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 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/438526?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern Philology 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). ?1989 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/90/8701-0002$01.00 13 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 in- vented."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 inven- tion 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.