, his exile was only to the cabbages of the same “yeerd” from which he usually hunts. Another prelapsarian figure becomes a possible part of the context. Chauntecleer’s father sings in the “mowenynge.” So did Lucifer. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” 391 I do not mean to imply that Chauntecleer’s father was the devil. There is a more interesting possibility. Jeffrey Burton Russel writes,

Although a few medieval literary works distinguish between the persons of Satan and Lucifer, the tradition as a whole affirms their unity and uses the terms indiscriminately as names of a single personage, the Devil, the personification of evil. The name “Lucifer” was born through the association of the great prince of Isaiah 14, the morning star, Helel-ben-Shahar, who falls from the heavens through his pride, with the cherub of Ezekiel 28, who was “perfect in his ways from the day he was created until iniquity was found in him,” and of both with Satan, prince of this world and obstructer of the kingdom of God. Exactly when the three concepts came together is uncertain, but Origen treated them as a unity in the third century. 392

The confusion is important because it carries a distinction. “Lucifer is not the proper name of the devil, but denotes only the state from which he has fallen.” 393 Christ himself is described as the daystar. “And we have the more firm prophetical word: whereunto you do well to attend, as to a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day star arise in your hearts.”394 Confusing Lucifer with Satan is to understand that the name “Lucifer” praises a state of Innocence, one so expansive that the Devil once shared in it. And when he did, he roamed Eden, endowed with the power of music since the day of his creation. “Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.” 395 There is an ontological difference between Lucifer and the Devil. “Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.” 396 Or as Chaucer writes in the THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 177

Monk’s Tale , “O Lucifer, brightest of angels alle, / Now artow Sathanas” ( Monk’s Tale , 2004–2005). The technicolored garden-wanderer with music woven into his bones was in his better day an aubade. If we imagine such singing “sons of the morning” alongside what the Parson tells us about the dawn, ideas about Luciferian Innocence meet Boethian musical primitivism and begin to unify as an idea. “Whoso wolde by the morwe awaken and seke me, he shal fynde.’ / Thanne cometh negligence, or reccheleesnesse, that rekketh of no thyng” ( Parson’s Tale , 708–709). The world falls after every sunrise. In the morning, anyone who seeks God shall find him (708). After that, the demons go free. Chamberlain comments, “Really the whole tradition of the canonical hours works implicitly to make Chauntecleer’s singing more amusing.”397 Like other Chaucer ian d aw n song s, Chauntecleer passes on the oppor t un it y to “seke” and “fynde” God. Instead, he seduces Pertelote “Whan that the brighte sonne gan to sprynge” (2878), with Top 40 medieval hits like “My lief is faren in londe” (2897). The fact remains though that such buffoonery rarely stands alone qua buffoonery. That sunrise and that sentimental favorite are justified according to the Luciferian morning to which the poem continues to refer itself: “From thilke tyme as I have understonde / Beestes and briddes koude speke and synge” (2880–2881) follows directly in order to reinforce the central paradox of the poem—that in order for Chauntecleer and his kind to make such a mess of eternity they have to be residents of it. The fallen, paradoxically, inhabit an unfallen world; but that of course is the point—the world fell and art did not. The poem is a stress test for the idea that Art is free to represent fallenness without having to exchange its birthright for soup, without having to sign away its Innocence in order to do so. The same idea runs through the history of Platonism: Philosophy does not have a substantial share in privation even while it represents it in dialogue. Thus we understand the opposing forces in the representation of Chauntecleer’s family tree. The fox’s rhetoric would flatter Chauntecleer, father and son, and trick them into fulfilling their natural function. He flatters too far, tracks too true, and offers an accidental confession. Even if they’re not the brightest bunch but they’re as bright in their “ na ï vet é savante et coloré e ”398 as the “day star” whose “light restores true day . . . and the actual day grows dull.” 399 So the insecurity of that rhetoric manifests itself by dithering on a facile opposition between “herte” and “wisedom.” The fox’s misreads the Boethian elision of the judgment of reason with the “herte” of performance. Musical judgment becomes preexisting knowledge in the soul acting upon sound, turning the tables on the debate and making the soul the cause and music the effect. The manner in which this is done is to refer music to the moment of creation, the Luciferian 178 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

“morwenynge” when Chauntecleer and his father sing. The fox’s rhetoric accepts at face value the camp fallenness of Chauntecleer—his heartfelt musical impiety—without reference to its experimental status as a mode of art and without reference to the fact that representation, as such, has no independent causal identity. Meanwhile, we continue to observe the reorganization of natural rhetorics into a single narratological force in anticipation of the fox chase. The fox has read “Daun Burnel the Asse,” which is a fairly throwaway piece of literature were it not a comedic suggestion of some grudge that exists between priests and chickens, like the one that exists between foxes and chicken.

I have wel rad in “Daun Burnel the Asse,” Among his vers, how that ther was a cok, For that a preestes sone yaf hym a knok Upon his leg whil he was yong and nyce, He made hym for to lese his benefice.

(3312–3316)

It comes out of nowhere in the text, but it comes from somewhere as a perspective. It joins up with the unique mood of the section: the historical depiction of conflicts with chickens. Now it seems that there is a particular duel between feather and cloth. I said earlier that all rhetorical perspectives will have the chicken fall. The fall, however, is not an ethical fall from grace to sin—Chauntecleer’s membership into the Merry Gang 400 could hardly be refused—but a fall from oracle to indigestion, from son of the morning to lunch, even from “My lief is faren in londe” (a hymn by irony in “thilke tyme”) to “Cok! cok!” In short, the poem’s naturalists want him back from art. They want him back without realizing that they are not “back” themselves. Their rhetoric is the nervous intuition that the unknowable is the principle of self-knowledge, that one cannot experience oneself; one can only speculate oneself. Every time a Chauntecleer arises, father or son, he must be reintroduced to the world by force or we are left like Dorigen to roam the “rokkes blake” waiting for something other than a husband to come across the sea and make sense of things. And that is no “disport.” Until we hear otherwise, poets live among the black rocks, like Bronwing’s, “Dante, pacer of the shore.” 401 At the end of his story when the fox tells Chauntecleer, “Now syngeth, sire, for seinte charitee,” we might hear an echo of Jean De Meun’s lament for the passing of the ideal world. Pelen writes, “We learn that the castration of Saturn and the resultant birth THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 179 of Venus introduce a fallen world where Justice, inferior to Charity, is now necessary.” 402 After Saturn’s misfortune, “whose testicles Jupiter, his hard and bitter son, cut off as though they were sausages and threw into the sea,” 403 Raison divides the world into two epochs. In the fallen epoch Justice comes to replace caritas , “But Love which comes from charity possesses greater necessity by far than does Justice.” 404 Justice is only a steward and the political man is a brief contingency. “They would never have a king or a prince; there would be neither bailiff nor provost . . . so I say that Love by itself is worth more than Justice.”405 Viewed through the aporia of the poem, the fox’s argument is not that Chauntecleer should sing to Charity as much as he should sing farewell to Charity and surrender himself to the Justice of a fallen world, the newborn goddess rising out of the sea from Saturn’s sausages, and his new life as a political animal.

How to Administer the Apocalypse Both the fox and the form of the poem achieve their mode of mimesis when, “This Chauntecleer stood hye upon his toos, / Strecchynge his nekke, and heeld his eyen cloos” (3331–3332). Chauntecleer imitates his father. The question is which. The absentee dad? The fox’s last best meal? Or is it the crooning Lucifer from the “pryme” of Jean’s Charity and the castrated world of the Titans? A tug of war begins over what order of knowledge governs this day. “O destinee, that mayet nat been eschewed! / Allas, that Chauntecleer fleigh fro the bemes! / Allas, his wyf ne roughte nat of dremes! / And on a Friday fil al this meschaunce” (3338–3341). In four lines there are four governors. All but one of them have already been discredited. If we allow Friday to bear upon the four-line unit retroactively it com- promises the candidacy of each. To quote Pearsall once more: “Friday is chosen for many reasons: it is the day of Venus . . . and traditionally an unlucky day. It is a day of change and the unexpected . . . It is also the day of the Crucifixion and therefore, in the synchronized dating beloved of biblical exegetes, the day of the Fall.” 406 Questions of Fate and foreknowledge have failed to meaningfully obtain under the surveillance of Boethian Providence. They only pushed the poem further from the world of men. When destiny enters, the next line waters down the typically inscrutable force. Chauntecleer makes a poor choice to fly down from the beam. Earlier the poem rewarded him for it. Then ‘choice’ is further saturated with unimportance. This is a tragedy and the Monk’s Fortune—cagey and unpredictable, sun and rain on good and bad alike—shakes off the sleep and tries to make something of itself in this poem. It wasn’t Chauntecleer’s fault. Instead, Pertelote is skewered for the 180 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL advice that her husband never actually takes. Chauntecleer “renounces laxatives,” stands somewhat steadfast in the idea that “I shall have of this vision adversity,” then “renounces both vision and dream,” and feels great after. Like a “grim lion.” The only unifying principle seems to be that all of these things were said on Friday about something that happens on a Friday. To my mind, only three of Friday’s imports have survived the poem’s insincerity toward chance, destiny, Fortune, and foreknowledge: the Crucifixion, the Fall, and Venus. If that is the case, then all the available authorities thus far are gods. Venus was the first birth after the Titan’s castration that brought about the fall. Christ’s Resurrection is the first birth in the coming world that replaces it. Theatrics are thus far insufficient to alter the aporetic course of the poem. ‘Venus II’, the Aphrodite Pandemos survives the first blast:

O Venus, that art goddesse of pleasuance, Syn that thy servant was this Chauntecleer, And in thy servyce dide al his poweer, Moore for delit than world to multiplye, Why woldestow suffre hym on thy day to dye?

(3342–3346)

The narrative refocuses, sheds the unnecessary weight of its musings upon agency, and aligns its prize chicken with the only god born in its preferred epoch. Even here the strategy is unstable. Of course it is obvious at this point that Chauntecleer’s sensuality, like the “mooste lusty bachiler” of the Manciple is more than rakishness—it is traditional literary shorthand for the expatriation to history and the experience rather than the contemplation of form. How did Chauntecleer do as an agent of Venus? He did “Moore for delit than world to multiplye” (3345). It manages the rather pedestrian opposition of sex-for-the-fun-of-it against the biblical command, “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 407 But in doing so it makes rather clear that the accomplishments of Venus occur in violation to the com- mandments of Genesis 1, which, here in the eleventh hour, I hope to have driven home is a robust and running problem in this kind of poetry. Our interest is not the ethics of wantonness and chastity, or even the ethics of the Fall. Rather it is the deception of ethics as durable mode of narratol- ogy. That is, the alignment of Chauntecleer with the postlapsarian Venus THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 181 due to his language and action rather than the resignation of the rooster in spite of such things as a symbol to the time before it. It is probably only a funny coincidence that had Chauntecleer done “moore to multiplye” then he would have had dominion over all other animals. But I cannot see how he could have done more for the cause than he already has and his dominion over the coop is resolute. One of the central ironies of the rooster is illustrated: that there is some power that sustains him as oracle despite the contentual representation of his phenomenality. Anyway, the opposition is false dilemma. Multiplying is hardly a chore and does not antagonize Chauntecleer’s “delit” in any very meaningful way. The idea of dominion is the feather in the cap for these panels. To which sphere’s philosophical power can the poem be referred in these final moments before the chase? As if in anticipation of the fact that the Friday that the world died and the Friday that Christ reversed it were continuing to lead the march out of history, the narrator replaces a Good Friday for a bad one. The way he does this is not to simply insert King Richard for God and Paradise, but to insert King Richard into the ‘laws’ of poetic production via Geoffrey de Vinsauf.

O Gaufred, deere maister soverayn, That whan thy worthy kyng Richard was slayn With shot, compleynedest his deeth so soore, Why ne hadde I now thy sentence and thy loore, The Friday for to chide, as diden ye? For on a Friday, soothly, slayn was he. Thanne wolde I shewe yow how that I koude pleyne For Chauntecleeres drede and for his peyne.

(3347–3354)

Fehrenbacher writes,

Although the fox’s entrance causes the narrator to attempt yet again to slip into the realm of the literary—this time by apostrophizing destiny, then Venus, then Fridays, in the course of apostrophizing Geoffrey of Vinsauf, the rhetor who taught him how to thus apostrophize—in this instance history will not so easily be evaded. For when the narrator invokes the most literary place imaginable—Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s rhetorical handbook—he finds that even there history awaits him, in Geoffrey’s reference to Richard I. 408

Besides tending, at this point in the poem, toward an inverse “telescopic fallacy,”409 it is important, perhaps crucial, to note that that the reference 182 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL is not a direct one to the death of Richard but to its rhetorical representation as an apostrophe in literature. To my mind, it should be somewhat unsatisfying as a powerful piece of historical incursion. The narrator does not use the death of England’s greatest hero to amplify Chauntecleer’s. Instead, he laments to his rhetorical mentor that he is not as good a writer as he, that he cannot “pleyne” as well as the exempla in the Poetria Nova . “Why can’t I a chide a Friday like Vinsauf?” This complicates matters. In what many have remarked is one of the most explicit historical references in Chaucer’s writing, the narrator treats history as a subject of formal rhetoric, the machinery of apostrophe. Even so, it is probably overstating the case to call Geoffrey’s exercises in rhetoric “the most literary place imaginable.” Travis writes, “It is a tour-de-force of apostrophes, punctuated by more than a dozen “O’s”! with the dire day itself (“O tearful day of Venus.)” 410 “What needs to be appreciated here is that this schoolbook exercise is a knowing and serious self-parody: that is, it is self-consciously designed to illustrate as many apostrophic tropes as possible, all within the floribundant style of twelfth-century academic verse.”411 And so it is that Geoffrey’s introduction to Apostrophe is not signposted “The Death of Richard.” It is merely a discussion of “apostrophe,” which is “the fourth means of delay by which you can hold back the matter and expatiate for a while.” 412 Thanks to apostrophe, “You will enjoy these courses without which the food would be sufficiently abun- dant, but whose presence swells the dishes of an outstanding feast. The greater number of dishes in the banquet and the tardy delay of the feast make for dignity.” 413 Fehrenbacher’s argument depends upon two ideas. The first is that a handbook of over-the-top exercises in composition is “the most literary place imaginable.” It would be something like calling a book of method acting exercises the most theatrical place imaginable rather than playing Hamlet. Like Geoffrey’s exercises, method-acting experiments can take consciously exaggerated forms, such as Brando’s idea to play a role “like a green suitcase.” 414 The second idea is that King Richard bursts into the poem as a piece of prime matter, rather than as the subject of what is probably the most famous of Geoffrey’s how-tos, one that circulates as an excerpt in various manuscripts. 415 Other apostrophes accompany Richard’s in the Poetria Nova , including one that warns against sirens. Another apostrophe takes a pessimistic view of avian prophecy. “Will you question the cries of birds with your ear? Or their flight with your eye? Or the Fates through Apollo? Away with the sooth-sayers! The augur is deaf, the haruspex blind and the prophet insane. It is for man to know the present, but for God alone to foretell the future.” 416 Furthermore, the apostrophe focuses its rhetoric on themes that directly precede and follow: pride, tragic THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 183 reversals of fortune. In which case, it is difficult to trace the line that would separate the pride, tragic fortune, and murder of Richard from the pride, tragic fortune, and near-murder of Joseph, who was also seen as an historical figure. However, no one reads the mention of Joseph in the poem as a compelling about-face in which the figural collapses under the pressure of Egyptian social realities during the 12th Dynasty. Even so, I do not want to minimize the importance of Richard as a potential defeater to the poem’s ahistoricity. Instead, I want to remark that his historicity, more than Straw’s, is inscribed within the context of rhetoric. Besides dulling its disruptive power, it’s a trick. The historical and rhetorical are modes of phenomenal substance. Rhetoric and Richard are equipoetic, which is to say, that left to their own signifying devices they are unpoetic. So the trick that is played works in two movements. In the first, history tries to ‘enter’ a poem that it has been pummeling since the Monk’s Tale , but only manages to piggyback a poetic exercise. In the second, a poetic exercise illustrates the impasse between rhetoric and form that we observe in the Phaedrus —the impasse between cicadian chirping and singing. Likewise in the Anticlaudianus , Alain characterizes rhetoric as painting, on the assumption that it too must move upward on the ladder of ascensus until it can “bring into being something that can have no real existence.”417 The poem finds a metapoetic rather than simply formal use for Geoffrey’s rhetorical apostrophe and we understand a Platonic principle: that in the space between technique and truth lays a mystery. The historical weakness of this King Richard, co-opted to interrogate the relationship of rhetoric to poetry, does not go unanswered in the poem. When the signal scrambles again, a wiry and hungrier history attempts to become prime matter. The way it does this is to try and correct this earlier wrong first by shedding the baggage of rhetoric, and then by attempting to collapse any language whatsoever into sound. The last and best hope for the reification of history will depend upon the demystification of the poem’s mode of reference. This Richard won’t be the thing that does it. Richard belongs to poetry. According to Wetherbee, “Richard Lionheart was the stuff of legend, his life enveloped in an aura of idealized chivalry and crusading piety, as distant from the concrete realities of contemporary life as the Knight’s treatment of Theseus.” 418 He is also a secondary discussion in a letter addressed to Geoffrey of Vinsauf, an apostrophe in a discussion of apostrophes. Jack Straw, on the other hand, is a “subtle piece of professional violence.”419 Its effect, however brief, is sharper. For now, though, the Poetria Nova rather than Richard survives into the next panel. The narrator wants to “pleyne” like Geoffrey 184 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL and the references that follow echo the pattern of his rhetorical exercise. “Minos subvertit Athenas, / Ylion Atrides, magnae Cartaginis arces / Scipio, sed Romam multi .” 420 In Chaucer’s formulation, the order of the mytho-historical weeping women louder than Pertelote and the other hens are those of Troy, Carthage, and Rome. “Priming himself for the upcoming fox chase, the narrator takes a deep and very rhetorical breath.” 421 It is important that it is a “deeply rhetorical breath.” Unable to “pleyne” like Geoffrey, the narrator spoils the comparatio between his chicken and Richard. Such is the effect of pre-packaging Richard as a discussion of how good a Vinsauf apostrophe he is rather than how well he could work to co-tragedize the chicken’s abduction on historical terms. The rhetorical breath that the narrator takes attempts to, on its own steam, outdo Geoffrey. This is because along with the Friday upon which “fil al of this meschaunce,” the idea of rhetoric is the last governor to survive the panels before the chase. The baton passed as follows: Destiny (3338), choice (3339), wommanes conseil (3340), and Friday (3341). Friday survives, and with it, the theological symmetry of the Fall and Crucifixion and the festival of Venus. Born out of Saturn’s testicles the day the Golden Age ends, Venus’s command to do “Moore for delit than world to multiplye” (3345) squares off with “be fruitful and multiply” and pits Chauntecleer’s postlapsarian sensuality against a command from God given to Adam in his Luciferian morning—a impossible command that tells the first Good and Perfect Man to make sure that Paradise is always filled with Good and Perfect Men, to populate a mythical geography with a species that never existed. Once this happens, Venus’s inchoate Friday fails to obtain in the poem’s neverending one. The narrator replaces this universal Friday with a particular one—Richard’s death—but does so as a personal journal entry about Geoffrey’s apostrophic skills. Still, rhetoric is as much a dupe in the history of classical Platonism as it is in medieval Neoplatonism, and the poem accepts and expands these models to reach this conclusion on the governance panels: that the only thing left to administer the coming apocalypse is the “rhetoric” of poetry, a rhetoric that already died to itself and was reborn as Alain’s Rhetoric, who “enfolds(s) in her bosom the complete art of the painter,” 422 rather than, and with no disrespect to Geoffrey, a “means of delay by which you can hold back the matter and expatiate for a while.” 423 In this way, when the rubble from these panels clears, what remains is a Rhetoric of Art along with the Friday that redeems the Friday of the Fall. And understanding how these two mysteries form a single idea seems to me the primary business of criticism in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale . THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 185

In response to this inability to apostrophize Chauntecleer, who proves lucky at the pyre in preceding panels, the poem shifts its entire power away from the rooster. Instead, the narrator apostrophizes the cries of the hens, “Certes, swich cry ne lamentacion / Was nevere of ladyes maad whan Ylion, / Was wonne” (3335–3357a). “But sovereynly dame Pertelote shrighte / Ful louder than dide Hasdrubales wyf” (3361–3362). “O woful hennes, right so criden ye / As whan that Nero brende the citee / Of Rome cryden senatoures wyves” (3369– 3371). But this too walks the unsure road of rhetoric, a thing too easily co-opted by art and made all “foreign glitter” instead of “native hue.”424 In addition, the references themselves are suspect. They tell a story of the rise and fall of the eternal city. The destruction of Troy sends Aeneas on his mission to found Rome. First he goes to war against the sensual understanding of his destiny sponsored by Dido and Carthage. Carthage returns led by Hasdrubal to destroy Rome in the Punic wars and is defeated by Scipio. Appropriately, as Pearsall writes, the Carthaginians were “determined on self-immolation, but Hasdrubal, unable to face death, begged for mercy from the victor. His wife, indignant at his weakness, and with some last scathing words for him to take care of his life, cast her sons and then herself into the flames.” 425 More stories within stories and even here misogyny lurks. The wily woman besets all of our warlords. Next Rome burns under Nero’s watch. Perhaps while he fiddles. 426 That is to say, for our purposes, the last reference before the narrative tries to burn the coop down through raw sound is to a man perverting the Boethian musical concord and “soul of the universe” while he torches the eternal city. These are not gentle apostrophes: destruction, suicide, fire. Fiddle or no fiddle, they warn us that the musical soul of Chauntecleer’s universe is about to go up in smoke. The narrator’s apostrophizing does not last long. “Now wol I turne to my tale agayn” (3374) saying, in other words, “this didn’t really count.” The noise is coming.

