Poetic Invention and Chaucer's "Parlement of Foules" Author(S): Kurt Olsson Source: Modern Philology, Vol

Poetic Invention and Chaucer's "Parlement of Foules" Author(s): Kurt Olsson Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Aug., 1989), pp. 13-35 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/438526 Accessed: 03-10-2017 06:28 UTC

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This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Poetic Invention and Chaucer's Parlement of Foules1

Kurt Olsson

Anima . . . facit novas compositiones, licet non faciat novas res. [BONAVENTURA]

I Although the Parlement of Foules centrally describes a book-inspired process of discovery, it is, as a statement about that process, both playfully and seriously enigmatic. Chaucer's narrator, perplexed by the miracles of Love, reads an old book to learn a certain, unidentified thing; his search for knowledge turns into a dream-quest which culminates in his witnessing a parliament of birds, held "on seynt Valentynes day" (line 309).2 What the narrator learns or discovers from this experience remains a subject of scholarly debate, and it merits further inquiry. From the very outset, however, the narrative is problematic, even in the promise of new knowledge that Chaucer's persona has found in books:

For out of olde feldes, as men seyth, Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere, And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, Cometh al this newe science that men lere. [Lines 22-25]

This analogy, while it names a starting point for discovery, leaves much else out of account. How, specifically, is "al this" knowledge generated or harvested? In what form does it already exist in books? Does the human agent-not referred to in the analogy-merely find it there, or, as seems more likely, does he cultivate what he discovers into knowledge? In the narrative, reading itself does not satisfy Chaucer's persona, but things evolved out of his "olde bok," modified and combined in the vision with things recalled from other readings, will influence his quest and possibly yield the knowledge he seeks. By what process, then, are these things "invented," transformed, and organized to permit and foster, if not insure, discovery? Chaucer does not answer such questions directly-indeed, at no time in the poem does he openly identify his persona's "newe science," much less explain its genesis- and yet his statement about the emergence of knowledge is all the more powerful because its meaning is veiled by a fiction centered on an eager but not especially perceptive learner. The Parlement is, as the disparity of critical opinion about it suggests, a difficult work. The poet, as if bound by his opening analogy, gathers for it varied, even opposed ideas from the auctores, but it is not readily apparent in his fiction how, from those ideas, he produces a coherence of new knowledge. We need not infer, however, as one critic has done, that Chaucer's refusal to make this "science" explicit betrays a skepticism about the power of books or the auctores to illuminate "personal" experience, in this case the experience

I/I am grateful to the University of Idaho Research Council for a grant in support of research for this article. 2/All Chaucer quotations are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston, 1957).

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 14 Modern Philology (August 1989) of his narrator.3 The work has a complexity suited to the complexity of its issues, and it does not proclaim a simple doctrine. In this essay, I shall attempt to show how the Parlement becomes meaningful in its complexity as it focuses specifically on issues of discovery and poetic invention. The work provides significant insight into a medieval poet's capacity both to "invent" or discover matter and, in making fables based on that matter, to evolve prospects for "newe science." Chaucer's exercise of inventing the Parlement is closely related to his narrator's exercise of discovery, and by tracing how these processes converge, we shall come to a clearer sense of how the diverse parts of this complex work fit together to display a particular new knowledge. As is well known, medieval treatises on the poetical art devote scant attention to inventio, but the poets, even without a history of medieval theories to support them, take invention seriously. Boccaccio defines poesis itself as a certain fervor of "exquisite invention" and "fervid expression . . of that which the mind has invented."4 Poets obviously must find matter or, in Boccaccio's terms, bring forth "strange and unheard-of creations [inuenciones] of the mind" before they can do what the handbooks teach: give that matter a fixed order and adorn it.5 The nature of the finished poem, including the relationship between the fable and the truth it veils, will depend critically on this opening exercise of invention. At least in theory, a poet's resources for invention are unlimited: certainly the process itself would appear to demand a freedom to find things in places that rules cannot identify. In a later period, Leonardo da Vinci defends such a freedom when he advises painters to "look at certain walls stained with damp or at stones of uneven colour," for from such things, as from "the embers of the fire, or clouds or mud, or other similar objects . . . you will find most admirable ideas . . . because from a confusion of shapes the spirit is quickened to new inventions."6 This statement suggests by analogy the capacity of the medieval poet to generate freely such inuenciones as Boccaccio describes. Chaucer perhaps anticipates the idea in the House of Fame, where the whirling cage, the house of tidings, provides un- formed or deformed images, the hyle or primordial matter that might quicken the poet's "spirit of invention." A medieval poet, however, can also find a confusion of shapes elsewhere, even in matter already formed by the auctores and given a "fixed" value in tradition. A medieval poet's invention is bound to be affected by his regard for the auctores. One of his chief roles, in fact, is "to pass on matter" from their books, and such an office would appear to limit significantly his power to discover or innovate. Nevertheless, even in this role, he is not completely restricted: his task is partly to interpret or gloss that received matter, or to discover meanings implicit in it; it is partly to invest it with his own thought, skill, and purpose.7 The poet who retells a

3/H. M. Leicester, Jr., "The Harmony of Chaucer's Parlement: A Dissonant Voice," Chaucer Review 9 (1974): 15-24. 4/Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium 14.7, trans. Charles G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry (Indiana- polis, 1956), p. 39; "Poesis . . . est feruor quidam exquisite inueniendi atque dicendi seu scribendi quod inueneris" (Boccaccio in Defence of Poetry: Genealogiae deorum gentilium Liber XIV, ed. Jeremiah Reedy, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts, vol. 8 [Toronto, 1978], p. 34). 5/Osgood, trans., p. 39; and Reedy, ed., p. 34. 6/Quoted by Sir Kenneth Clark, "The Blot and the Diagram," Encounter 20 (1963): 28-29. 7/A. C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry, 2d ed. (London, 1972), p. 76; Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford, 1971), pp. 15-17.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Olsson/ Chaucer's Parlement of Foules 15 well-known story does not alter it in basic content, and yet he does change it, and often significantly, in details, expression, and "sentence." To be sure, such a pro- cedure, as far as it goes, is not likely to yield anything resembling Boccaccio's "peregrinas et inauditas inuenciones." The poet, however, can do even more with his sources, and in the Parlement, Chaucer has done so. That poem, though it is filled with copyings and tracings from earlier works, exemplifies the kind of invention Boccaccio envisions, and the reason for this is not far to seek. Chaucer introduces familiar topoi, recounts or alludes to known stories, and expresses received opinion in separate parts of his narrative; what is unique is the joining and placing of these disparate things in a whole. Though it is possible that such a gathering of materials is the product of "free" invention, it is equally possible that the auctores inspired Chaucer to it. They, in addition to providing "fixed" matter that the poet then adapts to this or that part of his composition, might influence the inventive process more basically by giving Chaucer the rationale for "finding" and drawing together things so diverse. As we shall discover, that rationale, at its poetic inception, is analogous to the painter's confusion of shapes. In looking at the potential influence of the auctores on the larger process of invention, we shall focus on topoi, but topoi different in kind from those that Ernst Curtius once described as the "cliches" of medieval literary tradition.8 The latter are unquestionably important to the poets: set images, motifs, or "intellectual themes" such as the locus amoenus and the goddess Natura reappear so frequently in medieval literature that we ignore them and the poets' adaptation of them at our peril. Chaucer introduces them in abundance, and readers of the Parlement must remain indebted to J. A. W. Bennett for showing their importance in that poem.9 For our present purpose, however, their relevance is limited: they constitute "matter" and separately cannot reveal the form that makes them meaningful in a whole; indeed, an emphasis on material topoi can make the Parlement seem an elusive totality in which elements are joined together to create tensions and suggest meanings, rather than a coherent whole that evinces a complex but unified knowledge.10 In poetics, the concept of inventio refers most often "to finding, or otherwise producing, the subject matter or 'content' of poems."'1 Curtius sees fixed content in the topics: with the decline of ancient rhetoric, he suggests, topics formerly valued as "the 'regions'. . . from which arguments are drawn" lose their power for opening a subject.12 Medieval poets, however, see more in topics than Curtius supposes or suggests: in them they discover form, and through form, they open their subject and find new "content." Formal topics, used to organize an argument, a poem, and the experience of a poem, can have thematic value, but that value will depend on the structure they help to produce. In this inquiry we shall be concerned with formal topics of a particular kind: not "common" places-topics such as genus, conse- quence, and degree which can be used in all fields of knowledge, but "special"

