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Chaucerian Fiction
By Robert B. Burlin PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06322-5
CHAPTER 1
EXPERIENCE AND AUTHORITY
"IN SCOLE IS GREET ALTERCACIOUN"
The only method of freeing learning, at once, from these abstruse questions, is to enquire seriously into the nature of human understanding, and show, from an exact analysis of its powers and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects.
HUME
CHAUCER'S thoughts about what we would call literary theory are, like most of his personal beliefs and judgments, difficult to isolate and interpret. Such clues as we have appear in tantalizing disguises — tossed off in a casual phrase, entangled in a dramatic encounter, or enthusiastically averred by a patently fictive narrator. The indirection of fragmentary "internal evidence" undoubtedly presents severe problems to the theoretician but is not without its virtues. The critic may be left sounding tendentious by comparison, but insofar as the poet's "definitions" are implicated in the very process of his fictions, they share in its ironic cover, in the semantic relativity of its dramatic occasions. The terms that assume importance in Chaucer's poetry are — or are made to seem — remote from technical discourse. By varying the context — verbal, narrative, or generic — Chaucer is, however, capable of investing the most casual word or phrase with dimensions of meaning that, while they clearly mark out the range of his thinking, preclude simplistic abstraction.
Words for Chaucer, as for some more recent schools of linguistic philosophy, mean what they mean when spoken on a particular occasion and cannot (to the frustration of editors) be glossed once and for all by a single modern equivalent. Worthy and a good felawe notoriously slip and slide through the General Prologue, as if condensing centuries of popular usage. Compressed into a single work, however, their semantic adjustments simulate that unthinking reliance on ready-made standards, the basic stuff of ordinary discourse. Apparently casual language produces more than the obvious local effects, satirically directed at the individual pilgrim. Cumulatively, such linguistic acts reproduce habits of judgment; we are forced into an awareness of our social propensity for unconsidered, ad hoc evaluation. Inconsistency and illogicality in the verbal pattern awaken a sense of the absent absolutes that in the pressure of everyday life we prefer to keep comfortably anaesthetized.
The Chaucerian habit of drawing complex moral implications from simple, familiar words also characterizes what might be called his aesthetic pronouncements. In particular, when he yokes a pair of antithetical terms in this innocent colloquial manner, Chaucer appears to be offering some purchase on his theoretical conception of literature. The ubiquitous "ernest and game," for example, which generally masks a tangle of unspoken motives, carries over this psychologically acquired ambiguity when it is used to designate the formal (rather than the tonal) possibilities for any kind of spoken exchange. So convincing is their Chaucerian deployment that such antinomies have often been taken as proverbial, a dramatic poet's attempt to evoke the platitudinous, or at best a conditioned response of the medieval mind, conceiving reality in patterns of opposing extremes. The polarities by which Christian myth affixed the temporal to the eternal — Creation and Judgment, good and evil, heaven and hell — provide an analogue for the aesthetic habit of considering stories as either serious (in earnest) or comic (in game). Indeed, when Chaucer uses such phrases as "lust and lore" or "sentence and solaas," he seems to be considering the functions of art merely as incompatible alternatives. Harry Bailly, like many masters of ceremonies before and since, would undoubtedly be content to stop there, with a sure-fire formula for keeping things going, tragedy followed by comedy, a pious legend followed by a fabliau. But the terms are obviously no more satisfactorily polarized than the classical ideal they so closely resemble.
As Chaucerian usage, and the articulation of the Canterbury Tales in particular, makes clear, such opposing terms may be both antithetical and interpenetrating. "Heigh sentence" to be effective cannot rely exclusively on a naked proposition, but must enclose its exposition in "solaas" and perhaps "myrthe" as well. Likewise, a "lusty" effort is never quite devoid of "lore." A literary performance may, by virtue of its kind, tend to one extreme or the other, but, in the successful production, both functions are inevitably and inextricably entwined.
While "lust and lore" may tell us a good deal about Chaucer's sense of the ends and means of literature, another of his familiar antinomies, "experience and auctoritee," serves a more comprehensive purpose. Explicitly or implicitly, it may be said to inform the structure of his imaginative work throughout his career. As with the other pairs, the issues it raises are central to an understanding of the literary experience, though the angle of attack is somewhat different. Rather than form and function, "experience and auctoritee" addresses itself to the problem of the origins or sources of literary creativity, which leads in turn to an inescapable questioning of the viability of the final product as a source of knowledge.