Framing a chase in a poem about dreams In each poem that we have discussed, there comes a point at which aggression reads as an epistemological Hail Mary, a final push for human governance in art. Three rioters die in the place of the Old Man in another Sisyphean labor to make nature’s first gold green, instead of the other way around. Mutilation in the Miller starts a fire that only a discredited Flood can quell. Poor “Wyf” lies with an arrow in her heart when Phoebus’s crow loses the ability to speak because he forgets how to sing. The poem’s contentual strategy is not entirely benign; it envisions itself as a monistic 186 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL metapoetic that sends Chauntecleer on a satirical suicide mission in order to co-rhetoricize experience and intuition into a single linguistic performance. What no one tells Chauntecleer is that his immortality depends on the fence around his coup becoming a bulwark. Because the more history that gets in and breathes the social into the soterial the closer he comes to the end of the neverending day that has thus far sustained him. He has a better chance with the fox than he does the Widow. This is Macrobius’s “oblivion,” “that begins silently to creep into the recesses of the soul.” 427 Fehrenbacher describes the thrill of the chase:

The reintroduction of the “sely wydwe and eek hir doghtres two” shatters the ahistorical frame the narrator has constructed in his attempt to contain the tale’s historical dimension. Here the tale’s setting expands not just from the “yerd enclosed” into the poor widow’s barnyard, but beyond it, extending into the widow’s village community, introducing “many another man.” 428

He continues,

The tale’s hyperliterary style also falters, as rhetorical virtuosity, up to this point that defense used to keep the historical at bay, breaks down. Language no longer operates in the realm of lofty rhetoric, but is characterized as barking, shouting, crying, and yelling, as peasants holler “Out! Harrow and weylaway! / Ha, ha! The fox!”; and the sounds of animals and the language of humans conflate . . . the repressed returns; and when it does it is monstrous: an animalistic, incoherent mob of murderers. 429

This is the definitive interruption of a hyperlitarariness whose function is to “enable societies to mystify and delude themselves about social inequalities.”430 And “these delusions—as well as the rhetoric and literature surrounding them—have a habit of collapsing in the face of historical realities like the rioting Jack Straw.”431 For Helen Barr, the hayseed army of L’homme moyen sensuel pursues merely in order to “restore rightful ownership.” 432 Chief among the sourdoughs of class warfare is the widow, a wholesome and quiltless Defarge whose literal farm is about to become the collateral damage of an aristocratic pillow fight. “The wild- ness of the chase” is an “index of [her] desperation.” 433 To that effect, a few remarks are in order to frame the chase in the wider context of the poem. First—and I want to sound off of Fehrenbacher’s fearless interpretation—he argues that the hens’ laments in the context of the Aeneid and Troy “trace not just the progress of the Trojan Aeneas from Troy to Carthage to Rome, but also the genealogy THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 187 of the English nation. This passage thus rehistoricizes the Nun’s Priest’s Tale .” 434 So, he accepts the domino effect genealogy of the city epics, but they lead to Britain and not the City of God. Fair enough. This is because Brutus is the mythical founder of Britain. But the poem is rife with Troy references, one of which (“o Greek Synon, / That broghtest Troye al outrely to sorwe!” (3228–3229) earlier prompted Fehrenbacher to write, “And even when the ‘col-fox ful of sly iniquitee,’ finally bursts through the hedges . . . his threatening presence is again erased by the literary . . . This rhetoricization continues for about the following fifty lines, allowing the reality of the fox to recede as the text plunges into the world of literature.” 435 The second point is that the legendary founding of a city is literary matter. References to the wolf-suckled Romulus in Latin literature do not necessarily entail a detailed account of the state of the economy and a piercing portrait of overcrowded lodgings in the Aventine. However, if we allow that English history attempts to reify itself in the chase, many interesting possibilities emerge. If contemporary criticism is any indicator, it is very tempting, often I would wager for the sake of space, to skip over a good two-thirds of the poem in order to descr ibe the chase. However, it is also especially tempting in the current critical mood because of Jack Straw. But as Cooper points out, this is a poem about dreams. Its penultimate scene is a chase. The final scene is a conversation. This long story of Chauntecleer introduced a world of talking animals, dream debates, philosophical battles of wit, and at the very least, some very polished back and forth. As the cabaret descensus ad inferos begins, the first thing to remark is both obvious and surprising. The chase is not a story about Chauntecleer. While the language of the poem is put through the blender of onomatopoeic noise, the rooster never speaks. He gets one passing reference, “And bar upon his bak the cok away” (3379). When the rooster returns, his arrival is announced in the same manner of his brief farewell, “This cok, that lay upon the foxes bak” (3405). The noise of the chase disappears. The way to visualize it is this, in order of appearance: “Hennes crie and maken wo, Out! Harrow and weylaway!, Ha, ha!, berkyng, shoutyng, yolleden, cryden, hydous noyse, shoutes shrille, bras bemes, skriked, howped and blewe and powped and skriked–AND— Sire, if that I were as ye .” Urbane overtures dismiss noise in the poem. The story always resettles. It’s self-healing. After Chauntecleer cries “Cok! cok!” the fox calmed the sonic irregularity with “Gentil sire, allas” (3284). Here too, the noise stops, the conversation resumes, and the entire Widow’s world, who chased after what they saw —“And out at dores stirten they anon / And syen the fox toward the grove gon” (3378–3379)—seem 188 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL to not see this. Of course, we’ll never know. Whatever happens, they disappear and the chase ends. The poem never mentions them again. The only things left are a fox, a rooster, a tree, and a narrative voice or two all involved in the finer points of hard-learned lessons and chicken wit. That is to say, even if the poem changes for a moment, the poem is left unchanged. The second feature of this intellectual setting is that it is all low history rather than high. The Monk’s high history is interrupted by the “compaignye.” The transition to the Widow’s low history is cut short as well. Neither was “worth a boterflye.” Neither could “pley.” Chauntecleer’s world is all high literature and history. It concludes in a narrative comparison of crying chickens to the ladies of Troy, Carthage, and Rome. Very abruptly low history returns in the chase. The references now are not to Nero and Pirrus, but to Malkyn, Jack Straw, and some very loud animals. But this too is short-lived and the narrator resumes with a lament according to the Monk’s cause c él è bre and Boethius’s much- maligned capital-F Fortune. Then the sober Middle English dialogue resumes. We observed the elision of the Monk and Widow’s modes of history, Chauntecleer’s “learning” with Pertelote’s “loore.” A simple way to understand this is to recognize its circularity. Natural voices represent high history governed by Fortune, then low history according to the daily habits of smalltime farmers, then high literature and history according to any available concept—chance, predestination, Fortune— then low history governed by the daily habits of smalltime farmers, here, “That fox is stealing “the vital means of my food production!” 436 Finally the narrator settles on the high literary lament against Fortune and tries to fade out with a moralitas . Thus, the available machinery of literalism in art is exhausted. It is equivalent to the frustrated parent saying ‘I’ve tried everything with this kid: kindness, discipline, bribery, manipulation. I guess I’ll try bribery.’ In this sense, Chauntecleer’s world is unruly and “refuses” as Cooper says, “all attempts to turn it into something other than a superb story.” 437 More precisely, it refuses all attempts to turn it into something other than a story. It is important that the Nun’s Priest’s Tale flattens contentual distinctions. It is a complicated poem about a simple opposition. All oppositions are simple but their philosophical evocations are not. It’s the subtle antagonisms that make for quick work. Opposites become meaningless in Platonism due to the fact that the larger power eventually causes the lesser to go extinct. But that is epistemology and this is a piece of criticism. Without that initial and simple opposition between Art and History, it is hard to tell which oppositions are actual ones. Without that structural friction, it’s hard to tell whether a rhetoric of history THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 189 truly belongs to history or whether it belongs to a mode of enquiry about its artistic representation. It is important that distinctions are flat- tened within an opposition because the chase’s mode of language is elemental and it is unique. The only clue to the noise of the chase was a telling “Cok! cok!” If by the time the chase arrives we had not witnessed through the lens of aporia various antipoetries regrouping into a big tent philosophy, we could not appreciate the full percussive force, the bald “thud” of onomatopoeia as it strikes the wicket gate between Coop and coop. A third preliminary observation is in order. Throughout the tale a superstructure develops. The idea is reverse chronology, the contin- ual rewinding to the Golden Age established in the General Prologue and invested with special shimmering properties in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale . The paradoxical narratological strategy is to reverse human history without eliminating the possibility of the visceral experience of the time before it. The idea is to extend human history into the ideal world without any ontological concessions. Even for characters whose rhetorical attachment to the “lif present” is resolute, the uneasiness of existing in their own time comes to express itself strategically in the form of the attempt to reinhabit a form of the Golden Age with their experience intact. All of the tales that we have considered share in that structure. The Pardoner’s Old Man carries over an even older argument from the history of literature, that if he can survive the mortal epoch with his body intact, then he can viscerally experience his own physical perpetuity in Paradise. That is, if the whole world is eliminated and the days in which we age come to close, then the oldest man on earth can be young again. In order to do this, the Old Man has two strategies: to wait it out or to send sad people to premature deaths. Sooner or later the earth will depopulate. When it does, he can merge infinity and contingency into his own being and exist palpably in a world of symbols. In the Miller’s Tale , interlocutors rewind their world to one that existed prior to the judgment of the Flood. The way the poem’s philosophy does this is not to reconvene the machinery of antediluvian primitivism but to simply kill the God who sent the Flood. Part of the idea of the tale is to turn back the clock to a time before the drowning of the world and corporeally experience its perks, without reference to the superior order of knowledge that fabricated prehistory serves. But it doesn’t go far enough. It’s not good enough to build a second ark in a postdiluvian earth. The damage is already done. The contract is in place. And it just so happens that we already tried. The prettiest version from the Lozi people of western Zambia tells “a story of how they became separated from God and then built something like the Tower of Babel to try to 190 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL get back to Him.” 438 In the trench warfare of biblical history, Josephus relates,

Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand . . . He also gradually changed the government into a tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from their fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his own power. He also said, “He would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again, for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach; and he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers.” 439

So like the Miller, Nimrod goes to the ovens. “It was built of burned brick, cemented together with mortar made of bitumen , that it might not be liable to admit water.” 440 In the Manciple’s Tale, the current separation of men from gods is rolled back to reveal the Golden Age, where Hesiod and Ovid say that gods and men walked side-by-side. But, of course, the way this is done is simply to have Apollo walk side-by side with “wyf” on the current earth. Cohabitation in this instance is not merely between Phoebus and Wyf, but between heaven and earth, content and form, in a monistic marital bliss. In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , the Monk’s high history quits and low history loses its grip on it own coop. A new Golden Age is born in Chauntecleer and it is a not-so-distant cousin to “Whan in Aprille.” The narratological premiums on experience are represented in the poem as the devolution of the initial fancy and culminate, according to other Chaucerian models, in an ecstatic bedroom finish. The next scene falters between a rhetoric that cannot decide whether to represent Chauntecleer as a floating Croesus or a chicken hungry for a corn. As a mock piece of metapoetry, the poem rewinds and “explodes” into a second Golden Age in a flawed chronographia. The poem sings like a dog-whistle to history again, comb- ing over the subtleties of oracles and suddenly becomes audible again when Chauntecleer sees the fox. The effect of the “Cok! cok!” is once again replaced by the launch of the poem into the Boethian Musical concord, a figural genealogy of Chauntecleers, and a mimetic place even prior to the first man when Lucifer was covered in gems and sang matins. Next the poem collapses this third otherworldliness into the reintroduction in the chase scene of the Widow’s world and then concludes matters in the happy light of the “yonge sonne.” The confusion of the poem centers upon the question of how to achieve infinity consciously as narrative strategy rather than THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 191 unconsciously as form. Chauntecleer’s Golden Age came easy and accidentally by comparison. It came as the result of the undeniable fact that Chauntecleer’s coop is the City of God to a poet of Chaucer’s temperament, similar to how “ il faut cultiver notre jardin ”441 is the symphonic estate for human happiness in Candide . Once that City is named, the narrators of the poem try, according to each one’s particular brand of rhetorical antigenius, to interpret and define it. The tension takes place in between the rhetorical strategies that want to submit Chauntecleer to the common sense of herbs, wish fulfillment, and the literal future and the fact that this poem is identical with a lost world of “thilke tyme.” And just as the poem seems to so violently rewind the Golden Age again into the loud quotidian drama of losing a rooster, it resur- rects it when Chauntecleer outsmarts all of human and divine history “And heigh upon a tree he fleigh anon” (3417). It is Apollo sitting in the shade making crowns out of laurels. The peace and quiet of a balanced poetic universe return . To sum up, the narrators attempt to depict the Golden Age slipping away, then lost to the chaos of nature and history, and then regained according to the technology of Chauntecleer’s wit. Like every poem we have considered, the idea is that it is preferable to live in a Golden Age but that we should repopulate it in the current human estate. It is the problem with which we set out, the problem of Tithonus: that there is no infinity for the experience of history in art, only perpetuity. Chauntecleer’s escape is achieved to the satisfaction of both action and poetry. At the level of action, Chauntecleer is safe in a tree. But action is insufficient to conclude the story of the reintegration of language and being, of cognition with intuition. The real accomplishment is the metapoetic function of “resumption”: the resumption of the supernatural state of affairs in the “yeerd” and the larger and more fundamental joke that Paradise in the poem is not a thing to be resumed but a thing to be accepted as the cold, hard philosophical fact of zoonic existence inside this poem. The question posed by various rhetoric in the poem is whether the Golden Age can be an effect of interlocutory strategy or whether it is the preexisting condition for it. When it can’t control the backward movement of history’s representation in the poem, the naturalistic philosophy tries to reverse the poem back to before it started. It’s an extreme maneuver. If you can’t control the story of Chauntecleer, then perhaps you can erase it. Unleash the Widow. Still the chicken escapes. He’ll see another sunrise. It’s an expert extension of Chaucer’s models in which the Golden Age is invaded, intervened upon, and then restored. It’s the lesson of Apollo and Daphne and it is the lesson 192 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL here: the return to ‘business as usual’ is the poetic definition of time and eternity. Supernature is the natural state. Peneus turns Daphne into a tree in order to restore Apollo to his oracular order of being. A talking chicken flies into a tree in order to restore his own oracular order of being. In Ovid’s poem ‘order’ is restored to a comically virile vision of the Golden Age, but it is still a Golden Age, just like Chauntecleer’s coop is something like a bar fight in Eden. Ovid’s poem represents rape and erotic experience as the potential defeater of Elysium. In Chaucer’s poem it is Jack Straw and social history. But Ovid’s poem is not about the suppressed idea of rape making itself a necessary knowledge condition of poetry. Neither is the Nun’s Priest’s Tale the victim of its own traditional literary strategy, which would be the critical perspective of one who believed that the chase is a rupture instead of an experiment. Jack Straw, however staccato and singular, is not a feral element in a cautiously guarded literariness, or as Fehrenbacher calls it, a “fragile ahistorical enclosure.” 442 He is part of a traditional mode of a literature that tests itself. The disruption of a vision that represents the argumentative challenge to its continuity. Then it’s overcome by the continuity of the vision, an element of fantasy that’s so unsurprising and bound up in the original project: Metamorphoses for Ovid and the resumption, after the parodic disruption, of the magical stipulations of “thilke tyme” for Chaucer. All of this plays a delicate game with the fact that it is representational inside a tautology. It is not thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Desiring that Straw subdue the entire poem, or the entire philosophical and literary tradition from which the poem draws asks him to do too much. It asks him to actually be historical, to obtain as something other to the cyclonic art of the poem, to make the leap from illustrated to incarnated. All of this considered, a primary metapoetic function of the chase is not to ontologically puncture fantasy with reality, but to dramatize and speculate upon it at the level of language. This linguistic experiment is philosophical. It interrogates the self-sufficiency of the artistic vision and whether the mode of language that belongs to itself and to history can partake of a single substance. The chase questions things in the baldest terms: Can the voices of art and history hear each other? Can they speak a common tongue? From these questions another emerges: Can Chauntecleer and Jack Straw see each other?