8/Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; reprint, New York, 1963), p. 70; on Curtius's approach, see Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000-1150 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 1-22. 9/J. A. W. Bennett, The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation (Oxford, 1957). 10/See the review of Bennett's book by Theodore Silverstein, "Chaucer's Modest and Homely Poem: The Parlement," Modern Philology 56 (1959): 270-76. 11/Robert Marsh, "Invention," in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, N.J., 1975), p. 401. 12/Cicero, Topica 2.7, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 387.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 16 Modern Philology (August 1989) places, or topics derived from, and ordinarily applied to, a given subject. The special topos, like Curtius's topic, is "determinate" in matter: the legal topic, for example, is a statement particularly suited to the content and setting of legal argument. Unlike Curtius's topic, however, the special topic can be used analogi- cally, forming a haunt containing a variety of arguments suited to a variety of other needs: it is not valued exclusively for its original content or its place in a specific argument. Discovery by means of these topoi can work to one of two ends, and the distinction is important for the Parlement. When the end is rhetorical, invention is, as Cicero notes, "the discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one's cause plausible."'3 This type of invention, important to the "game" of a Valentine rite, is used for speeches in the Parlement, but it does not govern the composition of the poem in its entirety. Medieval poets do use rhetorical invention in large poetic structures, however, and we might sharpen our focus on the Parle- ment by looking very briefly at an example of this practice in the Confessio Amantis, where John Gower has sought for Genius, his rhetor in the fiction, a strategy to turn an infatuated Amans from sensual love to a love wholly consistent with "moral vertu." Different and sometimes conflicting statements about the law of nature, found in books written by rhetoricians, poets, theologians, and legal authori- ties, become special places in an argument suited to Amans's nature and quasi-legal case. Using them, Genius gradually shifts the basis of argument from a law of sentient nature-the grounds of Amans's defense-to a law of reason, a law better suited to Amans's "kinde."14 In the eight-book invention of the Confessio, statements about the jus naturae form a distinctio leading to discovery of various kinds; it fosters new insight not only into love but into the capital vices and other matters historical, quasi-scientific, "political," and spiritual.'5 In the most important sense, however, these topics organize an argument promoting the conversion of Amans to values once held but now forgotten. In the Parlement, Chaucer also evolves a distinctio to explore aspects of love, but his purpose in doing so is different. The dream he narrates is not designed to make "old beliefs" plausible, and the end of his invention is less rhetorical than visionary. The medieval basis for this kind of invention-invention ordered to knowledge-can be found in Saint Augustine's De doctrina Christiana. As he attends to the subject of a Christian rhetoric in that work, Augustine focuses especially on discovery: to elocutio or "teaching what we have learned" he devotes a single book, but to inventio or "discovering those things which are to be understood" he devotes three.16 In these books, he does not develop a system of

13/Cicero, De inventione 1.7.9, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 19. 14/ Kurt Olsson, "Natural Law and John Gower's Confessio Amantis," Medievalia et Humanistica, N.S. 11 (1982): 229-61. 15/On the distinctio, see Judson Boyce Allen, The Friar as Critic: Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Nashville, 1971), pp. 102-12, and The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto, 1982), pp. 142-49; Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, "Biblical Distinctions in the Thirteenth Century," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age 41 (1974): 27-37, and "Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 201-25. 16/Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.1., trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York, 1958), p. 7.

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"free" invention: truths, for him, are to be found in Scripture. Nonetheless, the fact that knowledge is thereby subjected to prior determination does not mean, as one interpreter has suggested, that Augustine has reduced inventio to an art of less range or power than it had in the rhetorics of antiquity.17 One could argue, to the contrary, that Augustine has conferred on invention a more ambitious office. In his art, he looks not for strategies of persuasion but for truths, and those truths, he would claim, are greater than the pagan orator could have imagined. The ancient orator is restricted not only by his unbelief but by a method that always points to contingent things, to causae or hypotheses: philosophical quaestiones or theses fall outside his discipline and expertise.18 The Christian orator, unlike his pagan counterpart, always refers causae or issues to truths of the utmost importance-truths pertaining to eternal salvation and damnation. Enjoined to be wise as well as eloquent, he reads Scripture to attain wisdom. This resource, however, is filled with obscurities and difficulties, and getting at the expanse of truths hidden in it is a complex and arduous task. It is for this reason that Augustine takes such pains to develop a framework for invention: by a division of signs and modes of analyzing them, he organizes perception in order to make discovery a likelihood. As presented in De doctrina, such inventio serves a rhetoric-indeed, it is necessary to that rhetoric- but its end is clearly not Ciceronian; by invention, Augustine does not seek means of persuasion but knowledge. For later writers who work in this mode, invention is obviously not confined to a reading of Scripture, but it most frequently still begins in the reading of books. To this practice Chaucer makes no exception in the case of his persona.'9 Invention taken as far as the visionary becomes a mode of philosophical or quasi-philosophical inquiry. For the poet, of course, the process of invention-whether it be rhetorical or visionary involves more. Reading and inquiry inspire fabling; and fabling, whatever its inspiration, can itself become a mode of inquiry. In fabling directed to new knowledge, the special topics represent more than set "content" or matter to be transferred from one context to another. Newly devised as forms, they become a means for finding things "strange and unheard-of," and they organize new structures of perception. In the interdependent activities of reading, fabling, and inquiry represented by the Parlement, Chaucer introduces topics that are, in their origins, unrelated to the issue that chiefly concerns his narrator. These topics set terms, propositions, or ideas in the auctores-become compatible with that concern when

17/Robert 0. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer's Poetics (New Haven, Conn., 1963), pp. 43-46. 18/Cicero thus challenges Hermagoras's assumption that the orator is qualified to speak on philosophical matters or "general questions" (quaestiones): "I think that everyone understands perfectly that these questions are far removed from the business of an orator. It seems the height of folly to assign to an orator as if they were trifles these subjects in which we know that the sublime genius of philosophers has spent so much labour" (De inventione 1.6.8). 19/In one of the more extensive treatments of invention in the medieval artes poeticae, John of Garland testifies that "to invent is to come into knowledge of an unknown thing through the agency of one's own reason" (Parisiana Poetria, chap. 1, lines 84-85, ed. and trans. Traugott Lawler [New Haven, Conn., 1947], p. 9). Eventually John defines invention according to the rhetorical ends of honestas and utilitas (chap. 1, lines 327-29); while narrowing his focus in that sense, he broadens it in another, introducing a field of topoi reaching far beyond the "places" found in books. In his own invention Chaucer offers a contrasting perspective. If he posits a rhetorical end for the Parlement, he does so only in the broad sense of "teaching what [he has] learned"; more centrally, he represents a process of learning, and books supply the "places" for discovery.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 18 Modern Philology (August 1989) they are turned into a "confusion of shapes" and used metaphorically in the exercise of discovery. It is through topics so transposed that Chaucer generates inuenciones that will veil but also reveal "newe science."

II The earliest accounts of the "highe feste" of Saint Valentine's Day occur in late fourteenth-century literature, and in these fictions the rite dedicated to the choosing of mates or pledging of loves can be refined to include a test, even a contest, of poetic invention.20 A gentle suitor' who wishes to be "chosen" at the feast does well to canvass the arguments- all available means of persuasion-that serve his case worthily. His proof of a noble heart rests in part on his skill at invention. He looks at his own person, at that of the beloved, at the love or lack of it between them; he explores ideas and forms of expression in the topoi of old "ditties, complaints, roundels, virelays, balades, lays."21 If he is going to succeed in his suit, he must warm the heart of the person he loves, and his task will be all the more difficult when there are rival suitors just as inventive as he, who are busy evolving their own rhetoric. In this exercise, he must find something new in something old, creating a fable that mysteriously tells the truth about himself, his beloved, and love itself. Three tercels in the Parlement vie as suitors for the formel eagle through a contest of rhetorical skill. That contest is unresolved, largely because the formel defers the "eleccioun, / Whoso he be that shulde be hire feere" (lines 409-10). The three suitors, all good rhetors, confuse rather than resolve the issue by their speeches since, as the "tercelet of the faucoun" testifies, each "hath swich repli- cacioun / That non by skilles may be brought adoun" (lines 536-37). Each of these birds is honorable, and yet each works to his own advantage. Each is inventive in the rhetorical sense, and because none is chosen on the basis of an argument selected, together their speeches provide a storehouse of ideas about love: their combined invention is modestly visionary. Nevertheless, as good as their speeches are, they do not convey the richness of the amatory and poetical arts to which Chaucer's entire poem testifies. The poet's larger concern grows out of the link between being a poet and loving: in this game, the test of a lover is poetic skill, and the test of a poet is knowing love. Chaucer's invention begins playfully with hints of his own failure in both skill and knowledge. As Saint Augustine testifies in De doctrina, one cannot speak eloquently on a subject about which one knows nothing. Chaucer's tercels, knowing love, can be eloquent. Chaucer's narrator, lacking that knowledge, cannot.