Like the other antinomies, "experience and auctoritee" proffers a familiar set of alternatives that upon examination prove to be both real and apparent. A casual reading of the terms might lead one to think that they comprehend a process: the transcription of the author's observation of life ("experience") into a verbal form ("auctoritee") which, by virtue of a reverence accorded the written word, acquires an authenticity or authoritativeness. Indeed, this process seems to be implied when the speaker in Chaucer's early poems remarks upon his decision to commit his dream experience to written form, or when the experiences of the Wife of Bath are cited as authorities for the edification of January or Bukton. But these experiences themselves are obviously fictive; their value as authority is qualified, if not totally undermined, by the comic irony. Fiction by definition is something made up, a fabrication, and its benefit to mankind has always been a matter for some anxiety. For Plato, poetry ("making") implied feigning, and in the Republic he suggests that its charms may be potentially dangerous to the ideal state. The Middle Ages tolerated and of ten relished its own poets, while, with a variety of rationalizations, they accepted and even revered the auctores of the pagan past. Yet the new religion also revived the Platonic suspicions in a new form. What was the value of secular poetry to the City of God? Apologists were as numerous as objectors, ranging from those who found pedagogical value in the verbal manner to those who allegorized away the offending matter. Yet the question must have nagged at many authors — Chaucer among them, as the endings of his two great poems remind us. The attitude of the Parson to the telling of "fables and swich wrecchednesse" clearly does not reflect the poet's feeling throughout his life, but the "Retraction" in many ways represents a logical conclusion to his poetic career.
Chaucer's elusive attitude toward his avocation can be to some extent clarified by taking a close look at the complications and obscurities accruing from his unsystematic use of "experience and auctoritee." The antithetical terms are conjoined by their reference to kinds of knowledge or information. Commonly they denote the intellectual basis of a given utterance, the raw materials upon which the speaker is drawing. Authoritatively, he may cite a proverb or scriptural text, or he may reproduce an entire book — in translation (Melibeus), adaptation (troilus), or in summary abstract (the Somnium in the Parliament of Fowls). But the material comes from the written page and usually from the remote past; it constitutes a vicarious acquaintance with another man's conscious reshaping of his own apprehension of reality, as, for example, when Chauntecleer's men of "auctoritee" are defined as transmitters of what they "han wel founden by experience" (NPT, 2978). Written sources are then assumed to be in opposition to what has been acquired through direct observation, what the senses have perceived of the natural or social worlds and what the mind has or has not made of it, by memory, imagination, or reason, or by the less controlled processes of fantasy and dreaming. All of Chaucer's major works depend structurally on this opposition: of what the speaker has read against what he experiences in a dream; of the old books that he scrupulously follows against the experience of the narrator in reproducing them. In the fictive world of the Canterbury pilgrimage, this polarization is exaggerated into the confessional autobiography of the Wife of Bath at one extreme and, at the other, the pathetic failure of Chaucer the pilgrim to come up with anything better than "a rym I lerned longe agoon." Such purely literary associations for "experience and auctoritee" are simple to isolate, not very new or intellectually taxing. Horace, in fact, offers similar alternatives in his advice to poets: "Aut famam sequere aut sibi convenientia finge" (Ars Poetica, II9).
Of the two terms, "auctoritee" is probably the more familiar to students of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, but, largely because of the excesses of the medievals themselves, it has suffered, like rhetoric and allegory, from imperfect understanding and a consequent lack of sympathy. The process by which auctoritas came to mean a written document, obscure in English usage, has been usefully clarified by Fr. Chenu's analysis of a semantic history that antecedes the medieval development:
An auctor among the Latins was ... a person who took the initiative in an act. More properly, an auctor in common law was a person who transferred to another person, subject to liability of some sort, a right for which he could vouch. A seller, for instance, was in respect to a buyer an auctor. The guarantee itself was called an auctoritas. ... Whether taken in its juridic meaning or in the wider sense of dignity, auctoritas originally signified that quality in virtue of which a man — whether magistrate, writer, witness, or priest — was worthy of credit, of consideration, of credence. By metonymy, the word designated secondly the person himself who possessed this quality. Soon after, by a transposition of meaning from the human subject to his outward act, the word came to designate the writing, the document in which the judgment or the decision of this human subject was expressed. This instrument was invested with authority, or what comes to the same, was considered authentic. This meaning, naturally, applied first of all to official documents. ... Through a new metonymy, the text itself was directly called an auctoritas; no longer was it just qualified as having authority, the text itself which was called to witness was an authority.
