Chaucer and the Social Contest (Routledge Revivals)

Peggy Knapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415616034
• eBook ISBN: 9781136810954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1990, Chaucer and the Social Contest takes a fresh view of The Canterbury Tales, by placing the storytelling contest among the Canterbury pilgrims within the larger social contests in the changing England of the late fourteenth century. The author focuses on three crucial fields of contention: the division of social duties into the three estates, the controversies around Wycliffite thought and practice, and the roles of women. Drawing on recent literary theory, particularly Bakhtin and Foucault, Peggy Knapp offers both a reading of nearly all the tales and an argument about how such readings come about, both for Chaucer's earliest audiences and for us.

1

Introduction: Thawing Frozen Words

Your majesty, I have something here which is said to be of interest to those in your line of work: power.

—James Watt

The Canterbury Tales is the account of a contest. The seemly Host, Harry Bailly, proposes the storytelling contest in a spirit of pleye and disport, making a festive, but at the same time a competing community of the sondry folk who began their pilgrimage at the Tabard. As we know now, play is psychic and social work. And storytelling supposes a way of seeing and saying the order of the world.

This book is about the contest the pilgrims carry out in the Canterbury Tales and the larger social contest which is both registered and participated in by that text. It posits that late fourteenth-century England was changing both broadly and deeply its attitudes and institutions, especially those concerning the three “estates,” the religious/philosophical underpinnings of belief, and the roles of women—the three divisions into which my inquiry is divided. Instead of the traditional, stable, consentual unanimity of the medieval “world view” often taken to be the social context of Chaucer’s fiction, I am interested in the discontinuities, the consciously articulated struggles and the unconscious, inarticulate unease engendered when a set of ideologies no longer adequately accounts for people’s experienced lives.

In the fourth book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Pantagruel and his company, far out at sea, suddenly heard voices, though they saw no speakers. The words they heard, it turned out, had been frozen the previous winter and only with the coming of good weather began to thaw and become audible. Texts, because of their material form, are frozen, mute until they are warmed in some context of human interests which allows intelligibility, just as Pantagruel’s companions had to warm their frozen words in their hands in order to hear them. What I want to do in this book is warm some features of the Canterbury Tales in the glow of both the major discursive codes of their times and also certain less obvious discourses and features of lived experience which we can only construct by inference. The aim of this thawing is not the discovery of an authoritative, never-to-be-disputed reading of Chaucer’s text, but the disclosure of patterns of significance which have enabled it to be experienced at all and which allow the experience of it to challenge received definitions of order.

Discourse and the Social Formation

“Discourse” is a term around which much of my investigation will revolve. I will ask what kind of discourse is produced by each of the pilgrims, and whether the fiction in which they appear—the Canterbury Tales as a whole—is in any way dominated by a more general discursive pattern. I am using the term discourse, as Catherine Belsey does, to indicate, “a domain of language use; a particular way of talking (and writing and thinking)” which “involves certain shared assumptions which appear in the formulation that characterize it.”¹ Ideology is always implied in discourse; we must make assumptions about the world in order to say anything. While ideology is sometimes coherent and consciously adopted, it is more often the customary, unquestioned, “natural” way people experience the world. And if one person’s discourse is radically different from another’s the two of them will fail to understand each other, as when an economist and an astrologer discuss the stock market.

Michel Foucault makes the surprising claim that discourse is produced by social power. Rather than merely acting to repress and limit, power “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body.…”² The first product of power is a set of fundamental codes which informs that society’s grasp of the world. Foucault posits for any society both a general code “governing its language, its schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices,” which makes people feel at home, and a scientific or philosophical justification of that code.³ Foucault’s analysis of power denies that it is divided into simply master and dominated. He sees power as dispersed through a wide network of relationships in which the same persons both exercise and undergo its operations: “individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application” (Power/Knowledge, p. 98). This view releases criticism from always seeing the same outlines in all the works of a period, the marks of power flowing from its sources, for example, in church and government, toward its victims the parishioners and citizens. Instead everybody does something in the power network, but that something will not always be the same. And it is because language codes are so fluid, so intractable and unlikely to be predictably fixed and managed by single oppressors, that literary texts can disclose such precise and complex power relations.