20/ D. S. Brewer provides a larger, extrinsic setting for contests such as the one presented in the Parlement by noting a similar practice later described in the charter of the cour amoureuse, an institution whose "chief aim was the presentation of love-poems to ladies in a kind of competition" (D. S. Brewer, ed., Parlement of Foulys [1960; reprint, New York, 1972], p. 4). See Arthur Piaget, "La cour amoureuse, dite de Charles VI," Romania 20 (1891): 417-54, and "Un manuscrit de la cour amoureuse de Charles VI," Romania 31 (1902): 597-603; Theodor Straub, "Die Grundung des Pariser Minnehofs von 1400," Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie 77 (1961): 1-14; Richard Firth Green, "The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis," in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1983), pp. 87-108; for a reappraisal of the historical relationship between actual Valentine customs and the Parlement, see Jack B. Oruch, "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February," Speculum 56 (1981): 534-65. 21/Brewer, ed., p. 132.

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Traditionally, of course, the inspiration for love, as for finding the right words to express it, is the beloved. This, for Chaucer the persona, is a special problem. He has no mistress and evidently never has had one, and because he has not experienced love, he is all the more mystified by Love's "wonderful werkynge" (line 5). In the first stanza of the Parlement, his complaint-"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne" (line 1)-reveals the double aspect of his problem: he does not know the amatory art and therefore lacks a subject; without a subject, he cannot exercise the poetical art. This, of course, makes of his poem an exercise in rhetorical outdoing. If he can write successfully about something he has never experienced, he can reveal his imagination-his ability to grasp the figure of things without the matter-and thereby establish his mastery of the art poetical; since his subject is love, that poetic mastery in its turn might qualify him for the experience of love. Nevertheless, his confession of inexperience is inauspicious not only for the poem but for the Valentine tradition itself: by his next action, in fact, he inspires little confidence that he knows how to celebrate so high a feast. Admitting "I knowe nat Love in dede" (line 8), he reads "Tullius of the Drem of Scipioun" in order to learn "a certeyn thing" (line 20). This choice of text must endear him to academicians but not much to lovers, and the fact that he tinkers with the Somnium, offering a paraphrase that better suits his aspiration, does not substantially improve its relevance. He reads into Cicero some matters of love, especially a contrast between "rightful" and "likerous folk" (line 79), but this does not satisfy him immediately-"I hadde thyng which that I nolde" (line 90) or ultimately, as his later experience will reveal. The wonder of the poet's choice of the Somnium, however, lies in the very distance of that text from his principal concern: its seeming irrelevance makes it the more fertile ground for invention. The book is only a starting point: dream supplies the field for inventio, and one might see in the process of reading "to mete" and then dreaming a model of the inventive process. Cicero's book provides determinate matter, and the dream yokes that matter with miracles of love, leading through a confusion of shapes to resolution. The transition begins with Africanus, no longer merely the venerable Ciceronian figure but now also a person wise in love. The new Africanus pushes the reluctant dreamer into the park, intending thereby to show him "mater of to wryte" (line 168): here invention begins. Africanus leads Chaucer into new experience to repay him for "lokynge of myn olde bok totorn, / Of which Macrobye roughte nat a lyte" (lines 110-11). Indeed, from the much that Macrobius wrote we might recover topoi for "discovering those things which are to be understood." In his chapter on fable, Macrobius introduces four kinds of fiction as modes of invention, as means a philosopher might use to find and express the truth. Only one of these kinds, he eventually claims, is suited to philosophical argument, but nevertheless his complete list offers topoi of poetical making. What Chaucer does with these topoi is roughly analogous to what Saint Augustine, in De doctrina, does with rules of invention generated by the Donatist Tyconius. Tyconius claimed that his rules "would help us to understand almost all those things which are said obscurely in the Law, or in the divine books, provided that we understood them and knew how to apply them":22 for Augustine, other

22/Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3.30.

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methods are also necessary for uncovering what is hidden in Scripture. For Chaucer, there are obviously many more kinds of fable than Macrobius's four, and in the Parlement he mixes a greater number to find and express the truth. Nevertheless, Macrobius's discussion, though limited, provides a valuable opening into a problem of interpretation and discovery, for the four kinds of fable give Chaucer four ways of perceiving love. Unlike Macrobius, he values all four and does not eliminate three as unworthy of those who profess the truth: each becomes an interpretive mode. In using this model, he unravels a mystery and also creates one in ways not approved by Macrobius. This happens because Macrobius's evaluative statements have become neutral topics of discovery for Chaucer. Much has been written about shifts of style, doctrine, and genre in the course of the Parlement; such changes might be reinterpreted in light of the Macrobian idea of fabulous narrative. The fables that Macrobius thinks unsuitable in a philosophical treatise, on the one hand, are those that merely "gratify the ear"- those, like the fables of Aesop, where "both the setting and plot are fictitious," and those presenting "matters base and unworthy of divinities . . . (as, for example, gods caught in adultery)." Fables acceptable to the philosopher, on the other hand, present "a decent and dignified conception of holy truths, with respectable events and characters. . . beneath a modest veil of allegory." These are used to present "the [world] Soul, or... spirits having dominion in the lower and upper air, or ... the gods in general."23 The separation of this fourth kind of fable-exempli- fied for Macrobius by the Somnium Scipionis- sets the stage for the Parlement. Nature is the greatest enigma in the Parlement, and presently we must consider her place among the fables Chaucer presents. If for the moment we exclude her from consideration, we might observe that in arranging his text Chaucer appears to descend through the four Macrobian modes. He begins with the Somnium, the best kind of narratio fabulosa, and then presents in order the three other kinds, adding to each certain features of other medieval literary genres and conventions. The second is introduced with Chaucer's dream, modeled on the medieval love vision in which a dreamer enters a park or garden, hears birds singing, and eventually comes before the god of love or Venus. These visions often include a love debate among the birds, an episode Chaucer defers until after the experience in Venus's temple.24 The focal point of the second stage of the poem-ending when the dreamer leaves the temple is the portrait of love deities, associated figures, and their devotees. This portion of the narrative conforms to Macrobius's base narratio fabulosa. Chaucer here modifies details of his immediate source in the Teseida, but he retains Boccaccio's sense of the gods: they are to be understood in malo.25 Priapus, for example, is given the sovereign place in Venus's temple, but appearing "in swich aray as whan the asse hym shente / With cri by nighte" (lines 255-56), he exemplifies the base matters which Macrobius thought unworthy of philosophical treatment.

23/Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 1.2.6-13, trans. William Harris Stahl, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies, no. 48 (New York, 1952), pp. 84-85. 24/Brewer, ed., p. 9; for a translation of relevant texts, see B. A. Windeatt, ed., Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues (Totowa, N.J., 1982), pp. 85-124. 25/For a translation of Boccaccio's notes on the relevant section of the Teseida, see Robert P. Miller, ed., Chaucer. Sources and Backgrounds (New York, 1977), pp. 336-43; see also Robert Hollander, "The Validity of Boccaccio's Self-Exegesis in His Teseida," Medievalia et Humanistica, N.S. 8 (1977): 163-83.