Chickenness Is in the Eye of the Beholder “Now wol I turne to my tale agayn” (3374). This curious line is a border between high history and low. Preceded by, “Wihouten gilt THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 193 this Nero hath hem slayn” (3373), and followed by, “This sely wydwe and eek hir doughtres two” (3374). It should strike us as funny that for five-hundred lines or so we have been in the world of talking chickens and when the narrator once again turns to his ‘real’ tale he goes back to the Widow. But the concept of what the Widow sees continues to define the space between history and art. When discussing the Widow’s exemplum , I argued that we must imagine that as the Widow looks out of her window at Chauntecleer’s yard she sees nothing but animals carrying on like animals and that we must also imagine that as Chauntecleer looks toward the Widow’s cottage he sees nothing at all. In the Epicurean retirement panel, the narrative split personality that brought us King Croesus clucking over corn, the idea of the Widow’s gaze once again obtained. At that moment it seemed as if the poem was being watched . The way the poem sees itself, that wink and smile whenever it passes a mirror, plays against a bored Widow looking at her quiet little farm while she worries about something else. If we take the poem at its word, Chauntecleer has been singing and philosophizing and setting land speed records as a lover and the Widow has not seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. Now, “This sely wydwe and eek hir doughtren two / Herden thise hennes crie and maken wo, / And out at dores stirten they anon, / And syen the fox toward the grove gon” (3375–3378). One can only imagine what any of us would do if we saw that our farm was populated by talking creatures who read Macrobius. What I mean is that if this were really a historical setting, if this were our world, the moment Chauntecleer sang “My lief is faren in londe” we would have reacted like this: “Out! Harrow and weylawey! / Ha, ha!” (3380–3381). The truth is that I think the Widow and the inhabitants of her world would have gone into hysterics had they heard Chauntecleer sing “My lief is faren in londe” but they couldn’t. That is another difference between our history and hers. Ours is permeable, we have a front row seat to art. We read the Nun’s Priest’s Tale . According to the Platonists, it might be hard to see its omens about our inner life, which is really our next life, through the fog of our deciduous predicament. But we have glimpsed the impossible. We know that animals worry about predestination. The Widow’s history is something less than history. It is history in art. It is simply represented. And it is didactically represented. History cannot see Chauntecleer; it can only see a rooster. This is what I mean by the philosophical evocations of opposites. History cannot know eternity on its own means. This is a central argument of the poem. The subtle antagonism, the easier thing to grasp is extrapoetic. The human is a hybrid thing in a Platonic 194 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL conception of the universe, fated or created to live two lives and only one of them ends. The life that does not end is the audience of art. The one that does is the agent of history. In that sense, the Widow, as she functions in an epistemological vision, is relegated to history; we are only inhibited by it. The importance of the gaze of the Widow’s world continues to expand in the chase. In the Widow’s world, dogs are dogs. “Ran Colle oure dogg, and Talbot and Gerland” (3383). It is the rebirth in the poem of the nontalking beasts, missing since the three sheep and cows of the exemplum . “Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hogges, / So fered for the berkyng of the dogges” (3385–3386). “The dokes cryden as men wolde hem quelle / The gees for feere flowen over the trees; Out of the hyve cam that swarm of bees” (3291–3292). And just when the animals reach the loudest point of their presto , the invisible chase crosses paths with Jack Straw. “So hydous was the noyse- a bene- dictee!— / Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee / Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille / Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille” (3393–3396). The essence of the scene is visual. Filming it would require two external settings. In one, an angry nighttime mob led by Jack Straw gathers with torches at a clearing in the forest, lights of London in the distance. In the other, a sunlit woodland on a Friday morning. A talking fox seizes a talking chicken by the neck. Hens pursue shouting, “O doleful day of Venus!” These bloodthirsty gorgons reach their version of the clearing in the woods where, in another dimension, Straw and his mob gather. And two very different things happen. The torch lit mob lifts their feet and allows an oinking, clucking, and quacking barnyard jailbreak to pass unmolested. They have more important things to worry about. As silly as that may seem, I think it is the comedic mood of the chase, based in the philosophical idea of the gaze. The idea is not that Jack Straw steps into the “yeerd,” but that when the “yeerd,” runs into Jack Straw, the poem does not look to him like it looks to us. It looks to him like it looks to the Widow. If we were to add notes, we might insist upon the following: when the animals of the “yeerd” run under the feet of “JACK STRAW” and “MOB” that night that they do not see anything standing in their way on the sunlit clearing in their forest. Either that, or render “JACK STRAW” and “MOB” as the typical furniture of their fantasy world. Perhaps they look like Ents. 443 This is one of the ways to understand the fact that “Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee / Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille” (3395). The poetic residents of the farm hear and see themselves as they are not : Olympian witnesses THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 195 of the real-time assassination of Croesus. In which case, art is louder than “Jack Straw and his meynee” simply because history has no voice in art. History never arrived. The widow’s farm was a fake address for Chauntecleer’s kingdom. The residents of the “yeerd” do not see or hear the world chasing after them. They could whisper in their world and still be louder than “Jakke Straw and his meynee.” In The Magician’s Nephew , “‘Now sir,’ said the bulldog in his business-like way, ‘are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?’ That was what it really said; but all Uncle Andrew heard was ‘Gr-r-r-arrh-ow!’” 444 But this brings up another point. If the perspective of the chase burlesques the historical, and bees buzz instead of banter, then even so, buzzing is louder than “Jakke Straw and his meynee.” And this is where Chaucer’s oft-observed superciliousness toward contemporary politics most meaningfully obtains. Travis writes, “Rather than a moment from the classical past, what is wrenched into the poem and given an unasked-for hearing is the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, the most earth-shaking and decentering event in English history during Chaucer’s lifetime.” 445 He continues, “Chaucer very rarely alludes to contemporary historical events, as we have noted, and many readers would perhaps be relieved had he not chosen to situate his only overt allusion to the Peasant’s Revolt in such a farcical context.” 446 “Unless,” he adds, “one finds human slaughter to be a sprightly witticism.” 447 What philosophical point could come of depicting both bee banter and bee buzzing as louder than the Peasant’s Revolt is difficult to understand. It could simply take itself for the traditional good-natured day- dreaming of the philosopher of art in which a painting about a man is more real than the man. It is the attitude of Wallace Stevens’s Ideal Order at Key West when the sea fades into nothingness as it is represented in song. “And when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self. / That was her song, for she was the maker.” In the end, we, “Knew that there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made.” 448 That may be too pretty an idea but inside it is a literary provocation. Epic high history and bucolic low history have already become “history, as such,” history as a mode of poetic content and not poetic form. Now our history does too. Pearsall suggests that the use of language here is “an encouragement to closer participation”: “Ran Colle oure dogge” (3383). If that is the case and we accept Chaucer’s invitation, the first view into our own history is Sudbury’s head on a pike. The poem makes that head equivalent to the imaginary historical life of a fourteenth-century widow. She runs alongside Jack Straw and his “meynee.” She shouts and whistles with murderers in the name of tax reform. Gower’s poem makes a myth 196 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL out of the Revolt. Chaucer’s poem makes an ad absurdum . If there is the faint whiff of condemnation of the Vox , as Justice argues, perhaps it has less to do with Gower than the general perspective that Chaucer’s poem borrows from writers like Dante and Alain de Lille: that history won’t obtain as art because art cannot understand it. “I barely see the things that are visible, she comprehends in their reflection things incomprehensible. I by my intellect hardly compass trifles, she in her comprehension compasses immensities. I, almost like a beast, walk the earth, she serves in secret heaven.”449 Chaucer’s poem just puts a new and more piqué spin on it: poetry cannot tell that it is supposed to know that London burning during a revolt is more important, is louder, than a swarm of bees. The poem has historical Prosopagnosia—facial blindness—it’s unable to read the terror on the poor “Flemyng” as something that requires a better and more sensitive craft than a barnyard ruckus. Kathryn Shulz “despises” The Great Gatsby for all the reasons any serious person should like Chaucer’s two-line Peasant’s Revolt. “In The Great Gatsby , polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder . . . Heavy plot, heavy symbolism, zero psychological motivation: Those are the genre conven- tions of fables and fairy tales . . . But moral significance requires moral engagement . . . The Great Gatsby offers none of that. In fact, it offers the opposite: aloofness.”450 In that sense, Justice hits on a deep truth about Chaucer’s habits as a writer. There’s an anarchic and irresponsible streak in Geoffrey. The juxtaposition of Chaucer’s noise panel to Gower’s is indeed instructive. I just see it as something more remote and alien than a parody of John Gower. Gower seems to take Jack Straw very seriously:

When this great multitude of monsters like wild beasts stood united, a multitude like the sands of the sea, there appeared a Jackdaw . . . Just as the Devil was placed in command over the army of the lower world, so this scoundrel was in charge of the wicked mob . . . Satan himself was freed and on hand, together with all the sinful band of servile hell. 451

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale ’s tone is rather glib. “So hydous was the noyse—a, benedicitee! / Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee / Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille / Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille” ( Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 3393–3396). Thus ends Geoffrey Chaucer’s Peasant’s revolt. Jack Straw and his army are shrill, but not “half so shrille” as the imaginary animals of Chauntecleer’s “yeerd.” At the very least, he is no Devil leading the Fallen Third, “with all the sinful band of servile hell.” There’s a certain Holden Caulfield quality to it: ‘Jack Straw was THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 197 pretty loud and all but you should have heard those old bees and ducks. They would have knocked you out.’ One way to look at it as that “jolly Chaucer” 452 tells fart jokes while lecturing at length on the Flood, which happens to be earth’s first mythical ethnic cleansing of the human population. He does animal impressions while barely mentioning the Peasant’s Revolt, which happens to be England’s first actual ethnic cleansing of the Flemish population. I make no pragmatic point about Chaucer; he probably took the Revolt very seriously. But part of the point of the chase panel is this: poetry is a force, a locust swarm. When history, high, low, now even the painful and immediate lies in its path, it leaves nothing behind. We know that the Miller, the Manciple, and the Pardoner can be aggressive rhetors and host aggressive rhetorics. The contribution of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is that art becomes the unconscious aggressor—the proverbial bull in a china shop. Art does not defend itself from reality. In this instance, reality defends itself from art. Barr accused Chaucer of committing “acts of rhetoric.” In the chase, art is an indiscriminate and elemental thing, sucking social ontology and rendering 1381 noise, co-sonic to a swarm of bees in a self-serving illustration of self-sufficiency. The critical problem transitions from the misrepresentation of a particular political voice to the potential futility of the representation of all political voice. Unlike contemporary depictions of the Revolt, the point is not to render the peasants as animals for the grieving sons and daughters of Sudbury’s Old Dixie, but to render all of history as noise that needs a good tuning. But if tuning a discord can eventually lead back to a concord, then all of history’s noise might run the risk of one day losing itself entirely to the creative principle of Boethius’s De Musica : “What Plato rightfully said can likewise be understood: the soul of the universe was joined together according to musical concord.” 453 Like a Frankenstein version of the Ideal Order of Key West , the “hydous noyse” of history becomes more real than history. “What is this sound, so strong and so sweet, which fills my ears?” “‘That,’ he replied, ‘is the music of the spheres. They create it by their own motion as they rush upon their way. Clever men, by imitating these musical effects with their stringed instruments and voices, have given themselves the possibility of eventually returning to this place; and the same chance exists for others too.’” 454

The Noise and the Silence. The End of the Chase Hearing the chase enacts the same aporetic principle as seeing the chase. Chaucer’s writing career repeatedly draws on two experimental 198 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL depictions of the conflict between literal and poetic language: noise and silence. The chase begins in noise and ends in silence. It goes from “This sely wydwe and eek hir doughtres two / Herden thise hennes crie and maken wo” (3375–3376) to the fox taking a page from the Manciple’s mother and condemning those “That jangleth whan he sholde holde his pees” (3435). The first idea of the noise of the chase is one we have already discussed: the rewinding of the Golden Age. The onomatopoeic chase in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale attempts to rewind the particular Golden Age of Chauntecleer, but in doing so attempts to rewind the entire Golden Age of the Canterbury Tales that begins in the General Prologue. This is because the spring and the animals that come to life in the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales are the broad strokes of a supernatural world that the Nun’s Priest’s Tale takes us into in microscopic detail. It takes us to one particular magical farm on a Friday morning. The General Prologue is the Golden Age viewed from space. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is the Golden Age viewed from a butterfly in the cabbages. In the General Prologue spring comes to life to celebrate pilgrimage. “Shoures soote” sing the flowers out of hiding. “And smale foweles maken melodye / That slepen al nyght with open ye” ( General Prologue , 9–10). Those sweet little birds “that slepen al nyght with open ye” at the beginning of the Tales grow up to become Pertelote, herbal murderer, and the husband who seduces her in mangled Latin by calling her the root cause of damnation. The “smale foweles” of the General Prologue expand, absorb more fantasy, and swell into the philosopher chickens of Paradise. The chase attempts to wash them down the drain. The sucking noise is last thing they are meant to hear as sentient beings. Because when they are spit out at the other end of the pipe they become animals. They live on a farm outside the beginning of the General Prologue where they were first born into Chaucer’s poetry and the poem begins without them. History expects to do Phoebus’s job: to kick birds out of art when they “Cok!” and “Cokkow!” But Phoebus never kicked onomatopoeia out of poetry. He kicked history out of poetry. Onomatopoeia just tips him off that something entered illegally. Chaucer is an ironist and his beatific visions often move in opposite directions to Alain’s and Dante’s. True, Dante’s alta fantasia reaches so far into heaven that symbol overwhelms the grace given to language through poetry. But the movement was always upwards Chaucer takes a downward path: he writes in via negativa creates an apophatic literary world. Apophaticism “describes God by saying what he is not, rather than what he is . . . because God is beyond what our language can posi- tively describe . . . Negative theology claims that religious language is THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 199 non-cognitive and equivocal. The ultimate thing is beyond all human concepts . . . This type of theology is rooted in Platonic thought as developed in Neoplatonism.” 455 Which is to say, whether Adorno’s right and “art is a genuine witness to what endured of theology or . . . the reflection of an enduring spell,” 456 and whether God is a “queynte,” a “derk hole,” or the “Love that moves the Sun and th’other stars,” it doesn’t change the fact that, “It is impossible to speak of God literally, and thus one cannot claim a literal equivalent for a metaphorical statement about God.” 457 Travis argues,

What is absolutely clear, at any rate, is that Chaucer is not going to lead his readers straight up Dante’s grammatical ladder of education from sonus to vox to elementum to dictio to oratio to lectio to enarratio and from there to a pronouncement engraved in the heavens and accompanied by the music of the saints explicating the workings of divine justice in human history. 458

Instead, language descends into onomatopoeia: the sound of the orphaned birds of Elysium. Speech headed toward extinction. The onomatopoeic howl rises against Boethian and Macrobian cosmic harmony. It’s the noise of history at the gates, the silent hum of the celestial spheres, and the oldest family feud in the universe. It would be rushed judgment that would read Chaucer’s literary patience with noise as epistemological rather than practical pessimism. Chaucer, as Travis points out, “finds dissonance rather than consonance to be the dominant chromatic of the body politic.”459 He gives noise a longer leash than writers like Augustine, who would witness human society’s harmonious return to cosmic principles of order. Chaucer seems to just let things be: there is a cosmic order, an earthly disorder, full stop. It makes for some fine comedy too. Most would concede that Chaucer and Boccaccio are funnier writers than Macrobius and Augustine for letting the world be the world. But it does not mean, as Justman proposed, “the Nun’s Priest’s Tale really concerns the authenticity of the commonplace, the chaff, and of the literalist perception. It shows that high Latin culture has no place in the barnyard.” 460 High Latin culture, or more precisely what Pelen calls “the memory of a contiguous Latin culture”461 transmits Plato’s divided universe right into Chauntecleer’s yard. In Chaucer’s poetry, there is no principle by which the world can be reorganized as universal, there is only a principle by which our language might. And yet, the poem’s depiction of onomatopoeia—and onomatopoeia, as such—is not entirely stable as antipoetry. The very brief noise panel in the poem has the hangover of the wider poetic mode it interrupts. Onomatopoeia conceals that other secret, the oral history of a 200 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL catastrophe: language and nature heard each other for the first time. In the last full day in Paradise its inhabitants were silent. In first day subject time they were mute. Still reeling from the loss, they begin language anew in the wrong mode. They become ‘crowing’ crows. It is a recording, the lost tapes from the Second Day of the Fall of Man—the natural “dede” of the Manciple and the first sound death ever made. Mimilogism and onomatopoeia thrust human language backward to its infancy, to the Friday day of the Fall—the day this poem takes place. Then something strange happens. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is too aggressive. It forgets to stop once it reaches the beginning of history and ends up where it started. It races backward, past the birth of human language, and continues to a time before words and oracles divorce. History in poetry can’t help but slip back to a date before it could speak. When Arcadia is mined to extinction in the Former Age , Schmidt, writes, “Most myths, as far as I gather, have a historical orientation, and whatever ethical lessons a mythical narration may convey, its purpose tends to be explanatory as well as normative ‘But,’ he continues, ‘it is also possible for a myth to lack any historical orientation, and refer to a purely ideal, imagined state of affairs.’” 462 For Barry Stocker, “Writing is separation from the origin, the following of traces of the origin . . . displaced onto a broken line between speech as lost speech and speech as promised speech.” 463 I’ve imagined it like this: There’s a chase, the gathered forces of Historical Voice in poetry hunting the great critique of its being: this chicken, this sunrise, this glowing iron, whatever shape it takes—the Flood that comes to drown it once a day. At some point, it loses sight of the chicken but keeps running. In the confusion, it reaches the edge of a new canyon: the great sinkhole of Eden. It teeters over the burnt out wasteland of poetic prehistory. It might have hung on, too, but art was against it. Art didn’t stop. It ran straight for the cliff shouting some nonsense about kissing the steps of “alle poesye.” So poetry pushes History over the cliff along with itself. Now, I’d also like to imagine that falling from so great a height gives you time to think. A few moments of reflection. Mental photographs of the ‘one that got away’ perhaps. “Never did get to see that old tree Tithonus told me about.” Maybe some Rosebud from a simpler time. That favorite snow globe you dropped so many years ago. A pet crow you could have been nicer to. But I don’t think history in this poem had time for any of this. Down the sinkhole it went. When it hit the ‘bottom’, it was at ground level. There was no drop. It tripped and landed on a patch of grass. It opens its eyes and looks up. The first thing it sees is a fox trying to talk a chicken into doing something it shouldn’t. It’s another cloudless day in the garden of God. There was never a sinkhole. The salted fields of THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 201

Paradise were a mirage. Like children putting on a play, someone helps language up and says, “I want to play History this time.” “You play the Old Man.” When at the end of the chase the fox tells Chauntecleer, “That jangleth whan he sholde holde his pees” (3435), we understand what has happened to the noise of the chase: it has reversed itself to extinction. The “silence” of “thilke tyme” resumes. The Widow’s world disappears, Straw with it. Perhaps historical language in art fails because it knows something about itself that we only intuit: its own contingency, that poetry perceives it in its entirety. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale tells the backward history of language in one chase panel: from the fullness of discord, to its onomatopoeic and mimological origins, to its silence. The poem travels by tradition to live inside the deaf revelations of Cicero, Macrobius, Alain, and Dante, but does it in reverse. Kensak writes, “The silences of Chaucer . . . derive from the fictional pilgrimages of Dante’s Paradiso and Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus . As they approach, the triune God, Dante and Phronesis is plunged into a silence born of mortal incapacity and linguistic confusion. In both texts however grace transforms the silence of human limitation.” 464 As such, Alain’s “Phronesis is no longer governed by the silence of natural man.” 465 For Cicero, “The ears of mankind are filled with this music all the time. But they have become completely deaf to its melody; no other human faculty has become as atrophied as this.” 466 The trick Chaucer’s poem plays is to enter the singing silence of art through the bathroom window. 467 He ascends to great heights. The world of Chauntecleer is a Helicon farm. He also allows human language the space to reify itself in the artistic vision. When that reification falters, when language is unable to find sure footing in a sonic tempest, it travels back in time toward the day when it split in two. It meets its younger self. Like Apollo, it goes home , where “Vision replaces language.” 468 “Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.” 469

The Old Growth Forest We’re approaching the end. So let’s resume the argument of this book. Where the previous poems feel like clandestine warfare, Neoplatonic espionage, and the cracking of an Enigma Code, the story of Chauntecleer is something like the Normandy invasion for Chaucer’s theory of art. A poem whose fictive present is marked in equal measure by an otherworldly courage, an admirable whistling over the abyss, and a big, brassy, not entirely insincere, ‘back-to-back world war champs’ outlook on the challenge of political history to fantasy. Here too, “While far from perfect, the weather on the morning of June 6 was good enough for the invasion 202 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL to proceed successfully.” 470 “Years later, during their ride to the Capitol for his inauguration, President-elect John F. Kennedy asked President Eisenhower why the Normandy invasion had been so successful. Ike’s answer: “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans.” 471 Which isn’t to say that the poem throws a “meatball” 472 to itself for an easy win. Chauntecleer is a one-man “heliotrope” army. His ‘shock and awe’ non-strategy for establishing an allied Arcadian beachhead East of Eden is to possess, an “uncanny affinity with the sun.” 473 “Sunniness” is not likely make an opponent quake with fear. The distinct advantage of his “better meteorology” is simply that it’s not meteorology. Strictly speaking, it’s cosmology. At the very least, it’s bad meteorology, and that’s cosmology enough. He has a different rhetorical fate than Nicholas and the crow As concerns that “uncanny affinity with the sun,” the Miller’s Nicholas, Manciple’s Crow, and the Pardoner’s Tithonus already held their black mass to ensure “that either the wind would break thy [Eos’s] chariot to pieces, or that they steed would fall, overtaken by some dense cloud.” 474 A patchwork alliance defends the horizon of human history against the “yonge sonne.” In the poem’s we’ve considered, the relationship between Paradise and the Fall deteriorates to outright civil war. Eos, the “early-born” sun goddess and humanity’s oldest lover, has gone below ground and, for that matter, below consciousness. “The young child transfers his love object from the breast (the oral phase) to the mother.” 475 Now she’s “mother” hiding behind “moodres gate.” 476 Her sex-starved children look like Old Men and “knokke with . . . staf, bothe erly and late” 477 screaming, “Leeve mooder, leet me in!” 478 “At this time, the child desires the mother and resents (even secretly desires the murder) of the father. The Oedipus complex is closely connected to the castration complex.” 479 What happens next? The absentee God. The “derk hole” of Miller’s Tale and the impotent ‘family man’ of Manciple’s Tale . The great accomplishment of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is that it finds the humor and absurdity at the core of the cosmic myths it gathers. It’s another Chaucerian dawn song. So imagine the Sun, our mother and ex-girlfriend, really is underground – a prophetic hermit awaiting execution and surviving on a diet of locusts.480 If this is the sunrise poetic materialism desires, then here it faces off in “thilke tyme” against the “haunts of childhood and a different day” 481 and what Adorno calls, “’The source of art’s power of resistance’: that a realized materialism would at the same time be the abolition of materialism.” 482 According to David C. Marshal in the Encylopedia of Entymology , “The term ‘locust’ is often incorrectly applied to cicadas (e.g. ‘17-year locust’).”483 The Magicicadae or “periodical cicada” spend most of their lives “in THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 203 the nymphal stage underground, feeding on the roots” of deciduous trees. 484 “Adults emerge from the soil, and ascend to the canopy where they mate, oviposit in twigs, and die within the space of 3–4 weeks. A few week after, first instar nymphs hatch from the eggs, descend to the forest floor, and once more initiate root feeding.” 485 Which is to say, the subterranean cicada-gorged natural Eos literally eats her young. Like in the Pardoner’s Tale , those lucky natural cicadas that survive “Moloch’s meal” spend the rest of their prolonged nymphal youth gnawing away at the roots of a terminally-ill forest world. Those lucky enough to grow fat on the juices emerge for a brief nihilistic Texas scramble of sex and death, abandon their children on the half eaten “twigs” of the fever-stained world tree, and the process repeats. ‘The perpetual return’. When the Nun’s Priest’s Tale starts screaming in the last hundred lines and Chauntecleer’s bones crack under the molars of a fox, he sees a twig and try to make a safe house out of it. And the safety of it depends less upon the twig than the character of the forest itself. More specifically, it its accessibility to the human population. By way of illustration,