The dependence upon received authorities in medieval writing resulted to a great extent from the paucity of books in even the best libraries and from the pedagogical methods, themselves inherited from the past, that were constrained by such practical considerations. Overriding all such external matters, however, was the spiritual justification for all learning, the primacy of theology as the queen of the sciences, and the reverence for scriptural authority, the revelation of the divine Author, which set the model for all intellectual endeavor. Yet, as Chenu persuasively demonstrates for Aquinas, the recourse to standard texts soon became a convention, used as often for "purely dialectical support," or for mere ornament, as for authority. The practice, though much abused, did not prevent the best medieval minds from "developing the processes of thinking and pushing research far beyond the trajectory described by the original text." And so it is that in Chaucer one finds the word "auctoritee" on the lips of Theseus when he is stretching his intellectual resources to their utmost limit, though more typical no doubt is the crowing pedantry of Chauntecleer or the greedy hypocrisy of the Summoner's friar. Whatever the occasion, Chaucer's deployment of the term has well — attested precedent in learned discourse. Its antithesis, "experience," however, is another matter. In Chaucer's usage both terms seem to evoke a second referential model and this complicates their import to literary theory.
This other model, or universe of discourse, may be called philosophical or theological, depending on which side of the watershed of the great scholastic synthesis one chooses to dwell. (In the parlance of modern philosophic inquiry, logic, epistemology, and metaphysics are all pressed into service.) Chaucer's way of defining the materials of fiction implicates, as we have seen, the question of what one knows with that of how such knowledge has come to be. In the medieval world when such philosophical problems were colored by the assumption of an absolute Truth, the comparative validity of alternate ways of knowing inevitably enters into reasoned discourse. "Experience and auctoritee" are more than just intellectual phenomena or mental baggage: as Theseus's famous Boethian speech illustrates, they constitute alternate modes of veridication, competing ways of getting at the truths of the human condition:
Ther nedeth noght noon auctoritee t'allegge
For it is preeved by experience. (KtT, 3000-3001)
Ideally, the proof of a metaphysical proposition can be discovered by either epistemological process, but as the opening of the Wife of Bath's Prologue aggressively reminds us, the two may not in every instance be equally available or, even worse, may be found contradictory and irreconcilable.
But if, as so many passages in Chaucer imply, there was a model in theological discourse for the conjunction of experience and authority, where is it to be found? Chaucer's usage suggests that it was a commonplace, and many Chaucerians have proved remarkably credulous. But the antithetical terms one finds running through medieval discourse are "faith" and "reason": the one founded on the revelation in Scripture of the Word of God, the preeminent and uncontested authority in matters of faith; other kinds of knowledge result from the application of human reason, itself a divine endowment, to the Book of Nature, God's other great work. Though Augustine devised ways of entertaining pagan philosophy, especially that of Plato, bringing "rational insight into the contents of Revelation," there was seldom any question of the "primacy of Faith": "Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that thou mayst believe, but believe that thou mayst understand." But in spite of Augustine's classic formula, a scholarly methodology with its training in the liberal arts became an essential tool for a proper interpretation of scriptural letter and spirit. When the text was less than Scripture, more than interpretation might be required, and questionable human authority demanded that it be put to the test of human reason. In Augustine's Soliloquia a passage of some importance for aesthetic theory allows Ratio to explain the difference between the falsehoods of deceivers and the untruth of an authority, in this case, a fabulist:
Farces and comedies and many poems are full of fables whose purpose is to give pleasure rather than to deceive, and almost everyone who tells a joke, tells a fable. But that one is rightly called fallacious or deceiving whose sole aim is to deceive someone. Those, on the contrary, who make something up, but do not do it in order to deceive, no one hesitates to call fabulists, or if not that, tellers of fables (vel mendaces tantum, vel si ne hoc quidem, mentientes tamen vocari nemo ambigit).
So, too, in the ninth century John the Scot advised publicizing the findings of reason where authority other than Holy Scripture was concerned:
For now we must follow reason, which investigates the truth of things and is not overborne by any authority, and is by no means prevented from revealing publicly and proclaiming to all men the things which it both zealously searches out by circuitous reasoning and discovers with such toil.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chaucerian Fiction by Robert B. Burlin. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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