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The third kind of narrative, also rejected by those who profess the truth, is the double fiction represented in works like Aesop's fables. Chaucer's account of the parliament, the next fable in the dream sequence, is the counterpart of this type. Macrobius rejects such fables not because they are immoral-indeed they can encourage virtue-but because they are false in argument and the "places" of argument. Although the beast fable provides some insight into behavior, it signifies nothing "true" or significant in the larger universe of Neoplatonic thought: this type of fable represents shadows or tracings, not truth or reality itself. Finally, at a fourth stage, Chaucer creates a poem within his poem. The birds, before they depart, sing a roundel in honor of Nature: this lyric represents the lowest order of fable, the least palatable to the philosopher, for it does not teach but merely delights. In this group of fables Macrobius places the comedies of Menander and tales filled with the "imaginary doings of lovers." What distinguishes this type, however, is not so much its genre or content as its end: the principle the roundel shares with this kind of fiction is the ostensibly exclusive goal of pleasing. Works of this sort the philosopher "relegates to children's nurseries."26 In the sequence of fables, the narrator of the Parlement thus appears to begin where he should end and end where he should begin. By his descent from a region of philosophical truth to one of sensual gratification, in fact, he might well give us pause. By his choice and order of fables, has Chaucer relegated the feast he celebrates to "children's nurseries"? The "indecent" narratio fabulosa, the Aesopic fable, and the poem intended merely to please are as useful to Chaucer's "science" as is the single kind of narratio fabulosa approved by Macrobius. Late medieval poets do not reject a fable merely because it debases the Olympians; a moral integument need not lose significance or value because the gods are treated in malo. The fable of the birds is also more valuable to Chaucer than it would have been to Macrobius, perhaps even to Chartrian writers who, like Macrobius, would think its insight into behavior too obvious to be useful to philosophers.27 For Chaucer, such fiction need not be a mere "toy of poetry"; the poet gains detachment from, as well as a corresponding wonder at, human behavior by representing it through the lofty rhetoric and ignoble chatter of birds. The fable of the parliament, including the song to Nature contained in it, has a moral content that warrants serious interpretation: its pars philosophiae is ethics. What then do these fables mean? If they exemplify Ciceronian ideas, the poem becomes a rhetorical invention in which Chaucer explores a theme such as "common profit" in different fabulous settings.28 His narrator, because he cannot fully understand the plain "sentence" of Scipio's dream, needs examples, and in that sense he resembles the worse of two pupils described by Thomas Aquinas: "a pupil is shown to have a better mind when he can grasp an intellectual truth which the master puts out without adornment, than the pupil who needs sense-perceptible examples, to

26/Macrobius, 1.2.8. 27/See, e.g., William of Conches's comment on Macrobius in Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte, 9 (Leiden, 1974), p. 18, n. 3; p. 69. 28/See Bruce Cowgill, "The Parlement of Foules and the Body Politic," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 74 (1975): 315-35.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 22 Modern Philology (August 1989) lead him up to that truth."29 For such a character, the last fables in the Parlement, though deemed useless to the better pupil or the philosopher, might contain a valuable lesson. If a lesson based on the Somnium is present, however, it is not apparent least of all to a pupil in need of examples. To be sure, the doubled terms of Scipio's dream are carried forward into the inscribed "vers of gold and blak" over the gate where Chaucer's dream experience begins, but eventually the clear moral distinctions of the "Ciceronian" type-between the "rightful" and the "likerous," for example- are lost. This is most evident in the bird debate and roundel. It is not that these parts of the dream cannot support the weight of philosophical doctrine but that the value center of the experience has shifted. By the poem's end, the narrator does not feel that "he ne shulde hym in the world delyte" (line 66). The scenes in and about the temple of brass suggest torment and "harde grace" (line 65), but the dreamer sees the earth, or things of the earth, as happier than Africanus described them. Certainly, neither he nor we are made to feel, from the voices in the parliament, that "oure present worldes lives space / Nis but a maner deth" (lines 53-54). The last fables thus seem to point to a truth distinct from that of the Somnium. By adding to them an integument concerning Nature, Chaucer confuses the issue further, for, as Macrobius himself testifies, Nature is the subject of the best kind of narratio fabulosa:

The Supreme God and Mind . . . are above the Soul and therefore beyond nature. It is a sacrilege for fables to approach this sphere. But in treating of the other gods and the Soul . . . philosophers make use of fabulous narratives: not without a purpose, or merely to entertain, but because they realize that a frank, open exposition of herself is distasteful to Nature, who just as she has withheld an understanding of herself from the uncouth senses of men by enveloping herself in variegated garments, has also deigned to have her secrets handled by more prudent individuals through fabulous narratives. Accordingly, her sacred rites are veiled in mysterious representations so that she may not have to show herself even to initiates. Only eminent men of superior intelligence gain a revelation of her truths; the others must satisfy their desire for worship with a ritual drama which prevents her secrets from becoming common.30

In the last fables, Chaucer presents a ritual drama in which Nature figures centrally. The rite of this parliament, of course, is not wholly "ernest" or consistently lofty: there is comedy in the birds and, for some readers, in Nature herself.31 It is possible that the representation of the goddess suffers the effect of the fables in which Chaucer has placed her, since these are intellectually the least serious of the Macrobian types. The entire poem, in fact, is not an exercise in Neoplatonic metaphysics, and if there is mystery or a revelation of Nature's truths in the last fables, it is not at the level Macrobius envisions. In that sense perhaps, it is correct to state that the dreamer, despite his vision of Nature, remains "unillumined, unconverted, openly absorbed in history and its incorrigibly contingent forms of discourse."32 At the same time, the dreamer cannot be the sole warrant for judging Nature's importance. If his wish to learn a certain thing is fictitiously personal, his

29/Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae.174.2, trans. Roland Potter, Blackfriars, vol. 45 (New York, 1970), p. 75. 30/Macrobius, 1.2.17 18. 31/See Jack B. Oruch, "Nature's Limitations and the Demande d'Amour of Chaucer's Parlernent," Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 23-37. 32/David Aers, "The Parliament of Fowls: Authority, the Knower and the Known," Chaucer Resiew 16 (1981-82): 10.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Olsson/Chaucer's Parlement of Foules 23 discovery is impersonal; for reasons we shall note, the work is progressively less about him and more about what he dreams. Africanus supplies "mater of to wryte," and the images then recorded by the dreamer, but obviously judged and shaped by the poet, constitute the invention. The Nature who appears in the last fables is the "noble goddesse" of tradition. The dreamer, as Chaucer's agent for discovery, gains access to the natural order as well as to things historical and contingent because of the "plesaunce" of her rule. In the last fables she lends a form and significance to what otherwise might be chaotic and meaningless. Her presence, in short, suggests an ascent in knowledge even while, in a Macrobian framework, the fables in which she appears imply a descent from philosophical truth. That something positive is happening as we course through the fables is also suggested by changes in the quality of the poetry; the work reflects a maturing in poetic statement and craft. From the brief, almost prosaic summary of the Somnium, with its formulaic string of "thanne's," the poet advances to greater vividness, power, complexity, liveliness, and control: the rich imaginings of park and temple are surpassed by the vigorous debate among contentious birds, and all is concluded in the formal, indeed highly fashioned, roundel of fowls chosen to celebrate Nature in song. This ascent suggests that the Somnium does not warrant its oft-assumed status as the privileged text of the Parlement. Indeed, all four fables, each in a different mode, provide topoi that enlarge perspective, allowing Chaucer to discover and at the same time organize what he seeks to understand. Even the roundel set off within the larger work finally gives him, imaginatively, something closest to what he lacks: experience in love. In its elegance this song most clearly captures the delight that Nature herself inspires in her creatures.