In the 1970s research ecologists began using the term [old growth forest] to describe forests at least 150 years old that developed a complex structure characterized by large, live and dead trees; distinctive habitats; and a diverse group of plants, fungi, and animals. Environmental groups use the term ‘old growth’ to describe forests with large, old trees and no clearly visible human influences. Many forest scientists do not see the absence of human activity as a necessary criterion for old-growth, but there is no consensus on this in the scientific community. 486

All’s Well that Ends How It Started But back in the garden our fathers erased, an “old growth forest” teem- ing with the “absence of human activity,” supernature carries on. Here, “Her early leaf’s a flower,” which means the great sustaining plague and paediatric disease of immortality has returned. And if metaphor really is something like a contagion in language, I think the idea is that when we draw the first “ring around the rosy” it will be the perfect circle of a clock face, but one that’s succumbed to the infection and lost the use of its hands. No seconds and minutes left to swell into the hour when “leaf subsides to leaf.” A talking fox tries to convince a talking chicken to give him a second chance. “Com doun, and I shal telle yow what I mente; / I shal seye sooth to yow, God help me so!” (3424–3425). But there was never any ‘truth’ to the fox’s reading of Chauntecleer. 204 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL

History came and went, and when it did, it hardly even looked like itself. It looked like a poem. Chauntecleer is safe in a tree. Though vast in its imperfection as a solution to time and eternity, we know that we can leave the coop as we found it: safe and strange at the dawn of the world in the hands of an idiot. Still, there’s something about a tree that satisfies great stories. “Bunch’d all about with pagan mistletoe; / And thick with the nests of the hoarse bird / That talks, but understands not his own word; Stands, and so stood, a thousand years ago, / A single tree . . . The rotting saplings near it fall and leave it air, / Is all antiquity and no decay.” 487 In that sense, perhaps it’s the same tree where the oldest man in the world sends a few drunks to execution one thousand years later. It could be the unsung hero of many poems. Only a few recognized it when “Latona, clinging to an olive tree, bore Apollo and Diana.” 488 It could have gone by the name “Daphne” once. 489 The roots go deep into the soil of this place. The sheer numbers of the cicada population could spell certain doom. They could descend to the forest floor and once more “initiate root feeding.” 490 But here they “sing from the moment of birth till death without eating and drinking, and after that go to the Muses and tell how each of them is honoured on earth and by whom.” 491 At any rate, maybe trees in art go where they’re needed. This one was hacked down once and used as a raft so a clinically insane version of the human race could survive a fake Flood. Once a small branch fell off. Rhetoric knew where to return it. She transformed it into the sun and sent it home.492 Perhaps Chauntecleer’s sat here more than once. It’s the happy grove of Chaucer’s dream poetry: “trees clad with leves that ay shal laste, / Ech in his kinde, of colour fresh and grene / As emeraude, that joye was to sene ( Parliament of Fowls , 173–175). Listen close enough and we might catch the faint strains of “My lief is faren in londe” every Friday morning before a debate about dreams and a fox chase. This particular Chauntecleer may not be immortal, we will never know if another one replaces him; but at least from our view, he hasn’t aged a day in over six hundred years. Before “society and history . . . the ‘absent causes’ of Chaucer’s aesthetic choices . . . ” 493 are “reintroduced at the level of form.” 494 Strohm admits, “Chaucer’s usual tendency is deliberately to efface any demon- strable connections between contemporary politics and the meaning of his text.” 495 Early in Fehrenbacher’s study, before “Repressed historicity return(s) . . . with vengeance,” 496 he allows,

Indeed, here the tale’s retreat from history is so powerfully enacted that it abandons not only England, but also the realm of humankind entirely. For over five hundred lines, the tale remains in a land of chickens and THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 205

literature in a “yeerd enclosed al aboute,” a place so utterly removed from the social and historical that it can only “constitute” itself in an ultraliter- ary register that no longer even purports to reflect social reality but that revels in its dependence on established voices, themes, modes, and genres, many of which have been (or will be) encountered on the Canterbury pilgrimage. 497

My response would be to simply scratch the inevitable “however” of historicism and breathe the free air of a lost world. Even if it seems like irresponsible criticism. This is irresponsible literature. The reasonable and respectable critical mandate could be, “We must look beneath [Chaucer’s] lively pictures of human character for sly contemporary hits,” 498 to provide a “rational historical explanation of the obscure meanings, the lively apostrophes, and the variations and additions which are found in Chaucer’s mock-heroic masterpiece.” 499 It’s possible “There is no anti- climax if we catch Chaucer’s solemn wink.” 500 Then again, Chaucer’s poetry could be a staggering mural of “anti- climax” and some vast cave painting that can last for 30,000 years but blows away the moment we crack its tomb and let in the first sliver of “rational” fresh air. Maybe the whole point is to turn criticism into one gigantic padded room so poetry can run rabid and bash against the walls in relative comfort and peace. Poetry could be something like what Kerouac describes: “The complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows . . . a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. 501 ” In which case, the next project for Chaucer studies could be to take the new generation’s coiled matter and energy, all the great force and holy foolishness for poetry it has been secretly gathering into a terrible density the size of the common pea, stage some experimental performance of cosmic origins, and – just like that prehistoric pea—aim the cannon in the wrong direction, light the fuse, go shooting across the sky like old- timey circus daredevils, and get busy scorching the vacuum with raw materials. Even if doing so means accepting the newborn Second Law that prophecies your own entropic heat death. They probably just need to be told it’s “O.K.”

The Moral of the Story The end of this poem tells us to “Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille” (3443). It tells us to solve an old riddle and to keep an even 206 CHAUCER AND THE DEATH OF POLITICAL ANIMAL older secret. In a poem about reversing things to beginnings, it seems appropriate that the moralitas would do the same. There is a story about a chicken, born of art, who spends his happy hours in the eternity that never fell. The bad news never reached him. Everything he does, he does as an oracle. Even when he eats corn, he eats it like an oracle. Dinner for him is something called alectryomancy : “Divination by means of a cock with grains of corn.” 502 It was common enough in the ancient world. An alphabet was drawn in a circle with a piece of corn to cover every letter. 503 Whichever letters the chicken revealed would spell the answer to a prophecy. “Taketh the fruyt,” because there is a secret language under it. If we let him, Chauntecleer could accidentally reveal it every time he is hungry. He’ll spell it out in Clotho’s alphabet. One missing letter at a time. That is the difference between Phoebus’s bird and Chauntecleer. When one story ends, a bird will “evere crie agayn tempest and rayn” ( Manciple’s Tale , 301). Another ends how it began: a floating bird, a world without gravity, and a farm covered in delicious prophecies. “Hym deigned nat to sette his foot to grounde. / He chukketh whan he hath a corn yfounde” (3181–3182). Of course, as Charles Willeford wrote in a 1959 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s weekly crime magazine, “’I didn’t know there any practitioners of alectryomancy left in the Atomic Age’ . . . The science is crazy . . . Still , an article about a practicing alectryomancer would be of interest to a great many people, and I needed the money . . . ‘Where,’ I asked my maid, ‘does the old man with the rooster live?’” 504 Cicero laments in De divinatione that “the sacred chickens” are all but extinct now because of “forced augury.” 505 We intervened on their behalf. Chauntecleer is an endangered species, forced to tell truths he wasn’t born to tell. “Many auguries and auspices have been entirely abandoned and lost. 506 Cicero says we lost our oracles to noise . But it wasn’t always like this. “In our forefathers’ time the magistrates on such occasions used to call in some expert person to take the auspices.” 507 Who are the experts? Who do we call in to “take the auspices” when the greatest chicken in literature is under attack? Cicero tells us. “One must be an expert to know what constitutes silence .” 508 To save Chauntecleer, bring in the experts of “silence,” “for by that term, we mean free of every augural defect. To understand that belongs to a perfect augur.” 509 It can be a great thrill to reconvene these “experts of silence,” to discover they live inside these stories, that there were things about poetry they worked hard to protect, that Chaucer was one of them. Take the fruit and leave the chaff. I think every Chaucerian would like to lend a hand in that task, whatever it means. Perhaps out of some duty to “the THE LOST WORLD OF THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE 207 slumbering echoes in the caverns of Memory.” 510 In the words of Orwell, “What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.” 511 For my part, I hope someone might read this book one day and find some truth in a simple intuition: that it’s best to guard our original instinct, the one with which we arrived to literature. Mine happens to be that the most interesting thing about Geoffrey Chaucer is not that he was alive during the 1380s, but that he was alive when he wrote the Canterbury Tales .

NOTES

1 Poetry’s Old War 1 . Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , in The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 100. 2 . Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , 98. 3 . Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , 101. 4 . D.W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 365. 5 . Yasunari Takada, “Chaucer’s Use of Neoplatonic Traditions,” in Platonism and the English Imagination , ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45. 6 . The theology of salvation. In Augustine’s context, as effected through the Incarnation. 7 . Augustine, Against the Academicians , in Against the Academicians and the Teacher , trans. Peter King (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Inc., 1995), 92. 8 . Augustine, Of True Religion , in Augustine: Earlier Writings , trans. J.H.S. Burleigh (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006[ ad 390/391]), 229. 9 . Augustine, Confessions (vii: ix), from The Confessions of Saint Augustine , trans. E.M. Blaiklock (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2009), 171. 10 . Peter King, “Introduction,” Against the Academicians and the Teacher , vii–viii. 11 . Samuel Daniels, “To the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland,” in The London Book of English Verse, ed. Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobré e (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949), 556. 12 . Revelation 21:23. Unless otherwise stated, all biblical references are to the King James Version. 13 . William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in Read and Dobr é e, London Book of English Verse , 562. 14 . G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912), 248. 15 . Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men , 248. 210 NOTES

16 . Plato, The Republic , trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover Publications, 2000), 179. 17 . Plato, The Republic , 180. 18 . Cicero, “The Dream of Scipio,” in On the Good Life , trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1971), 354. 19 . “The method of mythological interpretation that regards myths as traditional accounts of real incidents in human history”; “euhemerism,” Oxford English Dictionary: Volume III (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933). 20 . Lewis Spencer, An Introduction to Mythology (New York: Moffat and Company, 1921), 42. 21 . Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , 98. 22 . Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor , trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 254. 23 . All references to Chaucer’s work are to the Riverside Chaucer , ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987). 24 . Marc Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony in the Roman de la Rose , (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1987), viii. 25 . “The soul is eternal and has seen the realm of Forms in heaven. But when the soul comes into the body, this knowledge needs to be recollected. Recollection is the process of learning, and because all the particulars are imperfect copies of the Forms, they can only act as reminders”; “recollection,” The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy , ed. Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 26 . Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , 101. 27 . For instance, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 686 (c. 1420) con- tains an alliterative scribal ending to the Cook’s Tale in which Perkyn receives his just desserts according to a straightforward moral matrix of sin and punishment, while twentieth-century critic J. Leslie Hotson attempts a one-to-one correspondence between the col fox and a fourteenth-century “Mr. Richard Colfox.” J. Leslie Hotson, Colfox vs. Chauntecleer , PMLA, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 1924): 762–781. Both, over the long arc of human history, either deliberately anchor Chaucer’s poetry to the conditions of waking life for some larger metapoetic purpose or accidentally prove in practice the reverse alchemy the literalist hermeneutic. 28 . J.O. Ward, “Rhetoric in the Faculty of Arts at the Universities of Paris and Oxford in the Middle Ages: A Summary of the Evidence,” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi, Vol. 54 (1996): 160. 29 . Cicero, De Senectute (v.13) from Cicero: De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione , trans. William Armistead Falconer (London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 23. 30 . Cicero, De Amicitia (iv.15, ii.10), 125, 119. 31 . Cicero, De Amicitia (iv.13–14), 123. 32 . Macrobius, Commentary of the Dream of Scipio , trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 81. NOTES 211

33 . I will refer to characters as “interlocutors” in order to emphasize their role as practitioners of rhetorical rather than psychological modes; “interlocutor,” “One who takes part in a dialogue, conversation, or discussion.” Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 34 . I use “aporia” consistently in its most extreme sense: an insoluble contradiction. In the context of this book it describes a Platonic impasse between art and history and epistemology and ontology; “[from Greek a , not + poros , path, passage; literally, no way through]”; “aporia,” Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy . 35 . See for instance Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962) and Sheldon Sax, On Metaphor (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1980). 36 . See G.R.F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 37 . Peter Travis, “Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor,” Speculum , Vol. 72, No. 2 (April 1997): 424. 38 . R.J. Tarrant, “Aeneas and the Gates of Sleep,” Classical Philology , Vol. 1, No. 55 (January 1982): 51–55. 39 . Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010): 98. 40 . Manciple’s Tale (243). 41 . Nun’s Priest’s Tale (3277). 42 . Augustine, The Teacher , in King, 137. 43 . Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (xxxiii: 124–126, 136–138), in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri , trans. Geoffrey L. Bickersteth (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1972), 769. 44 . Andrew Hussey, Par is: A Secret History (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2006), 12. 45 . In the time of Augustus the great booksellers were the Sosii. 46 . The displays of the Pitt Rivers Museum are organized according to typological series. For instance, in the section dedicated to “Magic, Witchcraft and Trial by Ordeal” one finds objects used for both defense: “Oxfordshire. Black slug [sic] impaled on a thorn, a cure for warts. Donated by Thomas James Carter ” (1898.71.1) and offense: “Silvered & stoppered bottle said to contain a witch. Obtained about 1915 from an old lady living in a village near HOVE, SUSSEX. She remarked ‘and they do say there be a witch in it, and if you let un out there’ll be a peck o’ trouble.’” Pres. by Miss M. A. Murray, 1926 ” (1926.6.1). 47 . Ovid, Amores (I: XII), In The Hero ïdes, Or Epistles of the Heroines. The Amours. Art of Love , Remedy of Love: And Minor Works of Ovid , trans. Henry T. Riley (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), 295. 48 . “In a film (now also in a novel or other form of narrative fiction): “a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops”; “Macguffin,” Oxford English Dictionary: Third Edition 212 NOTES

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). The Macguffin achieved canonicity in the films of Hitchcock. 49 . Derek Pearsall, “Towards a Poetics of Chaucerian Narrative,” in Drama, Narrative and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales , ed. Wendy Harding (Toulouse: Presses Universitaire du Mirail, 2003), 110. 50 . Pearsall, “Chaucerian Narrative,” 111. 51 . Pearsall, “Chaucerian Narrative,” 111. 52 . T.F. Thielston Dyer, “The Cat and Its Folklore,” The Gentleman’s Magazine , Vol. 252 (January– 1882), 604. 53 . Concerning the history of the Tithonus myth I am indebted to the kind assistance of Professor Richard Janko and his forthcoming article “Tithonus and Eos in the New Sappho (fr. 58.1123), with a Note on Horace Odes 1.22.” 54 . “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” In Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer , trans. Martin L. West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 177. 55 . “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” 177fn48. 56 . Hellanicus, “Fragment 140,” quoted in Janko, “Tithonus and Eos in the New Sappho,” 20, trans. Janko. 57 . Homer, Iliad , trans. Samuel Butler (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009), 60. 58 . Cicero, On the Good Life , 354. 59 . Cicero, De Senectute . 60 . Hunter H. Gardner, Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. 61 . Rory. B. Egan, “Cicada in Ancient Greece: Ventures in Classical Tettigology,” Cultural Entomology Digest , No. 3 (November 1994): 21. 62 . Janko, “Tithonus and Eos in the New Sappho,” 21. 63 . Callimachus, Aetia (29–38), in Callimachus: Fragments , trans. Cedric Whitman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 9. Whitman adds the footnote, “The ‘voice’ of the cicada is frequently used in Greek poetry as a simile for sweet sounds. The cicala, according to Plato . . . is the favourite of the Muses, and in Alexandrian poetry poets are compared to, or called after it.” 64 . “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” 177. 65 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 131. 66 . Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII , trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1973), 70. 67 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 68 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 69 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 70 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 71 . “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” 177. 72 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 73 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. NOTES 213

74 . T.S. Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday,” Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1952), 62. 75 . Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday,” 66. 76 . Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas , 26. 77 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 78 . G.M.A. Grube, Plato’s Thought (London: The Athelone Press, 1980), 188. 79 . Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (665–660). Quoted in Mark P.O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, Sixth Edition (New York: Longman, 1999), 548. 80 . Callimachus, Aetia , 9. 81 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , unless otherwise stated, all references are to trans. A.S. Kline, The Ovid Project, Electronic Text (University of Virginia, 2000), xi, 172–193, http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome. htm#askline. Kline’s translation is arranged in sections, with each headed by the corresponding lines in the Latin text. 82 . F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 203. 83 . John Updike, “Introduction,” in Henry D. Thoreau, Walden , ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ix. 84 . Alistair Minnis, “The Trouble with Theology,” in Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice , ed. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 33. 85 . Callimachus, Aetia , 9. 86 . Num bers 22:21–38. 87 . Ephesians 4:22–24. “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” 88 . Cicero, De Senectute (x.32), 41. 89 . Gudrun Richardson, “The Old Man in the Pardoner’s Tale : An Interpretive Study of His Identity and Meaning,” Neophilologus , Vol. 87 (2003): 324. 90 . Gardner, Gendering Time , 224. 91 . David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators , (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 26. 92 . Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1907), 890. 93 . Cicero, De Senectute (v.13), 23. 94 . “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” 177. 95 . “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” 177. 96 . “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” 177. 97 . Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales , ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1958), 415–438. 98 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 130. 99 . Cicero, De Senectute (xi.38), 47. 214 NOTES

100 . L’envoy de Chaucer a Scogan (47). See also, Alfred Davis, “Chaucer’s Good Counsel to Scogan,” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 3, No. 4 (Spring 1969): 273. 101 . Cicero, De Senectute (x.32), 41. 102 . Cicero, De Senectute (xxii.83), 95. 103 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 104 . Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Tithonus,” in Read and Dobr é e, London Book of English Verse , 538. 105 . Tennyson, “Tithonus,” in London Book of English Verse , 538. 106 . Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Collected Poems of Robert Frost (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943), 272. 107 . Homer, Iliad , trans. Butler, 60. 108 . The Lady from Shanghai , dir. Orson Wells, Screenplay Orson Wells, Perf. Rita Hayworth, Orson Wells. Columbia Pictures. 1947. Film. 109 . William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), xviii. 110 . Cicero, De Senectute (xxii.83), 95.