In describing the social and personal contests of the Canterbury Tales, I will adopt these analyses of Foucault’s as broadly enabling, but not binding. They are enabling because they bring into focus a vast network of power working its effects beyond a conventionally “political” arena and enforced at many social levels, rather than merely from above. Foucault’s explanations of the bonds between power and discourse are, however, too closed to account for what I take to be the fluidity of the discursive contest carried on (in both game and ernest) in Chaucer’s text and in fourteenth-century English life. His all-encompassing networks of discursive power, then, will not be taken as binding, because there must have been discursive tactics that escaped the effects of the most general coding. Strictly enforced, Foucault’s power networks only allow confrontations whose end is foreordained and cannot explain internally induced social change. Raymond Williams’s formulation of the simultaneous pressure of dominant and counter-hegemonic currents is more directly relevant to my inquiry:

The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes. Works of art, by their substantial and general character, are often especially important as sources of this complex evidence.⁴

Williams’s denial that the dominant is total and exclusive, and his insistence that it often gives birth to its own resistances (which in turn may become emergent social trends and not merely cannon fodder on which the dominant can exercise its power), is important to my sense of the era, especially in the area of Wycliffite religious controversy. And although Foucault’s more general articulation of power networks seems to exclude such fluidity from one system to another, his notion of the “subjugated knowledges” (in Power/Knowledge) requires something like it.

The category of discourses Foucault calls “subjugated knowledges” are at odds with the authoritative institutions of the era in which they appear. They are described as “those blocs of historical knowledge which were present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory (Power/ Knowledge, p. 82). I like this formulation of the issue because a number of the Canterbury pilgrims—most notably the Wife of Bath—are shown taking this attitude about the way they talk. She certainly considers some modes of thought and proof (among them clerical typologies) to form an overarching “functionalist and systematizing theory” which informs the dominant discourse of her world. The acknowledgment of a dominant, authorized mode is an unavoidable step in the argument, but it must be taken with care lest it suggest that the culture of any given moment is a more closed and “metaphysical” system than it ever can be. Positing its dominance does not ignore social difference and flux, but merely avoids regarding history “as sheer heterogeneity, random difference.”⁵ The notion of a dominant discourse allows us to gather the impulses of dissent and change around certain foci, recognizing conflict, but not assuming out-and-out chaos in cultural life.

Social conflict is often carried on, as Williams implies, just where texts are located: in the realm of language. Words themselves, which have been regarded by philology and exegetics as so definite and binding, split, shift, and spread under the kind of scrutiny inspired by recent semiotic theories. Such theories attack the solidity of words as fixed references to things and posit rather their position as counters in a chain of signs, each referring to yet another sign, each depending on a metaphoric constitution of the “reality” it is intended to convey. Paul de Man, commenting on the semiology of Charles Sanders Peirce, writes:

The interpretation of the sign is not, for Peirce, a meaning but another sign; it is reading, not a decodage, and this reading has, in its turn, to be interpreted into another sign, and so on ad infinitum.⁶

Words signify, not things, but ideas and images of things in a potentially limitless series of deferrals backwards. Further, they derive authority from a social community and are therefore subject to change as it changes.

M. M. Bakhtin proposes in The Dialogic Imagination that a single, monolithic system of meaning-assignment is a feature of the age of epic (never fully specified historically, best seen as a specter which leaves traces rather than a fully executed genre), not seen in later literary languages, which contain, as history moves along, greater and greater “indeterminacy,” and “semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.”⁷ Epic language Bakhtin describes as taking an authoritative, internally unchallenged view of the dominant ideology of the era that produced it; it becomes the official word, underwritten by political power, either personal or institutional, and it, “binds us, independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it” (p. 342). When that authority disappears from the social world, the discourse associated with it becomes “simply an object, a relic” (p. 344). The Chaucer called up for us by the school of patristic exegeses fits just such a notion of epic: a workmanlike Christian poet bringing order out of the potential complexity of the world by creating the pilgrims and the characters within their tales in terms of the typologies of the scriptural tradition. Thus to D. W. Robertson in. A Preface to Chaucer,⁸ the pilgrims and story characters of the Canterbury Tales are not located in a “still evolving contemporary reality,” but fixed in and by a tradition which predates and frames them. Neither the pilgrims nor their “creations” fall or could fall outside this massive signifying system, which is, Robertson argues, Chaucer’s language and the language of the medieval world.