III As topoi, the four fables provide a variety of psychological perspectives; each is necessary but none alone is sufficient for discovering the truth. That each is represented as a dream or part of a dream also suggests their value in discovery. By convention, a dream isolates and clarifies the things to be understood, affording prospects and insights usually not thought possible in waking life. In the rich introduction to the House of Fame, Chaucer goes so far as to ask whether "the soule, of propre kind, be so parfit" that in dream, divested of the body, it comes to understand "what oure flessh ne hath no myght to understonde" (lines 43-44, 49- 50). In effect, that process of attaining knowledge is represented in the original Somnium Scipionis, and such a vision is an appropriate starting point for Chaucer's own dream inquiry into the "wonderful werkynge" of love. It might be argued that both of these visions concern love and the common profit, but the miracles of love that most interest Chaucer must be distinguished from the common profit that occupies Cicero, at least in the Chaucerian paraphrase. Chaucer's dream, it might be said, occurs because of that difference because from Cicero's book he "nadde that thyng that [he] wolde" (line 91). His vision involves inventio or discovery as Augustine described it: "to discover is to come into that which is sought. . . we do not usually say that things which come as it were spontaneously into the mind are discovered, although they can be called known. The reason is, because we do not set out in search of them in order to come into them, that is, to discover them."33

33/ Augustine, The Trinity, 10.7, trans. Stephen McKenna, Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 45 (Washington, D.C., 1963), p. 304.

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Medieval writers frequently observe that the truth man seeks outside himself can be discovered within. As expressed in a gloss on Boethius, "lat hym techyn his soule that it hath, by naturel principles kyndeliche yhyd withynne itself, al the trouthe the which he ymagineth to ben in thinges withoute."34 Paradoxically, the more conscientiously a person applies the "lyght of his ynwarde sighte," the less private his knowledge becomes: in the inner recesses of the mind he discovers truths about himself, but he also finds the truth. Although things seem to come spontaneously into a dreamer's mind, they are already present there and might be ordered by an exercise of discovery; in such a case, these images provide a shortcut to truth, giving the occasion for insight even in a "lyf so short." As Robert Burlin has observed, the Parlement "is an epistemological process. By unfolding a progress that makes us conscious of how we know, it implies more than one might expect about what we can know."35 Medieval philosophers and cosmological poets, theologians and spiritual writers refined this idea of discovery in terms of faculty psychology. Especially useful to our inquiry is Boethius's division of four faculties: senses perceive matter and the figure of things as constituted in matter, imagination grasps the figure of things without the matter, reason understands the universal species, and intelligence knows the simple forms.36 Late medieval authors use these topoi variously. Alain de Lille, for example, reworks and expands the Boethian doctrine in his "Sermo de sphaera intelligibili." Through the order of faculties, Alain discovers and represents a universal order of being; in four spheres, each named after a faculty, he places forms that are related in varying degrees to the divine essence. Although this particular treatise is not an immediate source for the Parlement, its myth provides a useful model for the ordering of matter in dream and fable, and we shall find that it can shed light on the progress of Chaucer's narrative. In his fiction, Alain has the human soul approach each sphere and the forms unique to it through an appropriate faculty. By sense perception, she enters the sensible sphere, the physical world; by imagination, she is carried to the imaginable sphere, the dwelling of primordial matter; by reason, she ascends to the rational sphere, the palace of the world-soul; and by intelligence, she is conveyed to the intelligible sphere, the inner chamber of divine ideas. Chaucer, of course, is inter- ested in human experience on earth, but the subjects of "De sphaera" the world- soul, primordial matter, the sensible world, and the divine essence-have analogues in his poem. The spheres or regions, the psychological faculties, and the forms which variously manifest the divine are topoi that additionally demarcate the fields of his invention and illumine the shifting psychological emphases of his poem. From the work he uses for his opening fable, Chaucer distills ideas that suggest features of Alain's rational sphere. The issue for him is not the world-soul, deemed by Macrobius the highest possible subject of fabulous narrative. Reading the Somnium literally, he discovers instead a lex aeterna to govern human affairs. This provides a rational order for experience, and souls that obey it ascend to a joyful abode-a place for "soules cleere"-in eternity. The "sentence" of the dream is a

34/ Boece, 3.m.l 1, in Robinson, ed. (n. 2 above), p. 355. 35/Robert Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction (Princeton, N.J., 1977), pp. 92-93. 36/ Boece, 5.pr.4, in Robinson, ed., p. 379.

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Know thyself first immortal, And loke ay besyly to werche and wysse To commune profit, and thow shalt not mysse To comen swiftly to that place deere That ful of blysse is and of soules cleere. [Lines 73-77]

Africanus couples his assertion that "rightful folk shul gon, after they dye, / To hevene" (lines 55-56) with a reminder that the wrongful will be punished:

But brekers of the lawe, soth to seyne, And likerous folk, after that they ben dede, Shul whirle aboute th'erthe alwey in peyne, Tyl many a world be passed, out of drede, And than, foryeven al hir wikked dede, Than shul they come into this blysful place. [Lines 78-83] Alain's concern is different, yet analogous. In "De sphaera" he pictures forms (ychome) joyfully returning to their place of origin-"ad proprium sue immortalita- tis . . . originem"37- in the rational sphere. There "clinging to the first dawn of their nativity, they do not know the sunset of unstable matter."38 The torment inherent in "materia fluitans"-a Boethian term which Chaucer, in his translation of the Consolation, renders "floterynge matere"39-will be manifest in lower spheres; it is foreshadowed in Scipio's dream by the painful whirling about the earth of "brekers of the lawe" and "likerous folk." More important at this point in Chaucer's paraphrase of the Somnium, however, is the sense of purity, rest, completeness, and bliss represented in a place which, in these features, resembles Alain's rational sphere. This establishes an order from which things in the lesser spheres will, at first glance, diverge. At the second stage of the Parlement, which includes the action of Chaucer's own dream up to the point where he emerges from Venus's temple, we traverse a region suggestive of Alain's imaginable sphere. In cosmology or ontology, this sphere is the shadowy region of hyle or primordial matter, of "matter divorced from form" returning to "primordial chaos."40 Here misshapen figures (ychonie) lament the injury of their deformity and plead for the succor of a better subject; they try to return to true being, but, having fallen, they are driven about in the contagion of unstable matter.4' In the morality that concerns Chaucer, this region offers images of frustrated love. The dreamer here witnesses a couple pleading their case before Venus and sees lovers pictured, but his field of vision is crowded with attendant

37/Alain, "Sermo de sphaera intelligibili," ed. Marie-Therese d'Alverny, Textes inedits (Paris, 1965), p. 301. Hereafter cited as "De sphaera." 38/"De sphaera," p. 301 (Dronke's translation, Fabula [n. 27 above], p. 150). 39/ Boece, 3.m.9, in Robinson, ed., p. 350. 40/In his later Anticlaudianus, or the Good and Perfect Man, bk. 1, lines 450-510 (trans. James J. Sheridan [Toronto, 1973], pp. 63-65), Alain has Reason see in three mirrors the contents of the four spheres of the earlier myth: in a silver mirror she sees pure forms (rational sphere) and primordial matter (imaginable sphere). 41/"De sphaera," pp. 300-301, 302.

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images, the ychonie, of things that draw lovers to eventual sorrow and despair. In a sense, the region is a product of sensualitas and misdirected imagination, of love made morally unstable by the false promise of the images which lovers fashion, then wrongly perceive. The order of images presented to the dreamer as he advances from the bright garden to the darkened interior of Venus's temple suggests the effect of this misperception: it mirrors a descent from expected pleasure to loss, frustra- tion, and grief. The journey through this region begins well in a paradisal setting, but the mood changes when Chaucer's dreamer comes upon Cupid:

Under a tre, besyde a welle, I say Cupide, oure lord, his arwes forge and file; And at his fet his bowe al redy lay; And Wille, his doughter, temprede al this while The hevedes in the welle, and with hire file She touchede hem, after they shulde serve Som for to sle, and some to wounde and kerve. [Lines 211-17]

What is here a prospect of death, with Cupid preparing his arrows to wound, pierce, and slay, later becomes a retrospect as the narrator, just before leaving the temple of brass, surveys pictures of dying lovers: "dyde," his last word before he enters a new region, suggests an omen fulfilled. Most of the personified figures the dreamer sees between these opening and closing scenes are assigned no moral value; though not "disfigurat" as is one of their number, Craft, they lack moral form or definition. They can be turned willy-nilly to good or evil, and in that-their moral indeterminacy-they resemble the partially formed images floating about in chaotic matter in Alain's imaginable sphere. Surely one looks for order, stability, and happiness in this place because it is an extension of the paradisal garden. Indeed, some of the figures in it, by name or attribute, promise delight, "game and jolyte" (line 226). Even these promises, however, are partially formed. Bennett has noted in this part of the dream "the presence of more equivocal emotions and the more sombre aspects of passion."42 The narrator does not condemn or approve these figures, and that perhaps is consistent with the poet's larger strategy in the work of rejecting tyrannies of form, whether they exist in genre, narrative stance, or moral thought. Here, in the promise of delight, however, he undercuts another kind of tyranny-the tyranny of formlessness-by generating "dark ambiguities" and then implicitly judging them through the images presented in Venus's temple.43 The journey from garden to temple, like a comparable descent envisioned in Alain's imaginable sphere, introduces the divided, approximate, fallen, and corruptible.44 In the temple, Venus's devotees find no delight, but longing and torment. Those who succumb to her see in the love she sponsors a paradise of endless delight: there, presumably, "No man may . . . waxe sek ne old" (line 207). Like the figures in "De sphaera" who never achieve the succor of a better subject, however, Venus's disappointed followers end their careers in wretchedness.