2 The Broken Flood of the Miller’s Tale 1 . Nehemiah 9:32. 2 . Psalm 62:7. 3 . House of Fame (1130). 4 . Proverbs 16:18. 5 . Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol , (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1915), 90. 6 . “Churl,” Merriam-Webster.com, Web, 11 October 2014, http://www. merriamwebster.com/dictionary/churl . 7 . I use “anagogical” as it pertains to a wider and more remote referential horizon of religious meaning in symbolist aesthetics rather than a category of exegetical hermeneutics. 8 . Katherine Zieman, “Chaucer’s Voys ,” Representations , Vol. 60 (Fall 1997): 70. 9 . Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators , 23. 10 . Charles Bukowski, “An Almost Made Up Poem,” Love Is a God from Hell (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 47. 11 . Alexander Pope, “Chaos,” Read and Dobr é e, London Book of English Verse , 525. 12 . Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 103. 13 . Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 208. 14 . The Good Wife’s Guide (Le Mé nagier de Paris): Le m é nagier de Paris: A Medieval Household Book , trans. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). NOTES 215

15 . The Good Wife’s Guide , 1, 11. 16 . Augustine, Soliloquies (II.18), trans. C.C. Starbuck, in Nicene and Post- Nicene Fathers First Series, St. Augustine: Gospel of John, First Epistle of John, Soliliques , ed. Philip Schaff (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 553 17 . Made famous by Star Wars , the “opening crawl” refers to the direct address scrolling text that was a trademark of early genre serials like Flash Gordon in the 1930s. 18 . “Storial,” “Historically true, belonging to history,” Middle English Dictionary , ed. Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1975). 19 . Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 24. 20 . Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 31. 21 . Leonard Michael Koff, Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 51. 22 . Koff, Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling , 31. 23 . Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 133. 24 . Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays , ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2003), 13. 25 . Richard C. Dales, The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995): 32. 26 . Winthrop Wetherbee, “Philosophy, Cosmology, and the Renaissance,” in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy , ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 30. 27 . Boethius, De institutione arithmetica , ed. Gottfried Friedlein (Leipzig: B.G. Teubneri, 1867), 9–10. Quoted in Wetherbee, Philosophy, Cosmology, and the Renaissance , 30. 28 . Boethius, De institutione arithmetica , in Wetherbee, Philosophy, Cosmology, and the Renaissance , 50. 29 . “The thermodynamic condition of maximum entropy, the most disor- dered state, in which the least amount of energy is available for useful work”; “Entropy,” The Oxford English Dictionary Online, Second Edition , 1989. 30 . Manciple’s Tale , 107. 31 . Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators , 8. 32 . Rabbinic commentary on Genesis 1:27 postulates that Adam’s first wife was Lilith. Eve was created later. Lilith expels herself from Eden by pro- nouncing “the secret Name of God.” She flees to a cave and takes demons for lovers. Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 216. 33 . Mark Miller, “Naturalism and Its Discontents,” ELH , Vol. 67 (2000): 26. 34 . Erik Hertog, Chaucer’s Fabliaux as Analogues (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991), 120. 216 NOTES

35 . Richard Daniels, “Textual Pleasure in the Miller’s Tale ,” in The Performance of Middle English Culture. Essays on Chaucer and the Drama , ed. J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylivia Tomasch (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998), 116. 36 . Louise M. Bishop, “‘Of Goddes pryvetee nor of his wyf’: Confusion of Orifices in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language , Vol. 44, No. 3 (Fall 2002): 240. 37 . Bishop, “Confusion of Orifices,” 240. 38 . Homer, The Odyssey , trans. A.T. Murray (London: William Heinemann, 1927), 183. 39 . Homer, The Odyssey , trans. Murray, 183. 40 . Hesiod, Theogony , in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica , trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge:Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914), 87. 41 . Related in Italian to “naughty” and defined in English as: “Music. A name variously applied but usually denoting a composition of lively character, and more or less free in form.” “ Capriccio ,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Second Edition , 1989. 42 . Jesse M. Gellrich, “Nicholas’ ‘Kynges Noote’ and ‘Melodye,’” ELN , Vol. 8 (1971): 252. Quoted in T.L. Burton and Rosemary Greentree, Chaucer’s Miller’s, Reeve’s, and Cook’s Tales: An Annotated Bibliography 1900–1902 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 187n.538. 43 . Boethius, Fundamentals of Music , trans. Calvin M. Bower, ed. Claude V. Palisca (London: Yale University Press, 1989), 2. 44 . Robert Barnard, Death of a Literary Widow (Posthumous Papers) (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1981), 95. 45 . Excessive or abnormal sexual craving in the male. 46 . Fear of genitals, particularly female. 47 . Miller, “Naturalism and Its Discontents,” 19. 48 . Miller, “Naturalism and Its Discontents,” 19. 49 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 130. 50 . George Orwell, Animal Farm and 1984 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), 109. 51 . General Prologue , 54. 52 . Strohm, Social Chaucer , 136. 53 . “A distorted projection or drawing that appears normal when viewed from a particular point or with a suitable mirror or lens.” “anamor- phosis,” Oxford English Dictionary , Third Edition . See, for instance, Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors , 1533, Oil on oak, National Gallery, London. A distorted image at bottom center becomes a human skull when viewed from the side. 54 . “caricature.” The New Oxford American Dictionary , ed. Elizabeth J. Jewell and Frank Abate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 55 . Hesiod, Theogony , 87. 56 . Richard Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute: Literature and History in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 29 (1994): 135. NOTES 217

57 . Miller’s Tale , 3274, 3400, 3659, 3274. 58 . V.A. Kolve, “Nature, Youth, and Nowell’s Flood,” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: A Casebook , ed. Lee Patterson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 86, 87. 59 . “tikel,” Middle English Dictionary , http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/ med-idx?type=id&id=MED45812 . 60 . “tickle,” The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, Vol, VIII (New York: The Century Co., 1903). 61 . Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and His Social Contest (New York: Routledge, 2013), 44. 62 . Marijane Osborn, Time and the Astrolabe in the Canterbury Tales (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 189. 63 . Cliff Slaughter, Marxism & the Class Struggle (London: New Park Publi- cations, 1975), 162. 64 . Flavius Josephus, The History and Antiquity of the Jews (I. ii. 2), in The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus , trans. William Whiston (Chicago, IL: Thompson & Thomas, 1901), 30. 65 . Genesis 4:15. 66 . Genesis 4:17. 67 . “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” Genesis 4:16. 68 . Matthew 24:37–38. 69 . Matthew 24:36. 70 . Genesis 7:11. 71 . Genesis 7:19. 72 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 73 . Matthew 24:36. 74 . Matthew 24:29. 75 . Matthew 24:5. 76 . Richard Sorabji, “Time, Mysticism, and Creation,” In Augustine’s Confessions: Critical Essays , ed. William E. Mann (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), 218. 77 . Cath é dral Notre-Dame de Chartres, Vitrail 47, No é (ca. 1215). 78 . Wetherbee, “Philosophy, Cosmology, and the Renaissance,” 56. 79 . Genesis 5:29. 80 . Genesis 5:32. 81 . Genesis 7:6. 82 . Genesis 9:21. 83 . Matthew 3:3. 84 . Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , trans. Robert-Hullot Kenter, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedmann (London: Continuum, 2002), 271. 85 . Cabrol, Fernand, “Lauds,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/09038a.htm. 218 NOTES

86 . Daniels, “Textual Pleasure in the Miller’s Tale ,” 116. 87 . Alvin W. Bowker, “Comic Illusion and Dark Reality in ‘The Miller’s Tale,’” Modern Language Studies , Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 1974): 27. 88 . Bowker, “Comic Illusion and Dark Reality,” 32. 89 . Genesis 7:11. 90 . Matthew 24:36. 91 . Matthew 24:39. 92 . 1 Corinthians 15:17–19. “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” 93 . Matthew 24:36. 94 . Stephen Gersh, “Anselm of Canterbury,” in Peter Dronke (ed.), A History of Twelfth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 273. 95 . Gersh, “Anselm of Canterbury.” 96 . John Dryden, “Finite Reason,” in Read and Dobr é e, London Book of English Verse , 529. 97 . Artaud, Theatre and Its Double , 24. 98 . Artaud, Theatre and Its Double , 31. 99 . Gersh, “Anselm of Canterbury,” 275. 100 . Gersh, “Anselm of Canterbury,” 275. 101 . Strohm, Social Chaucer , 136. 102 . Strohm, Social Chaucer , 136. 103 . Parliament of Fowls , 67–69. 104 . Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Mineola: Dover Thrift Editions, 1995), 75. 105 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 131. 106 . Miller, “Naturalism and Its Discontents.” 8. 107 . Carroll, The Annotated Alice , 98. 108 . Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Lenoir: Reformation Press, 2002), 36. 109 . Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 24. 110 . Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 29. 111 . William Bridges Hunter, A Milton Encyclopedia, Volume 5 (Cranbery: Associated University Press, 1979), 143. 112 . Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (441ff), in Aeschylus, Vol. I , trans. Herbert Weir Smyth (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 259. 113 . James Thompson, “The City of Dreadful Night,” in Read and Dobr é e, London Book of English Verse , 547. 114 . Daniels, “Textual Pleasure in the Miller’s Tale,” 121. 115 . Thompson, “The City of Dreadful Night,” in Read and Dobr é e, London Book of English Verse, 547. 116 . Thompson, “The City of Dreadful Night, in Read and Dobré e, London Book of English Verse , 545. 117 . Alexander Pope, “Chaos,” in Read and Dobr é e, London Book of English Verse , 525. NOTES 219

118 . Themis is the goddess of divine rather than human law. She later became one of the Oracles at Delphi. M. Finley, The World of Odysseus (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 78n. 119 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus or the Good and Perfect Man , ed. and trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973), 94. 120 . Samuel Butler, Hudibras (ii. 797), in Hudibras: Volume II , ed. Zachary Grey (London: Charles & Henry Baldwin, 1819), 234. 121 . Travis, Disseminal Chaucer , 209. 122 . “Thalassophobia,” Lippincott’s Pocket Medical Dictionary: Including the Pronunciation and Definition of Twenty Thousand of the Principal Terms Used in Medicine and the Allied Sciences, Together with Many Elaborate Tables , ed. Ryland W. Greene (Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1897). 123 . Kari Snyder, “Attack of the Water Monster,” Boating Magazine , Vol. 76, No. 4 (April, 2003): 44. 124 . Hesiod, Theogony , 131. 125 . Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 33. 126 . Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 161. 127 . Strohm, Social Chaucer , 136. 128 . K. H. Blacker and Normund Wong, “Four Cases of Autocastration,” Archives of General Psychiatry , Vol. 8, No. 2 (1963): 169. 129 . Chesterton, Orthodoxy , 35. 130 . Wetherbee, Philosophy, Cosmology, and the Renaissance, 50. 131 . Genesis 9:14–15. 132 . Revelation 20:9. 133 . Josephus, The History and Antiquity of the Jews , 30. 134 . A.V.C. Schmidt, “Chaucer and the Golden Age,” Essays in Criticism , Vol. 26, No. 2 (April 1976), 102. 135 . Homer, Odyssey , 183. 136 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 97. 137 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 102. 138 . General Prologue , 6. 139 . Bob Stencil Goes to Comic Con , Perf. Kyle Ray, YouTube, 31 January 2006. Bob Stencil used to fly planes for Braniff International, but in 1982 they went bankrupt. Since then he’s been crooning, MCing, and teaching poker in Southern California, Las Vegas, and Reno. Every year he travels to the San Diego Comic-Con to chat with old friends, 140 . Daniel 11:31. 141 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 274–292, The Ovid Project, Electronic Text, University of Virginia, 2000. http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome. htm#askline. Kline’s translation is arranged in paragraphs, with each paragraph headed by the corresponding lines in the Latin text. 142 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 274–292, trans. Kline. 143 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i: 313–347, trans. Kline. 220 NOTES

144 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i: 313–347, trans. Kline. 145 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i: 348–380, trans. Kline. 146 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i: 381–415, trans. Kline. 147 . Artaud, Theatre of Cruelty , in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings , trans. Helen Weaver, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 243. 148 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i: 381–415, trans. Kline.

3 The Runaway Gods of the Manciple’s Tale 1 . Osborne, Time and the Astrolabe in the Canterbury Tales , 114. 2 . Strohm, Social Chaucer , 133. 3 . É douard Jeauneau, Rethinking the School of Chartres (North York: The University of Toronto Press, 2009), 98. 4 . Ann W. Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 100. 5 . Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose , ed. Felix Lecoy (Paris: Honor é Champion, 1965–1970), 16756. 6 . Jamie C. Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority and Chaucerian Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 68. 7 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 145. 8 . F.N.M. Diekstra, “Chaucer’s Digressive Mode and the Moral of the Manciple’s Tale,” Neophilologus , Vol. 67 (1983): 131. 9 . Fumo, “Thinking upon the Crow: The Manciple’s Tale and Ovidian Mythography,” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 38, No. 4 (2004): 355. 10 . Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1985), 238. 11 . Augustine, Soliloquies, II.18, trans. Starbuck, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , 553. 12 . Loren C. Gruber, “The Manciple’s Tale : One Key to Chaucer’s Language,” in New Views on Chaucer: Essays in Generative Criticism , ed. William C. Johnson and Loren C. Gruber (Denver, CO: The Society for New Language Study, 1973), 43. 13 . Ovid and Chaucer share a certain playfulness on the subject of small boats and divine floods. “There one man escapes to a hilltop, while another seated in his rowing boat pulls the oars over places where lately he was ploughing. One man sails over his cornfields or over the roof of his drowned farmhouse, while another man fishes in the topmost branches of an elm.” Metamorphoses , i. 293–312, trans. Kline. As previously noted, in Kline’s translation each Book is arranged in paragraphs, with each paragraph headed by the corresponding line references in the Latin text. The searchable translation is hyperlinked to a mythological index, hosted by the University of Virginia. http://ovid.lib.virginia. edu/trans/Ovhome.htm. 14 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 1–20. 15 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. NOTES 221

16 . See, for instance, J. Burke Severs, “Is the Manciple’s Tale a Success?” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology , Vol. 51 (1952): 1–16; Diekstra, “Chaucer’s Digressive Mode; and Fumo, “Thinking upon the Crow.” 17 . Severs, “Is the Manciple’s Tale a Success?” 3. 18 . Pelen, “The Manciple’s ‘Cosyn’ to the ‘Dede,’” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 25, No. 4 (1991): 343. 19 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 20 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 145. 21 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 91. 22 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 23 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 24 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 25 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 544–545, trans. Mary M. Innes (London: Penguin, 1971), 64. 26 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 27 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 551–552, trans. Innes, 65. 28 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 570–571, trans. Innes, 65. 29 . Ov id, Metamorphoses , ii. 566–595. 30 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 566–595. 31 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 566–595. 32 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 566–595. 33 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 566–595. 34 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 35 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 36 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 37 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 38 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 39 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 40 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 812–832. 41 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 42 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 596–597, trans. Innes, 66. 43 . Ovid, Metamorphoses, ii. 618, trans. Innes, 66. 44 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 618, trans. Innes, 66. 45 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 596–611. 46 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 612–632. 47 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 618, trans. Innes, 65. 48 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 612–632. 49 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 633–675. 50 . Pindar, Pythian Ode III, in The Odes of Pindar, Including the Principal Fragments , trans. John Sandys (London: William Heinemann, 1915), 189. 51 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 633–675. 52 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 633–675. 53 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 633–675. 54 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 438–472. 55 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 525–552. 222 NOTES

56 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 548–552, trans. Innes, 43. 57 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 612–632. 58 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 552, 554–556, trans. Innes, 43. 59 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 564–565, trans. Innes, 44. 60 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 558–559, trans. Innes, 44. 61 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 618, trans. Innes, 65. 62 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 556, trans. Innes, 43. 63 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 612–632. 64 . Cicero, On the Good Life , 346. 65 . Bernard F. Dick, “The Waste Land and the Descensus ad Inferos ,” Canadian Review of Contemporary Literature , Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 1975): 35. 66 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , x. 36–37, trans. Innes, 226. 67 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , x. 81–85, trans. Innes, 227. 68 . Plato, Symposium , trans. W.R.M. Lamb (London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 105. 69 . Par doner’s Tale, 729–731. 70 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 612–632. 71 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 618, trans. Innes, 66. 72 . Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1870), 240. 73 . Alain de Lille, The Plaint of Nature , trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), 125. 74 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , III. x. 3–4, in The Library: Vol. II , trans. James Frazer (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 17. 75 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , III. x. 3–4, trans. Frazer, 19. 76 . Hebrews 9:27. 77 . John 3:7. 78 . John 3:3. 79 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , x. 1–85. 80 . Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey , trans. Thomas Taylor (London: John M. Watkins, 1917), 58n25. 81 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 612–632. 82 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , vi. 121–122a, trans. Innes, 137. 83 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , vi. 103–104, trans. Innes, 137. 84 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 85 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 86 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 87 . Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 19. 88 . Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales , 238. 89 . Frankie Lymon, Herman Santiago, and Jimmy Merchant, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” The Teenagers Featuring Frankie Lymon , Gee Records, 1956, LP. 90 . The Maltese Falcon , dir. John Huston, perf. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Warner Bros Pictures, 1941, film. 91 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. NOTES 223

92 . Pelen, “The Manciple’s ‘Cosyn’ to the ‘Dede,’” 349. 93 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 558–559, trans. Innes, 44. 94 . “A disturbed state of consciousness in which the one affected seems to perform acts in full awareness but upon recovery cannot recollect the acts performed.” “Fugue,” Merriam-Webster.com, http://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fugue . 95 . Diekstra, “Chaucer’s Digressive Mode,” 141. 96 . Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Capitalist Production , trans. Samuel Moore, Edward Bibbins Aveling, and Ernest Untermann (Chicago, IL: C.H. Kerr & Company, 1915), 833. 97 . Marx, Capital , 833. 98 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 433–462, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 14. 99 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , I.iv.1, trans. Frazer, 27. 100 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 381–415. 101 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 1–20. 102 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 21–31. 103 . Hyginus, Fabulae , trans. and ed. Mary Grant (Lawrence, MO: University of Kansas Publications, 1960), 115. 104 . Hyginus, Fabulae , 116. 105 . Hyginus, Fabulae , 116. 106 . Hyginus, Fabulae , 116.. 107 . Hyginus, Fabulae , 116.. 108 . Hyginus, Fabulae , 116.. 109 . Metamorphoses , i. 438–472. 110 . Aaron J. Atsma, “Python,” The Theoi Project: Greek Mythology (2001– 2011) , http://www.theoi.com/. 111 . Mich èle Mendelssohn, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2007), 233. 112 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i: 438–472. 113 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i: 438–472. 114 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 102. 115 . Anthony Welch, The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 16. 116 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , III.v.5, trans. Frazer, 339. 117 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , III.v.5, trans. Frazer, 338fn. 118 . Horace, Epistle 1.18 in Horace’s Satires and Epistles , trans. Jacob Fuchs (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 70. 119 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , III.v.5, trans. Frazer, 339fn. 120 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , III.v.5, trans. Frazer, 339fn. 121 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , III.v.5, trans. Frazer, 339fn. 122 . Euripides, The Phoenissae , trans. E.P. Coleridge, in The Complete Greek Drama , ed. Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O’Neill Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938), 824. 123 . Euripides, The Phoenician Women , trans. Peter Burian and Brian Swann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 24. 224 NOTES

124 . Euripides, The Phoenician Women , 24. 125 . Charles Fantazzi, “Vives against the Pseudodialecticians,” in Erika Rummel, Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 110. 126 . Vives, in Augustine, Of the Citie of God. With the Learned Comments of Jo. Lod. Vives , trans. John Healey (London: George Eld, 1610), 684. Quoted by R.W. Maslen in Philip Sidney, An Apology For Poetry (Or The Defence Of Poesy): Revised and Expanded Second Edition , ed. R.W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 124fn.22. 127 . David K. Coley, Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377–1422 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 31. 128 . Coley, Wheel of Language , 31. 129 . Frank Sinatra, “Put Your Dreams Away (For Another Day),” Columbia Records, 1945, LP. 130 . Homer, Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu, D.C.H. Rieu (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2003), 102. 131 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i. 151–176. 132 . Claudian, Gigantomachi a , in Claudian: Carmina Minora Vol. II, trans. Maurice Platnauer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1922), 287. 133 . Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica , trans. J.H. Mozley. (London: William Heinemann, 1934), 73. 134 . Plato, Timaeus , 47C, in Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5. 135 . Ovid, Metamorphoses, ii. 612–632. 136 . Arthur C. Aufderheide, The Scientific Study of Mummies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47. 137 . “The Weighing of the Heart,” from The Papyrus of Ani (Book of the Dead) . Nineteenth Dynasty, ca. 1275 B.C. Papyrus, painted (London, British Museum EA 10470/3). 138 . Robert L. Tignor, Egypt: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 74. 139 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 140 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 31–48. 141 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 142 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 531–565. 143 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 596–611. 144 . Aristotle, Metaphysics , XII. 1072, b3, quoted in Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 206. 145 . Aristotle, Parts of Animals , 645, quoted in Corrigan, Reading Plotinus , 206. 146 . Corrgian, Reading Plotinus , 206. 147 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , vi. 103–104. 148 . Homer , The Odyssey , 123. NOTES 225

149 . Janet Coleman, “The Christian Platonism of St. Augustine,” in Platonism and the English Imagination , 31. 150 . Homer, The Odyssey , 183. 151 . Hesiod, Theogony , 133. 152 . Margaret F. Nims, “Translatio: Difficult Statement in Medieval Poetic Theory,” University of Toronto Quarterly , Vol. 42, No. 3 (Spring 1974): 215. 153 . John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats The Complete Poems , ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 279 154 . George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1977), 289. 155 . Among available analogues only two others do not feature the child: Gower’s brief proverbial poem in the Confessio and the Seven Sages of Rome , which also does not feature Phoebus. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales II (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), 749–774. 156 . In Metamorphoses II , Jupiter appears as a bull and abducts Europa. 157 . Troilus and Criseyde , V: 1790. 158 . Troilus and Criseyde , V: 1791–1792. 159 . John Donne, A Valediction of Forbidding Mourning , In Poems of John Donne: Vol. I , ed. E.K. Chambers (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896), 51–52. 160 . Arnold E. Davidson, “The Logic of Confusion in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale ,” Annuale Mediaevale , Vol. 19 (1979): 5. 161 . John of Salisbury, Policraticus , 1.6, quoted in Laure Hermand-Shebat, “John of Salisbury and Classical Antiquity,” in A Companion to John of Salisbury , ed. Christophe Grellard and Fré dé rique Lachaud (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 191. 162 . Nims, “Translatio,” 216. 163 . Natalia Gagarina, “The Early Verb Development and Demarcation of Stages in Three Russian-Speaking Children,” in Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective , ed. Dagmar Bittner, Wolfgang U. Dressler, and Marianne Kilani-Schoch (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 139. 164 . Travis, Disseminal , 243. See Charles Nodier, Dictionnaire Raisonné des Onomatop ées Fran çaises (Paris: Demoville, 1808). Travis’s discussions of Nodier are conducted with reference to G é rard Genette, Mimologics , trans. Thaï s E. Morgan (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 165 . Genette, Mimologics , 125. 166 . Jeauneau, Rethinking the School of Chartres , 68. 167 . Stewart Justman, “Literal and Symbolic in the ‘Canterbury Tales,’” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 14, No. 3 (Winter 1980): 212. 168 . John of Salsbury, Metalogicon , IV, 35, quoted in Ralph McInery, A History of Western Philosophy (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 159. 169 . Pelen, Cosyn to the Dede , 348. 226 NOTES

170 . Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language , trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), 12. 171 . Jody Endgers, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 71. 172 . Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy , trans. S.J. Tester, in The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy , trans. H.F Stewart, H.K. Rand, and S.J. Tester (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1973), 307. 173 . John 2:19–20. 174 . John 15:1–2. 175 . Jeffrey Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History in the Center of Dante’s Paradise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 163, quoted in Travis, Disseminal , 216. 176 . Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103 177 . Pelen, Cosyn to the dede , 103. 178 . Coley, Wheel of Language , 51. 179 . Coley, Wheel of Language , 51. 180 . Mark Amsler, Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages , (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1989), 33. 181 . Amsler, Etymology and Grammatical Discourse , 27. 182 . John J. McGavin, “How Nasty Is Phoebus’ Crow?” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 21, No. 4 (1987): 449. 183 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 102. 184 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 102. 185 . McGavin, “How Nasty Is Phoebus’ Crow?” 452. 186 . Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo , 217. 187 . Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 140 . 188 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i.558–559. 189 . Hesiod, “To Delian Apollo,” III. 108–134, in The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica , 333. 190 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 618, trans. Innes, 66. 191 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , ii. 551–552, trans. Innes, 65. 192 . Alan Bennett, The History Boys (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2006), 61. 193 . Nodier, Dictionnaire des Onomatop ées Fran çaises , quoted in Travis, Disseminal , 243 and Genette, Mimologics , 123. 194 . Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 3217. 195 . Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 2980. 196. V.J. Scattergood, “The Manciple’s Manner of Speaking,” Essays in Criticism , Vol. 24 (1974): 140. 197 . Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo , 367. 198 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , quoted in James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 246. NOTES 227

199 . Michael Kensak, “The Silences of Pilgrimage: ‘Manciple’s Tale, Paradiso, Anticlaudianus,’” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 34, No. 2 (1999): 193. 200 . Octavio Paz, Alternating Current , trans. Helen Lane (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991), 68–69. 201 . Boethius, Consolatio . Tester, 221. 202 . George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3. 203 . Steiner, Real Presences , 4. 204 . Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 3277.

4 The Lost World of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale 1 . Takada, “Chaucer’s use of Neoplatonic Traditions,” 45. 2 . E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1970), 146. 3 . Emmet T. Flood, “Augustine and the Classical Tradition of Rhetoric,” History of Education , Vol. 11, No. 4 (1982): 239. 4 . Flood, “Augustine and the Classical Tradition of Rhetoric,” 239. 5 . Black, Models and Metaphors , 37. 6 . Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: University of Cornell Press, 1981), 9. Clearly, or perhaps not, this is not the most opportune moment to trace in Platonic and Marxist theory what I find to be similar instincts to achieve philosophical power through a “unity of opposites.” It will have to wait. Suffice it to say, as indeed other Marxists have, that “The range of application for the categories of mechanical causality is extremely narrow.” V.N. Vološ inov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , trans. Ladislav Matekja and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 17. 7 . Vološ inov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , 23. 8 . Exodus 3:14. 9 . Luke 23:46. 10 . Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 349. 11 . Cooper, The Canterbury Tales , 349. 12. Peter Travis, personal conversation. The Bear Inn. Oxford (April 13, 2012). 13 . Travis, Heliotropes , 401; and Lisa Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the “Legend of Good Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 50. 14 . Patterson, “Introduction: Critical Historicism and Medieval Studies,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 , (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 13. 15 . Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 271. 16 . Sarah J. Dille, Mixing Metaphors: God as Mother and Father in Deutero- Isaiah (London and New York: T&T Clark International), 6. 17 . Patterson, “Introduction: Critical Historicism and Medieval Studies,” in Literary Practice and Social Change , 2. 228 NOTES

18 . Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957), 238. 19 . Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 121. 20 . Rosalyn Rossignol, Critical Companion to Chaucer: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006), 193. 21 . In the time of Augustus the great booksellers were the Sosii. 22 . Horace, Ars Poetica (343–346) in Horace’s Satires and Epistles , trans. Jacob Fuchs (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 92. 23 . Horace, Ars Poetica , trans. R.M. Millington (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1870), 237. 24 . Horace, Ars Poetica , 239. 25 . Horace, Ars Poetica , 240. 26 . Horace, Ars Poetica , 244. 27 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 102. 28 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 102. 29 . “The River of Lamentation in the Underworld, a branch of the Styx flowing into the Acheron. On its banks the souls of the unburied dead were said to wander for a hundred years . . . which Pausanius describes as ‘a most unlovely stream.’” Jennifer R. March, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), 133. 30 . Lynne Watson, “Hallowed Words or Melting Pot? Sidonius Apollinaris’ use of the Poetic Tradition,” in The Reception of Classical Texts and Images: Selected Proceedings of the Open University Conference, January 1996 , eds. Lorna Hardwick and Stanley Ireland (Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1996), 57–74, accessed on 2 November 2014, http://www2. open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/conf96/watson.htm . 31 . Augustine, Of True Religion , in Augustine Earlier Writings , 226. 32 . Augustine, Of True Religion , in Augustine Earlier Writings , 226. 33 . Chesterton, “Dickens: A Survey,” in Dickens, David Copperfield , 890. 34 . Chesterton, “Dickens: A Survey,” 890. 35 . Boethius, “Book III, Song XI: Reminiscence,” The Consolation of Philosophy , trans. H.R. James (London: Elliot Stock, 1897), 150. 36 . Grube, Plato’s Thought , 188. 37 . Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim , in The Collected Works of Joseph Conrad Volume IV: Lord Jim (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), 207. 38 . Aristotle, Historia Animalium (551a), in The History of Animals , trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing LLC, 2004), 147. 39 . Aristotle, Historia Animalium (551a), 147. 40 . Jacques Louis David, Amour et Psyché , 1817, Oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. 41 . For instance third century ad mosaic, Eros & Psykhe , Antakya Museum, Antakya, and, Reinhold Begas, Pan tr ö stet Psyche , 1857–1858, marble, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. NOTES 229

42 . Apuleius, The Golden Ass , trans. E.J. Kenney (London: Penguin, 2004), 105. 43 . See Joseph G. DeFilippo, “Curiositas and the Platonism of Apuleius’ Golden Ass,” The American Journal of Philology , Vol. 111, No. 4 (Winter 1990): 471–492, and, James Gollnick, The Religious Dreamworld of Apuleius ’ Metamorphoses: Recovering a Forgotten Hermeneutic (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1999). 44 . Dean Spruill Fansler, Chaucer and the Roman de la Rose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 74. 45 . Fansler, Chaucer and the Roman de la Rose , 74. 46 . Conrad, Lord Jim , 211–212. Quoted in Tony Tanner, “Butterflies and Beetles—Conrad’s Two Truths,” Chicago Review , Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter- Spring 1963): 124. 47 . Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels , in The Works of Jonathan Swift Vol. XII (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1814), 65. 48 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 139. 49 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 139. 50 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 139. 51 . Vološ inov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , 17. 52 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 134. 53 . Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition , 239. 54 . Wetherbee, The Canterbury Tales, 103. 55 . Travis, “Reading Chaucer Ab Ovo : Mock-Exemplum in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ,” from The Performance of Middle English Culture , 176. 56 . Barr, Socioliterary Practice , 121. 57 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 97. 58 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , quoted in Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony, 87. 59 . Travis, Heliotropes, 418. 60 . Takada, “Chaucer’s use of Neoplatonic Traditions,” 48. 61 . Albert Camus, Caligula: A Drama in Two Acts , trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Samuel French, 1989), 20. 62 . Camus, Caligula , 20. 63 . Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass,” The Annotated Alice , 199. 64 . Chré tien de Troyes, Yvain , in Arthurian Romances Including Perceval , trans. D. D. R. Owen (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1991), 318–319. 65 . Chesterton, Orthodoxy , 35. 66 . Travis, Disseminal , 269. 67 . Travis, Heliotropes , 424. 68 . Travis, Heliotropes , 425. 69 . Hotson, “Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” 781. 70 . See Strohm, Social Chaucer , 165; Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 140. 71 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 141. 72 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 142. 73 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 142. 230 NOTES

74 . Justice, Writing and Rebellion , 208. 75 . Justice, Writing and Rebellion , 217. 76 . Justice, Writing and Rebellion , 216. 77 . Hotson, “Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” 781. 78 . D.G. Myers. “The New Historicism in Literary Study,” Academic Questions, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 1988–1989): 27–36, accessed on 21 October 2010, http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/p/new-historicism-in- literary-study.html. 79 . Hotson, “Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” 762. 80 . Hotson, “Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” 781. 81 . Hotson, “Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” 781. 82 . Hotson, “Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” 778. 83 . Hotson, “Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” 764. 84 . Plato, Phaedrus , 70. 85 . “Academic” in this case, “from the perspective of the Platonic Academy.” 86 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 130. 87 . Cicero, De Amicitia (iv. 14), 123. 88 . Justice, Writing and Rebellion , 217. 89 . Hot son, “Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” 764. 90 . Plato, Phaedrus (261a). 91 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 131. 92 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 130. 93 . Ovid, Metamophoses , i. 504–524, trans. Kline. 94 . Ovid, Metamophoses , i. 504–524, trans. Kline. 95 . John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Simkin, Marshall & Co, 1856), 42. 96 . Not all monisms are natural. 97 . Paulina Aiken, “Vincent of Beauvais and Dame Pertelote’s Knowledge of Medicine,” Speculum , Vol. 10, No. 3 (July 1953): 281. 98 . Aiken, “Vincent of Beauvais,” 282. 99 . Corinne E. Kauffman, “Dame Pertelote’s Parlous Parle,” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 4, No. 1 (Summer 1969): 46. 100 . Aiken, “Vincent of Beauvais,” 285. 101 . Kauffman,“Dame Pertelote’s Parlous Parle,” 47. 102 . Kauffman, “Dame Pertelote’s Parlous Parle,” 48. 103 . Cooper, The Canterbury Tales , 343–344. 104 . John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Hi ſ torie of Plantes: Gathered by John Gerarde of London Master in Chirvgerie (London: John Norton, 1597), 1017. 105 . Andr é Breton, 4 April 1919 Letter to Tzara , quoted in Robert Short, “Paris Dada and Surrealism,” Journal of European Studies , Vol. 9. No. 75 (1979): 85. 106 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 135. 107 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 144. 108 . Brief Encounter , screenplay by Noel Coward, dir. David Lean, perf. Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Universal Pictures, 1946, Film. NOTES 231

109 . Genesis 11:17. 110 . Guillaume de Lorris and Jean De Meun, Roman de la Rose , II. 18031– 18061, in Romance of the Rose , trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 278. 111 . Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony , 11. 112 . Ovid, Amores (I:XIII), The Art of Love , trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1957), 35–36. 113 . Ovid, Amores (I:XIII), trans. Humphries, 35. 114 . Ovid, Amores (I:XIII), trans. Humphries, 35. 115 . Ovid, Amores (I:XIII), trans. Humphries, 35. 116 . Hyginus, Fabulae , 277, trans. Grant, 178. 117 . James Joyce, Ulysses , ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: The Bodley Head, 1986), 31. 118 . Hyginus, Fabulae , 277, trans. Grant, 178. 119 . Boethius, Consolation (Book III, Song XI: Reminiscence), trans. James, 150. 120 . Butler, Hudibras , 234. 121 . Cato, Distich II.31 , in The Distichs of Cato: A Famous Medieval Textbook , trans. Wayland Johnson Chase (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1922), 29. 122 . Paul R. Thomas, “Cato on Chauntecleer: Chaucer’s Sophisticated Audience,” Neophilologus , Vol. 72, No. 2 (April 1988), 280. 123 . Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1986), 16. 124 . Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo , 207. 125 . Augustine, Confessions , XI, The Confessions of St. Augustine , trans. Edward B. Pusey (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1949), 260. 126 . Augustine, Confessions , XI, trans. Pusey, 261. 127 . Wife of Bath’s Prologue , 1. 128 . W. H. Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats , in W.H. Auden Collected Poems , ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 248. 129 . Flood, “Augustine,” 241. 130 . Cooper, The Canterbury Tales , 347. 131 . Stuart Whalling, “Putting Mise-en-Abyme in Its (Medieval) Place,” Conference paper given at “Medieval ‘Mise-en-Abyme’: The Object Depicted within Itself,” 16 February 2009, Courtauld Institute of Art, accessed on 25 February 2015, http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum /projects/medievalarttheory/documents/Mise-en-abyme.pdf. 132 . Cicero, De Divinatione , I. xxx.62–63, 293–294. 133 . Cicero, De Divinatione , I. xxix.61, 293. 134 . Cicero, De Divinatione , I. xxix.61, 293. 135 . Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus , III. 132, in Epicurus: The Extant Remains , trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 89. 136 . Horace, Satire I:XI , trans. Fuchs, 19 137 . Cicero, De Divinatione , I.xxx.62, 293. 138 . 2 Samuel 12:7. 232 NOTES

139 . Benson, Riverside Chaucer , 938n.3065. 140 . Apuleius, Golden Ass , trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 116. 141 . “False Friends (Faux Amis),” Oxford Language Dictionaries Online , accessed on 3 May 2014, http://www.oxfordlanguagedictionaries.com/Public/ PublicResources.html?direction=b-fr-en&sp=S/oldo/resources/fr/ Difficulties-in-French-fr.html . 142 . Cicero, De Amicitia , iv.14, 123. 143 . Cicero, The Dream of Scipio , in On the Good Life , 346. 144 . Cicero, Dream of Scipio , in On the Good Life , 349. 145 . Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans , trans. George McCracken (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1957), 13. 146 . Grube, Plato’s Thought , 189. 147 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 81–82. 148 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 82. 149 . Luke 17:21 150 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 91. 151 . Daniel 12:9. 152 . Ex odus 13:18–19. 153 . Marie Gelbach, “On Chaucer’s Version of the Death of Croesus,” JEGP , Vol. 6 (1906–1907): 657. 154 . Boethius, Consolation , trans. Tester, 183. 155 . In Bacchylides, “Hyperborean land appears as a place to which pious mortals are translated without dying.” Sir Richard C. Jebb, “Introduction to the Odes,” in Bacchylides: The Poems and Fragments , ed. and trans. Sir Richard C. Jebb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 196. 156 . Bacchylides , Ode III , The Poems and Fragments , 259–260. 157 . Herodotus, The History of Herodotus , trans. George Rawlinson (London: J.M. Dent Sons Ltd., 1910), 17. 158 . Herodotus, History , 17. 159 . Helen H. Law, “Croesus from Herodotus to Boccaccio,” The Classical Journal , Vol. 43, No. 8 (May 1948): 456–457. 160 . Ctesias, Persia , in Photius, The Library , Vol. I , trans. J. H. Freese (London: SPCK, 1920), 93. 161 . Ctesias, Persia , 93. 162 . Ctesias, Persia , 93. 163 . Ctesias, Persia , 93–94. 164 . Law, “Croesus,” 460. 165 . Law, “Croesus,” 460. 166 . Law, “Croesus,” 460. 167 . Eric Jaeger, “Croesus and Chauntecleer: The Royal Road of Dreams,” MLQ, Vol. 49 (1988): 6. 168 . “E quant par vostre fol respons / M’avez mon songe ainsinc espons, / Servi m’avez de granz men ç onges; / Car sachiez que cist nobles songes, / Ou fausse glose voulez metre, / Deit estre entenduz a la letre” ( Le Roman de la Rose , 6605–6610), quoted in Jaeger, “Croesus and Chauntecleer,” 5–6. NOTES 233

169 . Jaeger, “Croesus and Chauntecleer,” 6. 170 . Jaeger, “Croesus and Chauntecleer,” 9. 171 . Herodotus , History, 17. 172 . Dares Phrygius, The History of the Fall of Troy , in The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian , trans. R. M. Frazer Jr. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966), 152. 173 . “A mental image or a dream of a highly desirable future state for the organization.” Jay Alden Conger, The Charismatic Leader: Behind the Mystique of Exceptional Leadership (Thousand Oaks, CA: Jossey-Bass publishers, 1989), 38. 174 . Homer, Iliad , XVI. 851–854, in The Iliad of Homer , trans. Richard Lattimore (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 353. 175 . Daniel 2:45. 176 . See Augustine’s Tractate 4 on the Gospel of John 4.4 , St. Augustine: Tractatates on the Gospel of John 1–10 , trans. John W. Retting (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 95–96. Also, Gerhard Pfandl, “Interpretations of the Kingdom of God in Daniel 2:44,” Seminary Studies , Vol. 34, No. 2 (1992): 249–268. 177 . Daniel 2:40, 44. 178 . W.H. Kalaga, “Semiosis, Continuity, Teleology,” Semiotica , Vol. 106, No. 3/4 (1995): 270. 179 . Kalaga, “Semiosis,” 270. 180 . Barry Stocker, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Derrida on Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 149. 181 . Travis, Disseminal , 178. 182 . Travis, Disseminal , 178–179. 183 . Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976): 6. 184 . Alan de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 149–150. 185 . Travis, Disseminal , 178. 186 . Cooper, Canterbury Tales , 350. 187 . Boethius, Consolation , trans. James, 101. 188 . G.K. Chesterton, “The Position of Sir Walter Scott,” in Twelve Types: A Book of Essays (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1902), 183. 189 . Alan Baraton, interviewed by É velyne Bellanger, “ Le jardinier qui rè gne sur Versailles ,” La Nouvelle Republique , accessed on 4 October 2005, http:// www.lanouvellerepublique.fr/France-Monde/Actualite/People/n/ Contenus/Articles/2013/10/04/Alain-Baraton-le-jardinier-qui-regne -sur-Versailles-1637218 . 190 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 144. 191 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 144. 192 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 144. 193 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , in Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey , trans. Thomas Taylor (London: John M. Watkins, 1917), 47n.12. 194 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , in Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs , 47n.12. 234 NOTES

195 . Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet , Act V, Scene 1, ed. William Strunk Jr. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 93. 196 . My Little Chickadee , dir. Edward F. Cline, perf. W.C. Fields, Mae West, Joseph Calleia, Universal Pictures, 1940, Film. 197 . Plato, Apology , trans. Harold North Fowler (London: William Heinemann, 1953), 133. 198 . Apuleius, Golden Ass , 17. In Apuleieus, Socrates cheats on his wife with a witch while on a business trip and dies hungover after choking on polenta, which is often listed as the diet of philosophers. 199 . Cicero, De Divinatione , I.xxx.62, 293. 200 . Cato, Distich II:31 , trans. Kennedy, 29. 201 . Stephen Manning, “Fabular Jangling and Poetic Vision in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ,” South Atlantic Review , Vol. 52, No. 1 (January 1987): 5. 202 . George R. Petty Jr., “Power, Deceit, and Misinterpretation: Uncooperative Speech in the ‘Canterbury Tales,’” Chaucer Review , Vol. 27, No. 4 (1993): 416–417. 203 . Bonnie Wheeler, Representations of the Feminine in the Middle Ages (Dallas, TX: Academia Press, 1993): 15. Wendy Harding, Drama, Narrative and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaire du Mirail, 2003), 229. 204 . Pelen, “The Escape of Chaucer’s Chauntecleer: A Brief Revaluation,” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 36, No. 4 (2002): 330. 205 . Travis, Disseminal , 95. 206 . Joseph A. Dane, “Mulier est hominis confusio: Note on Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, line 3164,” Notes and Queries , Vol. 39, No. 3 (1992): 276. Quoted in Travis, Disseminal , 100. 207 . Travis, Disseminal , 101. 208 . Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno, “Chauntecleer’s Bad Latin,” Exemplaria , Vol. 4, No. 2 (1992): 400. 209 . Pizzorno, “Chauntecleer’s Bad Latin,” 401. 210 . Wheeler, Representations of the Feminine , 15. 211 . Romans 5:12. 212 . Jeremy Dimmick, “Ovid and the Middle Ages: Authority and Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 267. 213 . Harding, Drama, Narrative and Poetry , 229. 214 . Harding, Drama, Narrative and Poetry , 229. 215 . Apuleius, Golden Ass , 105. 216 . John Lempri è re, A Classical Dictionary, Containing a Copious Account of All the Proper Names Mentioned in Antient Authors : With the Value of Coins, Weights, and Measures, Used Among the Greeks and Romans; and a Chronological Table (London: T. Cadell, 1839), 547. 217 . Nicholas Roe, John Keats (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 38. 218 . Roe, Keats , 38. NOTES 235