42/Bennett, The Parlement of Foutes (n. 9 above), p. 92. 43/Burlin (n. 35 above), p. 91. 44/"De sphaera," p. 301; for these terms, I follow the reading of Dronke, Fabula, p. 149, n. 3.

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Where Chaucer finishes the dreamer's journey through this region is therefore significant. In the Teseida, Boccaccio's account of the wending of a prayer to Venus ends with the approach to and portrait of the goddess. Though based on this work, Chaucer's accoint reverses episodes and ends later. Beyond the "sovereyn place" where he finds Priapus in the "aray" of his disgrace, beyond the dark and "prive corner" where he finds a "hautayn" Venus, the dreamer sees painted on the wall stories of lovers, "al here love, and in what plyt they dyde" (line 294). In Chaucer's work, images of Cupid, Priapus, Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres thus prepare for an inverted "tribute" by their followers. That tribute-a love that ends sorrowfully- contrasts starkly with the birds' roundel that will conclude Chaucer's dream. In a third and final region, the dreamer perceives the lower orders of existence of the physical world. The fabulous meeting over which Nature presides offers the counterpart of Alain's sensible sphere. The dreamer now apprehends concrete things: figures joined to matter, or Alain's ychones. The scene is variegated, par- ticularized, "historical," and made realistic by the individuated speeches of the birds; with the sole exception of Nature, this region presents no personified abstrac- tions. There is convention in birds debating, and there is wonder in their debating before Nature, but the scene displays a truth about experience that we have not yet seen. The participants, from start to finish, recognize contingency. Bliss in Nature's world is not endless but a function of time: "And whoso may at this tyme have his grace, / In blisful tyme he cam into this place!" (lines 412-13). Nature reminds the birds "as youre hap is, shul ye wynne or lese" (line 402), and in their final song, the birds rejoice in the return of summer: "Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe, / That hast this wintres wedres overshake, / And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!" (lines 680-82). The plurality and extension of issues, the range of characters, time, and the presence of accident or "hap" make moral judgment more difficult in this setting than it was in the earlier spheres. At the same time, the candor in dealing with temporality and uncertainty leads the poet closer to resolving the problem that so vexed him at the outset of his work:

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th'assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge, The dredful joye, alwey that slit so yerne: Al this mene I by Love. [Lines 1-4]

In the last fables, time and contingency do not pose such a threat, though they are "serious" issues in the love talk of the noble birds, in the comic advice of the birds of low degree, and even in the impatient "noyse of foules for to be delyvered" (line 491) of speeches and the parliament altogether. The solution to this problem is not to disregard change that is a major failing in the imaginable sphere but to let Nature "inform" it. On the one hand, with due regard for the impatient "kakelynge" of some fowls, this "noble emperesse" keeps life from chaos and nonexistence by her ordering. On the other hand, with due regard for the claim of "timeless" devotion by other birds-a devotion that might contravene her statutes she upholds an orderly process of change directed to resolution. Nature's action of kissing the formel eagle is suggestive of a principle underly- ing her speeches throughout the parliament:

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Nature held on hire hond A formel egle, of shap the gentilleste That evere she among hire werkes fond, The moste benygne and the goodlieste. In hire was everi vertu at his reste, So ferforth that Nature hireself hadde blysse To loke on hire, and ofte hire bek to kysse. [Lines 372-78]

This action has as its counterpart in Alain's sensible sphere the action of Form, who "kisses the subject with the godlike kiss of inherence."45 For Alain, this kiss of inherence is an act of creation: its offspring are things possible, true, and essential. For Chaucer, the kiss is an act not of compositio but of affirmation: it celebrates a union of Nature and created nature in the "goodlieste" of her creatures. In the parliament, nonetheless, composition does occur at another level. For Alain, when the soul enters the physical world, sense perception, "as if in a certain book, beholds erasures, that is, stains of damaged things, as if they were certain letters."46 Although in the formel "was everi vertue at his reste," the other birds' conduct betrays "erasures" and spots of corruption. For Nature, "composing" the parliament consequently requires more than mere affirmation or, as in De planctu, condemna- tion. In spite of the unexpected and discordant speeches of some, she displays no cruel ire or impatience, but gentleness in drawing all the birds to accord. Of necessity, she must suspend judgment in the case of the three eagles, who are all suitors of the formel; if she could judge as Reason does, she would choose the royal eagle as the worthiest. But in guiding creatures to their individual and collective profit, she rejects the option of settling disputes by simple verdicts. Allowing the birds freedom of choice, she guides them by filling them with pleasure. She thus states that by her statute and governance, "Ye come for to cheese-and fle your wey- / Youre makes, as I prike yow with plesaunce" (lines 388-89). The formel therefore "shal han hir eleccioun / Of whom hire lest" (lines 621-22). Nature exemplifies her own principles by her conduct throughout the parliament. Un- doubtedly she makes judgments, but one is less impressed with a figure who imposes her will or governance than with a figure who allows her statutes to emerge as the birds freely debate and freely choose. In short, she infuses her creation with form, and that remarkable talent adds to her loftiness. Although she is humbler than the Reason to whom she refers (line 632), her acts in Chaucer's vision reveal a dignity to rival that of forms in Alain's rational sphere. That rival power is illuminated by a final parallel in "De sphaera." Alain's ychome or rational forms "disdain the adulterous union with a material subject, they rejoice that they are far from taking on the pollution of the ordure of corruptibles, living in the fragrance of their own uncorruptedness."47 Dronke notes in these forms "an embarrassed self-righteousness": they clearly suppose a great, unbridgeable gulf between the rational and the sensible. Given such a supposition, what occurs in the next and highest sphere of Alain's myth is especially noteworthy.

45/"De sphaera," p. 300 (trans. Dronke, Fabula, p. 149); see also Alain, Anticlaudianus 1.455-59; The Plaint of Nature, prose 9, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto, 1980), pp. 217-28. 46/"De sphaera," p. 302. 47/Ibid., p. 301 (trans. Dronke, Fabula, p. 150).

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There, one might expect the distance from the sensible to be greater still, but Alain shows something very different. The center of the intelligible sphere is in fact "the physical handiwork, the whole universe," which draws its essence from the fullness of the divine essence as from a circumference. In this climax, Dronke observes, the fable affirms "the physical at the centre of the divine."48 Something like that occurs in Chaucer's poem: as paraphrased, the doctrine of the Somnium conveys a self- righteousness-no less so because the doctrine, for a medieval audience, is "rational" and, in a spiritual context, true. What this teaching lacks, despite its implied tribute to order in the universe, is a sense of the goodness of the entire creation. The parliament over which "the vicaire of almyghty Lord" (line 379) presides, by contrast, displays "stains of corruption," and yet it affirms creation as infused with the goodness of the divine. The moral content of the regions or spheres of the Parlement begins to give meaning to Chaucer's descent through types of Macrobian fable. What provides additional significance are the faculties engaged at each level of the experience. Alain has given us a model of those faculties, and yet Chaucer does not follow it literally. His dreamer does not descend from the rational to the sensible and then, merely because Nature appears, gain intelligence of love. The net effect of such a descent to the sensible would be confusion rather than ordered knowledge. Sig- nificant dream, by contrast, allows the mind to ascend by degrees from the chaos of experience to form. Each higher faculty also holds within it the power of the lower, and the ascent through faculties is a gain in elegance or clarity of knowing, as the dreamer recovers forms that explain the diverse things apprehended by the senses. Such an ascent sharpens remembrance; the dreamer does not forget what he has perceived but recovers what he has forgotten. Of this Boethius is reminded in the Consolation: "For certes the body, bryngynge the weighte of foryetynge, ne hath nat chased out of your thought al the cleernesse of your knowyng; for certeynli the seed of soth haldeth and clyveth within yowr corage, and it is awaked and excited by the wyndes and by the blastes of doctrine."49 It is tempting to see an intellectual descent in Chaucer's narrator. He is "awakened" to his dream quest by the teaching of the Somnium, and yet he appears to lose the clarity of knowing which that text inspires. In Macrobian terms, the "modest veil of allegory" which covers the truth of Scipio's dream becomes in the poet's vision more and more opaque. The narrator gradually loses the clear divisions of the Somnium, and his wonder, manifestly proportionate to the increasing am- biguity of his dream, might be caused by an inversion of psychological order. As the rational is left behind for the sensible, he advances not from the many to the one but from the one to the many; instead of moving through concentric rings toward a still center, the narrator advances to the outermost ring of experience. Though he might gain by this something resembling experience in love, his progress in this sense becomes a quest of inelegance, complexity, and fashioning. As he approaches love's miracles, he thus loses touch with his true and best nature, in a sense making of himself a fable.