219 . Roe, Keats , 38. 220 . Lempriè re, A Classical Dictionary , 547. 221 . Boethius, Consolation , trans. James, 101. 222 . 1 Corinthians 7:5. 223 . John Gill, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments Vol. II (London: Matthews and Leigh, 1809), 643. 224 . Edmond Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” Journal of the History of Ideas , Vol. 42, No. 2 (April-June 1981): 216. 225 . Pizzorno, “Chauntecleer’s Bad Latin,” 401. 226 . Travis, Disseminal , 98. 227 . Pelen, Escape of Chaucer’s Chauntecleer , 330. 228 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 82. 229 . Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony , 8. 230 . Heywood C. Broun, It Seems to Me (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 13. 231 . Ian Bishop, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Liberal Arts,” The Review of English Studies , New Series , Vol. 30, No. 119 (August 1979): 257. Brackets mine. 232 . Bishop, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 266–267. 233 . Ovid, Amores (I.VII), in Ovid’s Erotic Poems: Amores and Ars Amatoria , trans. Len Krisak (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 95. 234 . Gardner, Gendering Time , 220. 235 . Metamorphoses II. 236 . Barr, Socioliterary Practice , 115. 237 . Jaeger, “Croesus and Chauntecleer,” 12. 238 . Jaeger, “Croesus and Chauntecleer,” 13. 239 . Piero Boitani, “‘My Tale Is of a Cock,’ or The Problems of Literal Interpretation,” in Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages: Philological Studies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel , ed. Richard G. Newhauser and John A. Alford (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 34. 240 . John Milton, Paradise Regained (Philadelphia, PA: Henry Altemus, 1899), 23. 241 . Derek Pearsall, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Part 9 of A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Vol. 2, The Canterbury Tales (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 205–208. 242 . Travis, Disseminal , 287. 243 . Travis, Disseminal , 286. 244 . John P. McGall, “Chaucer’s May 3rd,” Modern Language Notes , Vol. 76, No. 3 (March 1961): 203–204. 245 . McGall, “Chaucer’s May 3rd,” 205. 246 . Pearsall, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 237. 247 . See, for instance, Mario Aloisio, “The Calculation of Easter Day, and the Origin and Use of the Word Computer ,” Annals of the History of Computing , Vol. 26, No. 3 (July-September 2004): 42–49. 236 NOTES

248 . Travis, Disseminal , 295–296. 249 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 102. 250 . Revelation 21:23. 251 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 121–123), trans. Bickersteth, 769. 252 . Travis, “Heliotropes ,” 424. 253 . Cato, Distich I:26 , trans. Kennedy, 28. 254 . Fleming, “Chaucer on Language,” 83. 255 . “Ne ja de riens n’an mentirai, / se li preudome n’en mentirent / qui les anciens livres firent.” Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose (15192–15194), trans. Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 235. 256 . F. Anne Payne, “Foreknowledge and Freewill: Three Theories in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ,” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 10, No. 3 (Winter 1976): 208. Brackets mine. 257 . Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, “Stairway to Heaven,” Led Zeppelin IV , Atlantic Records (1971) LP. 258 . Macrobius, Dream of Scipio , 91. 259 . Ren é Descartes, “First Meditation,” in Meditations and other Metaphysical Writings , trans. Desmond C. Clarke (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2003), 20. 260 . Descartes, “First Meditation,” in Meditations , 20. 261 . Descartes, “Third Meditation,” in Meditations, 38. 262 . Karl P. Wentersdorf, “ Heigh Ymaginacioun in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Studia Neophiloligica , Vol. 52 (1980): 31. 263 . Bishop, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 265. 264 . Bishop, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 265. 265 . Wentersdorf, “ Heigh Ymaginacioun ,” 32. 266 . Travis, Disseminal , 322. 267 . Travis, Disseminal , 322. 268 . Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (New York: Avon Books, 1996), 277. 269 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 121), trans. Bickersteth, 769. 270 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 124–126), trans. Bickersteth, 769. 271 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 136–138), trans. Bickersteth, 769. 272 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 139), trans. Bickersteth, 769. 273 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 142–145), trans. Bickersteth, 769. 274 . Tennyson, “Tithonus,” in Read and Dobr é e, London Book of English Verse , 538. 275 . The Lady Is a Tramp , words by Lorenz Hart, music by Richard Rodgers, The Rodgers and Hart Song Book (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1951), 166–171. 276 . Travis, Disseminal , 323. 277 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 131), trans. Bickersteth, 769. 278 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 128), trans. Bickersteth, 769. 279 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 142. 280 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 141–142. 281 . Plato, Laws , 811c, quoted in Grube, Plato’s Thought , 201. NOTES 237

282 . Boethius, Consolation , trans. James, 202. 283 . Chauncey Wood, Chaucer and the Country of the Stars: Poetic Used of Astrological Imagery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 26. 284 . Pearsall, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 219. 285 . Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony , 132. 286 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 142. 287 . Jahan Ramanzi, “Chaucer’s Monk: The Poetics of Abbreviation, Aggression, and Tragedy,” The Chaucer Review , Vol. 27, No. 3 (1993): 274. 288 . Ovid, Metamorphoses , i.109, trans. Brookes More (Francestown: Marshal Jones Company, 1978), 5. 289 . Ovid, Metamorphoses (i.107–108), ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 9–10. 290 . Payne, “Foreknowledge and Freewill,” 211. 291 . Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony , 12. 292 . Ovid, Art of Love , II. 277–278, quoted in Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “The Golden Age and Sin in Augustan Ideology,” Past & Present , No. 95 (May 1982): 27. 293 . Chesterton, Orthodoxy ,, 211. If I quote Chesterton to excess it is because I agree with the part of Harold Bloom’s introduction to Chaucer that says: “My own models for writing about Chaucer always have been my late friend E. Talbot Donaldson . . . and the formidable man of letters and burly roustabout, the thoroughly Chaucerian G.K. Chesterton, who would fit easily into the Canterbury Tales .” Harold Bloom and Michelle M. Sauer, Bloom’s How to Write about Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Infobase Publishing: 2010), vii. Chesterton’s Chaucerian spirit and overall penchant for High Gothic knock-knock jokes aren’t limited to his 1932 Chaucer. 294. John Keats, “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” in The Poetical Works of John Keats , ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), 242. 295 . Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Les Baigneuses , ca. 1918–1919, Oil on Canvas, Mus é e d’Orsay, Paris. 296 . Peter Meredith, “Chauntecleer and the Mermaids,” Neophilologus , Vol. 54, No. 1 (January 1970): 82. 297 . Roman de la Rose (669–674), trans. Horgan, 12. 298 . Strohm, Social Chaucer , 165. 299 . Strohm, Social Chaucer , 165. 300 . Radiohead, “There, There,” Hail to the Thief , Capitol Records, 2002, CD. 301 . Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova (286 –288), trans. Er nest Ga l lo. Quoted in Ernest Gallo, The Poetria Nova and Its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1971), 29. 302 . Homer, The Odyssey of Homer , trans. S. H. Butcher and A. Lang (London: Macmillan & Co., 1906), 197–198. 238 NOTES

303 . The Book of Vices and Virtues , ed. W. Nelson Francis (London: The Early English Text Society, 1942), 58. 304 . Homer, Odyssey , trans. Butcher and Lang, 198. 305 . Meredith, “Chauntecleer and the Mermaids,” 81. 306 . Meredith, “Chauntecleer and the Mermaids,” 82. 307 . Chaucer writes in the Romaunt of the Rose , “Song of the mermaydens in the see, / That for her syngyng is so cleere, / Though we mermaydens clepe hem here. / In English, as is oure usaunce, / Men clepe hem sereyns in Fraunce” (680–684). Hoccleve recounts the story of Ulysses and the Sirens from Holcot, and calls them mermaids: “Whan þat Vlixes saillid to and fro / By meermaides; this was his policie: / All eres of men of his conpaignie / With wex he stoppe leet.” Thomas Hoccleve, Selections from Thomas Hoccleve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 18. Quoted in L. A. J. R. Houwen, “Flattery and the Mermaid in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale ,” in Animals and the Symbolic in Medieval Art and Literature , ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997), 86. 308 . E. T. Donaldson, “Commentary on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ,” in Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader , ed. E. T. Donaldson (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1958), 943. 309 . Physiologus, Physiologus: A Metrical Bestiary of Twelve Chapters by Bishop Theobald , trans. Alan Wood Rendell (London: John Edward Bumpus, Ltd., 1928), 87. 310 . The Book of Vices and Virtues , 58–59. Quoted in Meredith, “Chauntecleer and the Mermaids,” 81. 311 . Ailene S. Goodman, “The Extraordinary Being: Death and the Mermaid in Baroque Literature,” in Literature and the Lore of the Sea , ed. Patricia Ann Carlson (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1986), 256. 312 . Walter Copland Perry, “The Sirens in Ancient Literature and Art,” The Nineteenth Century , Vol. 14 (July 1883): 117. 313 . Boethius, Consolation , trans. James, 8. 314 . Boece, Metrum 1, Prosa 1, 44–73. Chaucer uses “mermaydenes” and not “sirens.” 315 . Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse , 3. 316 . The Odyssey 12.1. 317 . David S. Chamberlain, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Boethius’s De Musica ,” Modern Philology , Vol. 68 (November 1970): 190. 318 . Travis, Disseminal , 193. 319 . Travis, Disseminal , 192. 320 . Boethius, Consolation , trans. James, 8. 321 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 142. 322 . Apollodorus, Bibliotheca , 2.57–59, Apollodorus’s Library and Hyginus’s Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology , trans. R. Scott Smith and Stephen Trzaskoma (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2007), 27–28. 323 . Atsma, “Kuon Lailaps,” The Theoi Project. NOTES 239

324 . Pausanius, Description of Greece, Vol. IV , trans. W.H.S. Jones (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1935), 251 325 . Sirius is the second closest star to earth and the brightest in the night sky. “Stars similar to it are called sirii by astronomers.” Theony Condos, Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans: A Sourcebook (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1997), 65. 326 . Isaiah 34:4. 327 . É douard Jeauneau, “Les sirè nes dans les choeur des vieillards ,” in Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of J.N. Hillgarth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002), 324. 328 . Jeauneau, “ Les sirènes ,” 319. 329 . Jeauneau, “ Les sirènes ,” 330. 330 . Ponce Denis Ecouchard Le Brun, Epigramme LXXXVIII , Oeuvres de Ponce Denis (Ecouchard) Le Brun , ed. P. L. Ginguen é (Paris: Gabriel Waré e, 1811), 317. 331 . “What are these churches now if not the new tombs and sepulchers of God?” Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 120. 332 . Eliot, “The Family Reunion,” The Complete Poems and Plays , 260. 333 . Saint Prosper of Aquitania, De vocatione omnium gentium , I, vii [Migne’s Patrologia Graeca , LI, 653 f.]. Quoted in George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 55. 334 . Conrad, Lord Jim, 215. 335 . Justman, “Literal and Symbolic,” 207. 336 . Justman, “Literal and Symbolic,” 208. 337 . Cicero, De Divinatione , I.i, 223. 338 . Travis, Disseminal, 320. 339 . Karsten Harries, “Metaphor and Transcendence,” Critical Inquiry , Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn 1978): 84. 340 . Charles S. Singleton, “The Irreducible Dove,” Comparative Literature , Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 1957): 129. 341 . Boethius, Consolation , trans. James, 81. 342 . Alain de Lille, The Complaint of Nature: Yale Studies in English, v. 36 , trans. Douglas M. Moffat (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1908), 22. 343 . Boethius, De Musica , I.34. Quoted in Peter Dronke, “Chaucer and Boethius’ ‘De Musica ,’” Notes and Queries , Vol. 13, No. 3 (1966): 92. 344 . Dronke, De Musica , 92. 345 . Dronke, De Musica , 92. 346 . Brian Brennan, “Augustine’s De Musica ,” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 42 (1988): 267. 347 . Chamberlain, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 189. 348. Chamberlain, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 190. 240 NOTES

349 . Chamberlain, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 189. 350 . Chamberlain, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 189. 351 . Chamberlain, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 191. 352 . Dante, Paradiso , (xxxiii: 103–105), trans. Bickersteth, 487. 353 . Augustine, De Musica , 6.17, quoted in Brennan, “Augustine’s De Musica ,” 274. 354 . Chamberlain, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 190. 355 . Robert Scott Stewart, “The Epistemological Function of Platonic Myth,” Philosophy & Rhetoric , Vol. 22, No. 4 (1989): 260. 356 . Bower, “Introduction,” in Boethius, Fundamentals of Music , xx. 357 . Bower, “Introduction,” xxiii. 358 . Boethius, De Musica , 2. 359 . Boethius, De Musica , 2. 360 . Boethius, De Musica , 5–6. 361 . Boethius, De Musica , 6. 361. All references to Chaucer’s work are to the Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987). 363 . Bower, “Introduction,” xxii. 364 . Boethius, De Musica , 18. 365 . Boethius, De Musica , 18. 366 . Boethius, De Musica , 18. 367 . Boethius, De Musica , 18. 368 . Boethius, De Musica , 18. 369 . Brennan, Augustine’s De Musica , 274. 370 . Chesterton, Everlasting Man , 173. 371 . Chesterton, Everlasting Man , 169. 372 . Boethius, De Musica , 3. 373 . Boethius, De Musica , 10. 374 . Boethius, De Musica , 8. 375 . Boethius, De Musica , 9. 376 . Augustine, On Free Will , II. xvi. 42, trans., Burleigh, 162. 377 . Boethius, De Musica , 16. 378 . Travis, Disseminal , 239. 379 . Will iam Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 2, in The Oxford Shakespeare: Hamlet , ed. G.R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 167. 380 . Roger Ellis, Patterns of Religious Narrative in the Canterbury Tales (London: Croon Helm Ltd., 1986), 280. 381 . Daniel 4:33. “The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.” Nebuchadnezzar recovers in the next verse. 382 . Meredith, “Chauntecleer and the Mermaids,” 81. 383 . Boethius, De Musica , 2. 384 . William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , ed. Charles Edelman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 251. NOTES 241

385 . Romans 8:22. 386 . Augustine, De Musica (6.17), quoted in Brennan, 274. 387 . Benedict Taylor, Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 20. 388 . Wetherbee, The Canterbury Tales , 106. 389 . I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 94. 390 . Payne, “Foreknowledge and Freewill,” 211. 391 . Isaiah 14:12. 392 . Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 11–12. 393 . Anthony Maas, ”Lucifer,” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), accessed on 30 April 2011, http:// www.newadvent.org/cathen/09410a.htm . 394 . 2 Peter 2:19. 395 . Ezekiel 28:13. 396 . Ezekiel 28:15. 397 . Chamberlain, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 190. 398 . Maupassant “acclaimed Flaubert’s attempts to imitate medieval art, comparing the work to ‘un vieux vitrail d’é glise d’une naï vet é savante et coloré e.’” Elizabeth Emery, “The Golden Legend in the Fin de Si ècle: Zola’s Le Rê ve and Its Reception,” in Medieval Saints in Nineteenth Century French Culture: Eight Essays , ed. Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewate (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2004), 92. 399 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 102. 400 . The “Merry Gang” is a titled bestowed by Andrew Marvell upon a famous group of libertines that included the infamous John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell: Vol. II, Letters (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), 355. 401 . Robert Browning, “Sordello, 366,” The Poems of Browning: Volume One: 1826–1840 , ed. John Woolford and Daniel Karlin (New York, Routledge, 2014), 418. 402 . Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony , 8. 403 . Lorris and De Meun, The Romance of the Rose , trans. Dahlberg, 112. 404 . Lorris and De Meun, The Romance of the Rose , trans. Dahlberg, 113. 405 . Lorris and De Meun, The Romance of the Rose , trans. Dahlberg, 113. 406 . Pearsall, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 237. 407 . Genesis 1:28. 408 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 142. 409 . “The telescopic fallacy makes a long story short. It appears in interpretations which reduce an extended trend to a momentary transformation.” David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 147. 410 . Travis, Disseminal , 86. 242 NOTES

411 . Travis, Disseminal , 86. 412 . Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova , 264–265, Gallo, 29. 413 . Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova , 266–269, Gallo, 29. 414 . “Show Business: Here Comes Superman!!!” TIME (27 November 1978), accessed on 5 May 2011, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,916487,00.html#ixzz1LU6qcLQw . 415 . Cooper, The Canterbury Tales , 344. 416 . Poetria Nova , 350–353, Gallo, 33. 417 . Travis, Disseminal , 171. 418 . Wetherbee, The Canterbury Tales , 109. 419 . Travis, Disseminal , 260. 420 . Poetria Nova , 361–363, Gallo, 32. 421 . Travis, Disseminal , 246. 422 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , 97. 423 . Poetria Nova , 264–265, Gallo, 29. 424 . Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus , quoted in Travis, Disseminal , 171. 425 . Pearsall, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale , 242. 426 . “The twelfth and thirteenth centuries mark the rebirth of the Nero tradition in western historiography . . . Vincent of Beauvais in his Speculum Historiale comments on Nero’s enthusiasm for musical competition on the cithara.” Mary Francis Gyles, “Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned,” The Classical Journal , Vol. 42, No. 4 (January 1947): 213. 427 . Macrobius , Dream of Scipio , in Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs , 47n.12. 428 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 144. 429 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 144. 430 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 146. 431 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 146. 432 . Barr, Solioliterary Practice, 121. 433 . Barr, Solioliterary Practice , 121. 434 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 143. 435 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 141–142. 436 . Barr, Socioliterary Practice , 121. 437 . Cooper, The Canterbury Tales , 349. 438 . David Adams Leeming, Creation Myths of the World: Parts I-II (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2010), 178. 439 . Josephus, The History and Antiquities of the Jews , I. iv. 2, trans. Whiston, 34. 440 . Josephus, The History and Antiquities of the Jews , I. iv. 3, trans. Whiston, 35. 441 . Voltaire, Candide ou l’optimiste (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1980), 260. 442 . Fehrenbacher, “A Yeerd Enclosed Aboute,” 142. 443 . Ents are a race of beings in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy world Middle Earth that closely resemble trees. 444 . Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew , 134. NOTES 243

445 . Travis, Disseminal , 259. 446 . Travis, Disseminal , 259. 447 . Travis, Disseminal , 259. 448 . Wallace Stevens, The Ideal Order at Key West , The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 129–130. 449 . Alain de Lille, The Plaint of Nature , trans. Sheridan, 125. 450 . Kathryn Schulz, “Why I Despise The Great Gatsby,” New York Magazine (13 May 2013). Featured on Vulture.com, http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/schulz-on-the-great-gatsby.html . 451 . John Gower, Vox Clamantis , Bk. 1, Ch. 9, Major Latin Works of John Gower , trans. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1962), 65–66. 452 . Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. 453 . Boethius, De Musica , 2. 454 . Cicero, Dream of Scipio, in On the Good Life , 347–348. 455 . “Negative theology,” Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy . 456 . Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 271. 457. Dille, Mixing Metaphors , 6. 458 . Travis, Disseminal , 251. 459 . Travis, Disseminal , 216. 460 . Justman, “Literal and Symbolic,” 208. 461 . Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony , viii. See also, R. Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages (London: The Warburg Institute, 1939). 462 . A.V.C. Schmidt, “Chaucer and the Golden Age,” Essays in Criticism, Vol. 26, No. 2 (April 1976), 111. 463 . Stocker, Routledge Philosophy Guide to Derrida , 163. 464 . Kensak, “The Silences of Pilgrimage,” 191. 465 . Kensak, “The Silences of Pilgrimage,” 191. 466 . Cicero, Dream of Scipio , in On the Good Life , 348. 467 . Paul McCartney and John Lennon, “She Came in through the Bathroom Window,” Abbey Road , EMI Studios, 1969, LP. 468 . Kensak, “The Silences of Pilgrimage,” 191. 469 . Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday,” in The Complete Poems and Plays , 65. 470 . Doyle Rice, “D-Day: The Most Important Weather Forecast in History,” 6 June 2014, USA Today , http://www.usatoday.com/story/ weather/2014/06/03/d-day-weather-forecast/9914207/ . 471 . Rice, “D-Day.” 472 . In baseball, “an easy-to-hit pitch that comes right down the middle of the plate,” “Meatball,” Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (Third Edition) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 539. 473 . Travis, Disseminal , 193. 474 . Ovid, Amores (I:XIII), trans. Riley, 295. 244 NOTES