481 Dronke, Fahula, p. 151. 49' Boe(e, 3.m. I I, in Robinson, ed. (n. 2 above), p. 355.

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A prospect of the dreamer falling away from his best nature as he enters the lower orders of Macrobian fable, however, does not fit the occasion of this poem of celebration. To suggest as much is to see the narrative merely as an exercise in Cicero applied, a medieval exemplum concerning the questionable "doings of lovers" or, in a more sophisticated way, concerning the philosophical lies of fable short of the best narratio fabulosa. That, in its turn, is to disregard the fullness of Chaucer's invention. In fact, the poet suggests that the Somnium, with its confident assertion about death in our "lives space," expresses only a partial truth. Are we then justified in inverting the ascetic ideology of the Somnium, letting rules of conduct emerge from the natural, physical order? Not entirely, of course. The wholeness of Chaucer's poem depends on Macrobian fables reevaluated, on matter newly discovered, and on fables freshly composed to suit an integration of human faculties. The dreamer himself "hath enclosid and hid in his tresors, al that he compasseth or secheth fro withoute,"50 and through dream he gains insight into the wholeness of experience: he knows more about love and poetry, and he also knows more about himself and a human nature reunified. Contrary to the models, the dream represents an ascent through faculties to integration in idea and simplicity in form. The narrator's entire experience, including reading the Somnium and dreaming, centers in imagination, but by imagination he advances from the sensible through the rational, and even as far as the intelligible. The first section of the Parlement presents data like that gathered through sense perception: though herein lie principles to guide behavior, these are figures as constituted in the "letter," the particular matter of language. To the narrator, the words of Scipio's dream lack a deeper "sentence" and meaning that imagination can begin to provide. He reads but does not yet understand. Despite his effort to make the Somnium fit his quest for knowledge, he can alter the text only minimally and, to his mind, unsatisfactorily. The counsel of Africanus is effectively the sense data on which the imagination of dream must work. In his own dream, Chaucer's narrator transforms the data of the Somnium, first seeing in his "mind's eye" the double inscription over the gate into the garden. The opening images in this blissful place give sensuous form to half the inscription: these are the figures of things without the matter. Later in the vision, the first images are reperceived as the dreamer emerges from the temple: "I was come ayeyn into the place / That I of spak, that was so sote and grene" (lines 295-96). Each of these beginnings constitutes the working of imagination proper, but with quite different results. The former leads to a place where "nevere tre shal fruyt ne leves bere" (line 137); the latter to "that blysful place / Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure" (lines 127-28). The imagination that draws us to Venus's temple confers false value on its creation. Especially in the "doings of lovers" pictured in and around that temple, Chaucer reveals the danger: by images that offer a mere illusion of enduring happiness, the mind is lulled into false security. Imagination driven by sensuality subverts reason and avoids judgment, specifically of the intentions or the power of images to help or injure. By it, the figures imagined are not drawn to resolution:

50/Ibid.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Olsson/ Chaucer's Parlement of Foules 31 perhaps significantly, most of them exist in name alone; those pictured in more detail manifest a potential never realized, for even when they move, they remain, in a larger sense, static. In a company of women dancing "alwey" around Venus's temple, for example, Chaucer invents a counterpart to the whirling of the lecherous in Scipio's dream, to the whirling of Paolo and Francesca in Dante's Inferno, perhaps even to the whirling tidings of the House of Fame. Although "some of hem were gay" (line 234), these women lack the prospect of a joyous ending; the dance, Chaucer goes on to say with a verb in the past tense, "was here offyce alwey, yer by yeere" (line 236). In this action there is no fulfillment-indeed, it is action without a future, without an ending. In the largest sense, this futile activity is symptomatic of the disease in all images of this region: all point to the death of imagination. Without adequate form, matter becomes increasingly unstable, and art becomes uninventive, sterile, and meaningless. By contrast, the imagination that "creates" Nature, even requiring that we recall images of her initially created in an old book (De planctu Naturae), calls upon judgment and moves us toward illumination. The progress of the dreamer from darkness in the temple to light in Nature's garden underscores the difference. Boccaccio's gloss on that darkness-"those who practice evil hate the light"- provides apt moral insight.5' Additionally relevant to the images of reentry into the garden is the psychological insight of authors such as Hugh of St. Victor: the ascent of imagination to reason is like shadow coming to light; reason illumines and defines what imagination presents.52 On the other side, imagination tends to cloud and overshadow reason; this, the problem in the imaginable sphere, is transcended in the third region of Chaucer's work. Imagination, righted, advances through reason toward intelligence. Thus in the parliament, even as the birds betray their imperfection, Nature displays principles which we rarely glimpse in our waking state. Through higher and higher faculties, the poet unifies his experience, advancing beyond the simple but fragmented ideas of the Somnium to fuller knowledge. The final lyric, despite its humble character, is suggestive of the contemplation in which the highest faculty-intelligence-engages. The poem within the poem is not philosophical, and it does not investigate or contemplate divine ideas (ydee) in the sense that Alain envisions; and yet it hints at an activity that transcends sense perception, imagination, and reason. As David Fowler has observed, in the medieval hexameral tradition which underlies the Parlement as a "Creation" poem, such a song of birds is judged a counterpart to the "ritual singing of the psalms" or hymns of praise to the Creator.53 It is like one type of poetry which, in Boethius's Consolation, reaches toward a suprarational truth. Through its rhythmic, cyclical pattern of celebration, imitative of the Nature it praises, it draws us to the natural order and offers a sense of completeness and fulfillment. To these things the faculty of imagination, properly used, directs us. Even more important, the inventive act not only guides us to knowledge but even recreates the things to be known. Like Nature in relation to her creatures, the poet instills form in his creation; like Nature, he draws his matter to resolution. In his

51/Miller, ed. (n. 25 above), p. 342. 52/ Hugh, De unione corporis et spiritus, Patrologia Latina 177:288. 53/David Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature (Seattle, 1984), p. 169.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 32 Modern Philology (August 1989) creative act, however, the poet does more than "find" or imitate Nature: he recreates her, as well as all things surrounding her, in a new composition (nova compositio). In the roundel he fashions, he offers a resolution not achieved or provided by the figures he invents for the "imaginable" universe of his second fable. Most important, he recreates a cycle of nature which, unlike the dance around the temple of brass, fructifies. Change in the setting of the parliament leads to new creation. As Bennett has reminded us, some manuscripts of the Parlement introduce the roundel with the words "Qui bien aime a tard oublie."54 This proverb-"Whoso loves well is slow to forget"-fits the song, a memorial that will sustain an idea through the cycle of nature; it suits the emphasis placed on love "in deed"-where form is joined to subject-making renewal a meaningful goal; and it affirms the necessity of memory in the creative or inventive process itself. The convening of the parliament is predicated on seasonal change and a larger natural cycle of generation and corruption. The parliament and the dreamer's experience of it are short-lived, but there will be other bird assemblies, other parliaments, and that fact carries important implications for the process of invention. As the dreamer moves further into his mind, he is empowered to create order out of chaos. The roundel at the metaphoric center of his dream is a finished invention, the most fully ordered product in the entire poem. Like the inventive act it completes, however, the song is fleeting and imperfect-even verging on the confused, formless, and nonexistent. As its moment passes, in fact, the birds disrupt the whole dream experience. In their noisy departure-itself a product of time-they waken the dreamer, who, even by his syntax, startles us with the suddenness of his loss: "And with the shoutyng, whan the song was do / That foules maden at here flyght awey, / I wok" (lines 693-95). The roundel is slight in duration and tentative in effect, but paradoxically it completes and satisfies, in its time doing all that the moment requires. In this doubleness it becomes a significant exemplar for the much larger process of invention. Nature will convene a new parliament in which her "kiss of inherence" must differ, for though the natural cycle is itself unvarying, its elements change. As Nature urges the tercels to new proofs of worthiness-"ech of yow peyne him in his degre / For to do wel" (lines 662-63)-so the union of form and subject, the invention, will be new. In this cycle, year by year, not only the tercels but all the birds-indeed the entire physical universe-will change. That change, absent in the "cycles" of the imaginable region of Chaucer's dream, makes innovation and new resolution ever possible: in such a setting, the roundel itself becomes matter for new invention, new "inherence."

IV From the likeness of the poet and Nature herself, it is not far to seek the significance of Chaucer's opening analogy between "olde feldes"-"newe corn" and "olde bokes"-"newe science." In conclusion I should like to examine the implications of that analogy for the Parlement as a whole.

54/J. A. W. Bennett, "Some Second Thoughts on The Parlement of Foules," in Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives, ed. Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy (Notre Dame, Ind., 1979), p. 145.

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For Chaucer and his contemporaries, imagination bridges distinct yet complementary insights into human experience. In the Parlement, those insights, provided by the Somnium and the dream of Nature's parliament, are not reconciled. Nevertheless, the poet keeps them separate, not to insist on their separation but to enlarge man's perception of who he is, to show him aspects of his nature that must be integrated in a whole. Each of these visions can become the "occasion" for the other, and each part of the work can open out to the other. When wakened by the birds' departure, the narrator tells us he will continue to read books in order to dream and will dream now to find something by which he might "fare / The bet" (lines 698-99). This offers a prospect of a return journey from books about love, a subject that no longer would have the privileged status of being the "certeyn thing to lerne," through places of delight and torment in the middle region of imagination, to a spiritual goal such as represented in the Somnium. In either kind of journey, the invention is visionary, extending to a fable which, under the "modest veil of allegory," offers signs of the whole of our experience, and encouraging us in our fallen reality to read in order to dream again, assured that we may thereby learn how to fare better. Whichever direction his journey takes, the poet must course through the integrative faculty of imagination. It is perhaps significant for Chaucer's poem that late medieval authors see imagination as a power which, when rightly ordered, can work to seemingly opposed ends. These ends, as it happens, are represented in the fables that start and close the Parlement. On the one hand, imagination can give "expression to the ingenium, or natural bent, of our nature, which is ultimately oriented toward harmonious participation in the natural order." On the other hand, it is a "power to abstract from the external world images which . . . enable us to form a notion of the richness of the divine."55 These perceptions need not contradict each other; imagination is "a means for the expression of intuitions inaccessible to reason in its fallen state, and the two aspects in which its response to these is interpreted, as urging a fuller participation in the natural order or as encouraging an incipient appreciation of spiritual things, are really complementary."56 The difference, nevertheless, implies a choice. Whereas Chaucer could have used the Somnium to provide a glimpse of spiritual truths, he chose instead to direct vision toward the natural order and-as a further invention-to give that order new though secondary form. In this work, in fact, the "incipient appreciation of spiritual things" is achieved through participation in a recreated natural universe. For the feast held "in die sancti Valentini," Chaucer composes a poem that is at once more playful and more earnest than convention seems to warrant. This feast is an occasion for amatory and poetical invention, but Chaucer leaves behind the typical suitor's hope "to chese his make" (line 310) for what appears to be a much greater ambition. His final wish is, of course, ambiguous: he may hope to fare better in love, knowledge, virtue, or poetic expression. The journey we have been tracing allows for all four possibilities. It draws Chaucer's persona closer to the experience of love; teaches him by example a meaningful process of sensing,

55/Winthrop Wetherbee, "The Theme of Imagination in Medieval Poetry and the Allegorical Figure 'Genius,'" Medievalia et Humanistica, N.S. 7 (1976): 46. 56/Ibid., p. 49.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 34 Modern Philology (August 1989) imagining, and judging; and, even as it displays paradox, guides him to informed moral choice. It contributes to his growth as a writer by exercising a range of poetic skills, thereby also forming a prolegomena to his subsequent poetic career. The region where the dream ends draws together things historical and contingent, ideal and conventional. This field, in its juxtapositions, encourages serious and ironical perceptions and ever new inventions, and in such juxtapositions, Chaucer will continue to find abundant "mater of to wryte." Even Nature's act of "composing" the parliament offers a model, in "ernest" and "game," for a practice in which he will repeatedly display his genius: managing the recalcitrance of subjects and "contingent forms of discourse." In venturing toward new discovery, Chaucer leaves behind "proven" wisdom even as he depends on it. His inventive art depends partly on reshaping matter from ancient and medieval sources to suit perspectives seen in the fabulous kinds of Macrobius. It also rests on modifying those kinds with an admixture of medieval forms and, in new composition, conferring on the lowest of the Macrobian fables the power of the highest narratio fabulosa. Although Chaucer was helped in this task by other auctores, he surpasses them, even within his orthodoxy, in his ability to imagine poetically the richness and goodness of all things which come from God into the world even while he, like Nature herself, retains "an ere / To murmur of the lewednesse behynde" (lines 519-20). Into this mixture of subjects he infuses form, and out of it he creates "plesaunce." His mode of invention, though it may seem obsolete to those who now seek to discover something new without the help of something old, has a modern counterpart in Arthur Koestler's hypothesis of a creator perceiving an idea "in two self- consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference." The idea "is not merely linked to one associative context, but bisociated with two."57 Had Chaucer merely applied a Ciceronian idea to the "wonderful werkynge" of Love, he would have but one associative context, and the result would have been an exemplum of an inherited truth. But he combines ideas from the Somnium with many other things: topoi derived from the Macrobian idea of fable; the Chartrian image of Nature; medieval tales in different genres, each with its own conventions; an idea of the temporality and uncertainty inherent in craft and its products, including language; principles of faculty psychology; and notions of the creative prjcess. He thereby stretches the potential for "miracles" in his subject. Love is at once an act of making a fable of self-a negative act and a means of realizing the self-a positive act. In the paradox Reason does not apply exclusively. By placing his subject in two incompatible frames of reference, Chaucer has come to an understanding that love includes the order prescribed by Reason and the delight instilled by Nature, and it includes more than a sum of these parts: love itself is an invention always newly formed. The testimony of the eagles, as well as of the goose, turtledove, duck, and cuckoo, suggests that a definition of love depends to a large extent upon social convention. The fowls, with memories limited to their own "person," nature, and estate, strive variously and also comically to respond to the occasion of this parliament, and in the process they give new but

57/Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London, 1964), p. 35.

This content downloaded from 195.113.54.40 on Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:28:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Olsson/ Chaucer's Parlement of Foules 35 restricted form to their experiences of love. At another level entirely, of course, the poet, drawing on the full range of human knowing, also relies on convention, but he reaches beyond it to give the experience a much more imaginative, compre- hensive, and significant form. Indeed, he enlarges his subject further, seeing more than miracles of Love- included in his new knowledge is the wonder of invention itself. At first glance, the frames of reference provided by the books that inspire the start and the close of the Parlement are incompatible, but these frames do no more than supply topics or places. Reading his sources seriously, the poet finds truth in them, but he does so, paradoxically, as he makes of those sources a fable. As an exercise in fabling, love thus reflects the larger truth of the Parlement. The work shows by its example that the poetic art- even in a period so evidently bound by old books, conventions, and forms-can lead a writer through an imaginative use of topoi to the creation of an original work coherent in its "newe science."

University of Idaho

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