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Manuscripts MS Bodley 686 . Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The Papyrus of Ani (Book of the Dead) . Nineteenth Dynasty, ca. 1275 B.C. Papyrus, painted. London, British Museum EA 10470/3. INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 36, 44, 87, 199, 202 literary ethics and, 24 Aeschylus, 44 literature and, 52, 81 Aetia (Callimachus), 13–14, 16 material world and, 68, 90 Aiken, Pauline, 106–7 music and, 171–2, 175 Alain de Lille, 1–2, 9, 45, 48–9, 52, narrative and, 150–1 59, 80, 132, 143, 183–4, 196, Of the Citie of God, 66 198, 201 Plato and, 1–3, 90, 116 alectryomancy, defined, 206 Rome and, 123–4, 129 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland should and, 171–2 (Carroll), 1, 4, 43, 98 time and, 138 alta fantasia, 124, 144, 148, 198 autocastration, 47 Amphion, 65–6, 77, 88 Amsler, Mark, 77 Bacchylides, 126 anamnesis, 4, 43, 85, 116, 138, 171 Barnard, Robert, 30 Anselm of Canterbury, 39–40 Barr, Helen, 88, 96, 139, 186, 197 Anticlaudianus (Alain de Lille), 45, 48, Baudelaire, Charles, 26 70, 77, 80, 89, 97, 102, 183, 201 Bible Antigone, 65 Corinthians, 218n92 Apollodorus, 59, 65 Daniel, 240n381 aporia, 59, 71, 84, 104, 151, 165, 179, Ephesians, 213n87 189, 211n34 Exodus, 125 Apuleius, 1, 91–2, 95, 121 Genesis, 35, 38, 59, 137, 143, 152, Arachne, 16, 60–1, 68, 75 180 Argonautica (Valerius Flaccus), 66 Matthew, 244n480 Aristotle, 80, 91, 130, 168 Revelation, 125 Artaud, Antonin, 25, 40, 43, 50, 75 Romans, 175 Augustine Bishop, Ian, 138, 147 art and, 144 Bishop, Louise M., 29 body and, 104 Black, Max, 85 Chaucer and, 114–16 Blake, William, 20 Confessions, 2 Bloom, Harold, 237n293 drunkenness and, 34 Bob Stencil Goes to Comic Con, God and, 39 219n139 imagination and, 148 Boccaccio, 1, 9, 126, 199 language and, 7, 81, 84, 199 Boece (Chaucer), 21, 158, 167 268 INDEX

Boethius De Amicitia, 5, 103 astronomy and, 27 De Divinatione, 117, 134, 206 Chaucer and, 75, 81, 150, 158–61 De Senectute, 18, 20 Consolatio, 75, 102, 116, 126, 151, God and, 39 158–61, 167–8 language and, 52 De Musica, 155, 167–72, 174, 197 mistranslated Latin and, 133–4 on delight, 90 music and, 168 Fortune and, 188 Nun’s Priests’ Tale and, 102–3, 112, God and, 39, 151 119, 121–5, 201 music and, 174–5, 185, 190 Plato and, 18, 134 philosophy and, 81 poetry and, 1, 52, 80, 97 poetry and, 1–2 Republic, 123 on providence, 151 Scipio and, 5 on truth, 166 on souls, 3–4, 13 Boitani, Piero, 140 City of Dreadful Night (Thompson), 44 Book of Vices and Virtues, 157 Coleman, Janet, 68 Bower, Calvin M., 169 Coley, David, 76 Bowker, Alvin W., 37 col-fox, 145–9, 174, 187 Bradwardine, 151 Conrad, Joseph, 91–2, 163 Brennan, Brian, 170 Consolatio (Boethius), 75, 102, 116, Butler, Samuel, 46 126, 151, 158–61, 167–8 butterflies, 91–2, 162–3, 198 Cooper, Helen, 86, 107, 130, 187–8 Corinthians, Epistle to, 38, 218n92 Calcidius, 75, 116 Croesus, 125–8, 133, 140, 152–3, 165, calendars, 142 190, 193, 195 Caligula (Camus), 97–8 Ctesias, 127 Callimachus, 13–17 Camus, Albert, 97–8 Dale, Richard, 26 caricature, defined, 31 Dane, Joseph, 135, 137 Carroll, Lewis, 43 Daniel, Book of, 240n381 Cato, 104, 112–13, 115, 133–4 Daniels, Richard, 28, 45 Chamberlain, David S., 159, 168–9, Dante 177 alta fantasia, 124, 144, 148, 198 Chesterton, G.K., 47, 90, 154, 168, ascensus, 149 171, 237n293 Chaucer and, 149, 196, 198–9 Chrétien de Troyes, 1, 98 Divine Comedy, 148, 165 Christianity, 2, 19, 21, 25, 35, 39, 52, language and, 119, 124 59, 94, 102, 160 night sky and, 160 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 113–14 Paradiso, 7, 51 chronographia, 99, 141, 143–5, 190 Plato and, 102, 168 churl, defined, 22 poetry and, 1–2, 80, 144, 148–9, cicadas, 10, 12–18, 34, 49, 53, 91, 102, 178, 201 202–4, 212n63 Dares Phrygius, 128 Cicero David, Alfred, 130, 158 anamnesis and, 138 David, Jacques Louis, 91 art and, 164 David (Biblical figure), 120 INDEX 269

Davidson, Arnold E., 72 Gellrich, Jesse M., 29 De Casibus Vironum Illustrium Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (Boccaccio), 126 (Boccaccio), 9 Descartes, René, 26, 146 Genesis, Book of, 35–6, 38, 59, 137, Dick, Bernard, 18, 58 143, 152, 180 Dickens, Charles, 18, 90 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 156, 181, 183 Diekstra, F.N.M., 52, 62 Gervys, Daun, 23 Dille, Sarah, 199 Gill, John, 137 Dimmick, Jeremy, 135 Golden Ass (Apuleius), 91, 163 Disseminal Chaucer (Travis), 86 Good Wife’s Guide, The, 24, 100–1, Distichs (Cato), 112–13, 134 195–6 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 83, 157, 237n293 Goodman, Ailene S., 157 Donne, John, 71 Gower, John, 5 Dronke, Peter, 167–9, 171 Grube, G.M.A., 16, 91 Dryden, John, 39 Gruber, Loren C., 52

Egan, Rory B., 13 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 182 Egypt, 67, 125, 183 Hannibal, 90 Eliot, T.S., 15 Harding, Wendy, 136 Ellis, Roger, 172 Hart, Lorenz, 149 entropy, defined, 215n29 heliotropes, 159, 202 Ents, 194, 242n443 Hellanicus, 12 Ephesians, Epistle to, 213n87 Hemingway, Ernest, 9, 61 Epicurus, 22, 102, 117–18, 134, 137, Herodotus, 126, 140, 190 140, 145, 152–3, 162, 193 Hertog, Erik, 28 Euripides, 65–6 Hesiod, 3, 31, 29, 46, 68, 78, 190 Exodus, Book of, 125 Hoccleve, Thomas, 238n307 Homer, 2, 12, 13, 19, 29, 40, 48, Fansler, Dean Spruill, 92 51–2, 103, 144 Fantazzi, Charles, 65 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 12, 14, 15, Fehrenbacher, Richard, 93, 100, 107, 18–19, 145, 202 131, 149–50, 159, 181–2, 186–7, Horace, 1, 9, 52, 65, 89–91, 92, 119 192, 204 Hotson, J. Leslie, 99–102, 205, Fields, W.C., 134 210n27 First Meditation (Descartes), 146 House of Fame (Chaucer), 21, 45, Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 16 127–8, 159 Flaubert, 241n398 humor, 90, 92, 95, 101, 118–19, 174, 202 Fleming, John, 156 Hyginus, 63–4, 78, 111, 204 Flood, Emmet T., 84, 116 Frost, Robert, 19, 56 Ideal Order at Key West (Stevens), 195, fugue, 62, 223n94 197 “ful tikel,” 32 Iliad (Homer), 13, 19, 51, 129 Fumo, Jamie C., 52, 78, 80, 114 interlocutors, 211n33

Gardner, Hunter H., 17 Jacob’s Ladder, 51–2 Gelbach, Marie, 126 Jaeger, Eric, 127–8, 140 270 INDEX

Jameson, Frederic, 85 dreams and, 113 Janko, Richard, 12–13 mistranslated Latin and, 132–3, 135 Jeauneau, Édouard, 51, 73, 161 on Muses, 161 John, Gospel of, 75 music and, 70 John of Salisbury, 72, 74 poetry and, 2, 5, 199, 201 Josephus, 33, 48, 190 soul and, 104, 186 Joyce, James, 111 on time, 132 Justice, Steven, 100, 103, 196 Magician’s Nephew, The (Lewis), 195 Justice (in literature), 169, 179 Maltese Falcon, The, 61 Justman, Stewart, 74, 163, 199 Manciple’s Tale, The (Chaucer) Apollo on Earth, 54–61 Kauffman, Corinne R., 106–7 Arachne in, 75–80 Keats, John, 136, 155 language and, 45, 67–8, 80–1 Kelaga, W.H., 129–30 music and, 65–7, 77 Kensak, Michael, 201 necrophilia in, 57–8 Kerouac, Jack, 205 overview, 51–4 King, Peter, 3 Ovid and, 52–4, 58–60 King Richard, 181–4 Phoebus in the suburbs, 61–9 Kiser, Lisa, 86 Plato and, 72–5 kiss, 41–5, 57, 71, 200 raven in, 55–7 Knapp, Peggy, 33 weather and, 27 Wyf in, 69–72 Lauds, 37 Manning, Stephen, 134 Law, Helen H., 127 Marvell, Andrew, 241n400 Lawton, David, 17, 22–3 Marxism, 33, 62, 227n6 Lazarus (Biblical character), 59 Matthew (Gospel of), 34, 38, Le Roman de Renart le Contrefait, 102 244n480 learned reasoning, 136 Maupassant, Guy de, 241n398 Lemprière, John, 136 McGall, John P., 141–2 Les Baigneuses (Renoir), 155 McGavin, John J., 77 Lewis, C.S., 43 McInery, Ralph, 74 Lewy, H., 34 meatball, defined, 202, 243n472 Lilith (Biblical character), 28, 215n32 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 174 Lord Jim (Conrad), 91–2 Meredith, Peter, 155, 157, 159, 174 Lucretius, 16 Merry Gang, 178, 241n400 metapoetics Macguffin, 11, 211n48 art and, 84–5 Macrobius Chaucer and, 7–10 on aging, 18, 42 Chauntecleer and, 186, 190–2 on Apollo, 52 explained, 6 art and, 168 history and, 7 on body, 18, 30, 103 Manciple’s Tale and, 61, 72 Chaucer and, 102–3, 132–3, 193 Miller’s Tale and, 32, 35, 38 Chauntecleer’s review of, 122–5, misogyny and, 152 135 mummification and, 67 Dream of Scipio, 100, 104, 122–3 Neoplatonism and, 25 INDEX 271

Nun’s Priests’ Tale and, 144, 152, narrative and, 27 183, 186, 190–2 necrophilia and, 60 Plato and, 16 Nun’s Priests’ Tale and, 91–2, 94–5, poetry and, 6–10, 46 99–112, 115, 118–19, 152, 178, religion and, 21 191 Miller, Mark, 30 Pertelote and, 100–12, 121 Miller’s Tale, The (Chaucer) poetry and, 4 Act I, 26–32 rape and, 60 Act II, 32–8 soul and, 4 Act III, 41–7 Nebuchadnezzar, 125, 173, 240n381 broken world, 47–8 necrophilia, 57–8, 60, 62, 78 intermission, 38–41 negative theology, 198–9 literary ethics, 23–6 Neoplatonic tradition, 2, 5, 51, 84, lost life story, 22–3 97, 100, 106, 110, 123, 143, 170, overview, 21 201 remaking the world, 48–50 see also Plato mimesis, 8, 173–4, 179 Nero, 185, 188, 193, 242n426 Minerva, 55, 60, 67, 97, 166 Nims, Margaret F., 68, 73 misogyny, 129, 135–6, 145, 152–5, Nodier, Charles, 73 185 Nun’s Priests’ Tale (Chaucer) Monk’s Tale (Chaucer), 89, 91–2, 96, anthropomorphism in, 192–7 98, 100, 120, 177, 183 apocalypse and, 179–85 mummification, 67 causal misogyny, 152–5 Muscatine, Charles, 87, 95 causation, 105 music chase in, 185–92 Boethius and, 174–5, 185, 190 Chauntecleer’s family tree, 172–9 Chauntecleer and, 173–8 Chauntecleer’s first mistake, form and, 6 112–16 Manciple’s Tale and, 65–7, 77 Chauntecleer’s stories, 116–17 as myth, 167–72 chicken’s world, 96–100 number and, 175 chronology and, 139–45 Plato and, 65–6, 167–9, 171, 174, col-fox in, 145–9 197 death by drowning and St. Kenelm, poetry and, 155–6, 197, 199, 201 121–2 religion and, 96 diagnosis, 105–6 sex and, 29 dialogue, 165–7 soul and, 29, 170–1, 173–7 end of argument, 131–3 Myers, D.G., 101 history and, 203–5 literary review: everyone else, naturalism 125–9 art and, 14 literary review: Macrobius, 122–5 Chaucer and, 27 low road out of history, 89–93 Chauntecleer’s refutation of, 118– mermaid tavern, 155–61 19, 133, 145, 159, 166 mistranslated Latin, 133–9 Manciple’s Tale and, 60, 64, 71–2 moral against murder, 119–21 Miller’s Tale and, 42, 50 moral of the story, 205–7 272 INDEX

Nun’s Priests’ Tale Pausanius, 136 (Chaucer)—Continued Payne, F. Anne, 145, 153, 173, 176 murder of the pilgrim, 117–19 Pearsall, Derek, 11, 52, 61, 141–2, music as myth, 167–72 151, 179, 185, 195 noise and silence, 197–203 Pelen, Marc, 4, 53, 61, 74–5, 109, overview, 83–8 134, 137–8, 151, 178, 199 Pertelotean Naturalism, 100–12 Perry, Walter Copland, 158 prescription, 106–11 Petrarch, 119 sex and, 161–5 Petty, George R. Jr., 134 sexual solution, 111–12 Phoenician Women, The (Euripides), 65 story of Chauntecleer’s stories, Physiologus, 150, 157 129–31 Pindar, 56 unmaking tragic hero, 149–52 Pitt Rivers Museum, 9, 211n46 widow’s world, 93–6 Pizzorno, Patrizia Grimaldi, 134–5, 137–8 Odes (Bacchylides), 65, 126 Plato onomatopoeia, 7, 45, 73, 76, 79, 88, anamnesis and, 116 163–4, 187, 189, 198–201 art and, 48–9, 159–61 Orpheus, 57–60 Chaucer and, 8, 11, 34, 52–3, 61 Orwell, George, 30, 69, 207 Christianity and, 21 Osborne, Marijane, 33, 51 cicadas, 34 Ovid Cicero and, 18, 134 Amores, 53, 110, 136, 153, 166 cities and, 123–4 Apollo and, 56–7 Death of Socrates, 101 asses and, 16–17 Dialogues, 102 Chaucer and, 4–5, 144, 220n13 history and, 115–16 Fasti, 141 imagination and, 148–9 gods and, 50, 190 language and, 199 Manciple’s Tale and, 52–4, 58–64, Manciple’s Tale and, 53, 72–5 67, 74, 79 metapoetics and, 9, 183 Metamorphoses, 16, 50, 52–4, 56–7, Miller’s Tale and, 43 60–2, 64, 67, 69, 71, 78, 105, 192 music and, 65–6, 167–9, 171, 174, 197 misogyny, 145, 152–4 Myth of the Cave, 1, 171 Nun’s Priests’ Tale and, 108, 110, Nun’s Priests’ Tale and, 83–5, 90–2, 135, 143 102–4, 111, 116–20, 188, 193 Orpheus myth and, 58 Orpheus myth and, 58 poetry and, 1–2, 4, 135–6, 144 Phaedrus, 14–16, 18, 59, 68, 88, sexual imagery, 71, 108, 192 104, 168, 183 Philosophy and, 14–15, 177 Pardoner’s Tale (Chaucer), 10–11, poetry and, 1–3, 184 18–19, 22, 51, 86, 117, 162, 166, Republic, 16, 123, 158, 167 189, 197, 202–3 rhetoric and, 184 Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer), 5, 13, Scipio and, 5–6, 122 41, 45, 70, 116, 122, 131, 161, Symposium, 58, 119 168, 204 Virgil and, 7 Patterson, Lee, 32, 86 see also Neoplatonic tradition INDEX 273

Platonic Realism, 68 Cicero and, 3–5 Pliny the Elder, 66 humor and, 90, 118 Prometheus, 44 imagination and, 148 Pythagoras, 167–71, 174 immortality of, 101, 103, 122–4, 210n25 Ramanzi, Jahan, 152 kiss and, 71–2 Revelation, Book of, 125 language and, 85, 89 Richardson, Gudrun, 17 music and, 29, 170–1, 173–7 Ricoeur, Paul, 4, 85 old age and, 18 River Styx, 29, 48, 59, 68, 86, 228n29 poetry and, 89, 111 Robertson, D.W., 2, 25 rebirth and, 59 Romans, Epistle to, 175 Scipio and, 5, 13 Romaunt of the Rose (Chaucer), Socrates and, 3 238n307 time and, 132–3 Rossignol, Rosalyn, 89 truth and, 117–18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 74 St. Kenelm, 121–2, 133 Russel, Jeffrey Burton, 164, 176 St. Paul, 175 Russell, Dan, 107 St. Prosper of Aquitania, 162 Stevens, Wallace, 195 scala perfectionis, 51 Stocker, Barry, 200 Scattergood, V.J., 80 Strohm, Paul, 25, 31, 40, 51, 156, 204 Schmidt, A.V.C., 90, 200 semiotics, 15, 64, 73, 129 Takada, Yasunari, 2, 97 Severs, J. Burke, 53 Tarrant, R.J., 7 sex telescopic fallacy, 181, 241n409 Apollo and, 28, 59 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 19 bliss and, 9 thalassophobia, defined, 46 mermaid/siren and, 155, 158 Theatre and the Plague (Artaud), 25 metaphysics and, 9 Themis, 45, 50, 63, 219n118 Miller’s Tale and, 24–5, 29–30, 32, 42 Thomas, Paul R., 113 mythology and, 25 Thompson, James, 44 Nature and, 27, 109 Thoreau, Henry David, 17 Nun’s Priests’ Tale and, 100–2, 108– Timaeus (Calcidius), 35, 116, 168 12, 145, 153, 155, 161, 180, 203 Tithonus, 12–21, 28, 37, 42, 76, 110, Pertelote and, 100–1, 111–12, 138 116, 139, 145, 191, 200, 202 poetry and, 71, 108 Tolkien, J.R.R., 242n443 Shakespeare, William, 41 Travis, Peter, 6–7, 46, 73, 86, 96–7, Singleton, Charles S., 165 99, 130, 134, 137–8, 141–2, 149, Sirius, 159, 239n325 159, 165, 172, 182, 195, 199 sophism, 142, 144, 168 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 2, 4, 6, Sorabji, Richard, 34 20, 141 soul Troy, 184–8 body and, 59–60, 71–2, 103–4, 169 truth butterfly and, 91–2 art and, 25 Chauntecleer and, 117–19, 136–8, birds and, 54–7, 60, 76 157–8 bliss and, 72 274 INDEX truth—Continued Vives, Juan Luis, 65–6 Chaucer and, 45, 196 Vološinov, V.N., 85, 95 Chauntelcleer and, 98–9, 101, 117, Vox Clamantis (Gower), 24, 100 128, 203, 206 comedy and, 90 Watson, Lynette, 89 language and, 143, 163 Wells, Orson, 19 Manciple’s Tale and, 52, 54–7, 76–81 Wentersdorf, Karl P., 147–8 Miller’s Tale and, 25, 27, 38, 42, 49 Wetherbee, 27, 35, 47, 95, 183 noise and, 45 Wheeler, Bonnie, 135 Nun’s Priests’ Tale and, 86–7, 148–9 “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?,” 61 persuasion and, 62 Willeford, Charles, 206 Plato and, 169, 171, 183 Wood, Chauncey, 151 Summoner’s Tale and, 86 Wordsworth, William, 3 Wuthering Heights (Bronte), 59 Ulysses (Joyce), 111 Updike, John, 17 “yeerd enclosed al aboute,” 95, 205 Yvain (Chrétien), 98 Valerius Flaccus, 66, 121 Vincent of Beauvais, 106–7, 242n426 Zethos, 65 Virgil, 2, 4, 7, 71, 80, 123, 135 Zeus, 12, 51, 59, 65, 88, 126, 160