The “novel,” Bakhtin’s contrast to epic, does not rest on authoritative discourse alone, but combines with it “internally persuasive” discourse, which is not prior to the present moment, is interwoven with everyday life, and is seen as in “struggle with other internally persuasive discourses” (p. 345–46). These internally persuasive discourses, present in every society, continually struggle to counteract the already official mode of thought, speech, and writing (and in some cases each other), but are “denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all” (pp. 345, 342). Their persuasiveness rests on what Alisoun of Bath calls experience. No one experiences mainstream discourse, then, as an entire, seamless, or unchallenged outlook; each separate life history will reflect a number of discursive tendencies and experience the discontinuities between them in a particular way. The person, as Paul Smith puts it: “exists in a dialectical relationship with the social but also lives that relationship alone,” his or her resistance to the present social formation being the “by-product of contradictions in and among subject positions” available within that society.⁹ The result is a certain unpredictability in the responses people offer to their social settings, and no author affords more range and variety in evoking the dialectic between the social and the idiosyncratic than Geoffrey Chaucer.

In the Canterbury Tales, it is the characters (including a characterized narrator) who do the talking. As Bakhtin puts it, the voice of an author who speaks through characters is “refracted as it passes through these planes [the speech diversity of the characters]” and “does not give itself up to any one of them” (p. 311). This speech diversity is created by contriving for each of the poem’s many speakers a social dialect that brings together certain forces of both “centralization and decentralization” of the language and renders each “an active participant” in linguistic diversification.¹⁰ Although Bakhtin does not specifically mention Chaucer, his terms are highly appropriate for discussing the Canterbury Tales, especially since the pilgrim named “Chaucer” is now recognized as a character within the fiction, not a presentation of the historical poet’s direct intention. Bakhtin’s view allows for the immediacy and idiosyncrasy which makes the multitude of voices in the tales and links possible, insisting at the same time on the co-presence of an authoritative discourse which is called up within the fiction to contend with its idiosyncratic voices without reducing them to a fixed hierarchical ordering. The social and moral tensions produced in the narrative are, as Marshall Leicester has put it, “embodied precisely as tensions, not as a resolution or a synthesis.”¹¹ I want to describe the institutions and practices of late fourteenth-century life which account for the emergence of these diverse voices and the resistance they offer to being nullified by the steamroller of dominant discourse.

Literary texts consist of mixed linguistic codes carrying various, sometimes contradictory, messages. Yet order, in Foucault’s sense, seems to be experienced through these ambiguous, open-ended discourses. Any one reader or hearer’s actual reception of theme, genre, and closure is enabled because particular features of the text are privileged by a particular configuration of interests which participate in a particular power structure. Interested perceptions also account for the way one generation can read the works of another and “see” its own power relations encoded in them. As Hamlet says to Ophelia, “This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.” Texts are radically open, being made of language, which in turn is made of socially negotiable terms, syntaxes, and genres; moreover, complex texts involve more details and combinations of detail than any reading of their unity can account for. But readings are produced all the time just the same. Accounting for that fact requires, I think, a theory of genre.

Interpreting Discourse

The curious fact is that people do create readings, and sometimes widely shared readings, of complex texts, in spite of the difficulties caused by the metaphoric nature of language and its social construction. One explanation is that societal interests lead a community of readers to privilege certain features of those texts, establishing a pattern of response which helps fix recalcitrant words which in themselves would be embarrassingly full of potential significances. Certain of such patterns are associated with genres, literary or practical, helping readers to eliminate some available meanings for textual features and elaborate others as they proceed. Rather than “having” or “containing” genre, texts mark generic patterning, which may be read according to interested perception. Otherwise all texts would consist of combinations of unstable words in a multiplicity too scattered to interpret at all. I once heard a recording of music from a non-Western culture and, being unfamiliar with the patterns of tone and rhythm in that music, took it for random sounds coming into the room through a window. Without notions of textual genre we would be hampered in interpreting texts in just that way.

No matter how complex or unresolved a text may be, it nonetheless first presents itself in a context of “situationally conditioned norms or conventions.” (Reviving some of those contexts which had been lost or dimmed was one of the great benefits of patristic criticism.) Literary discourse is like any other kind in that it demands a general “situation of understanding” or “horizon of expectations,” Hans Robert Jauss’s definition of genre in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.¹² Genre in this sense enables texts to be received and understood even if they are genuinely iconoclastic. I would posit a mixed situation of understanding for the Canterbury Tales, as the result of a social framework which held a number of distinct ideological possibilities on its horizon.

Most texts seem to mark generic patterns to guide readers, but such marks will appear and fade as interested perceptions seek or neglect them. Many texts leave too many clues to their meanings and exhibit several strong patterns of coherence in several different generic modes. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an exemplary specimen: a very convincing justification for its reading as chivalric romance contrasts with an equally strong case for it as a penitential tale. The undecidability is not the result of too little textual marking, but of too much—too many clues, too...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Sub Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Thawing Frozen Words
• Part I: The Estates
• Part II: The Wycliffite Controversy
• Part III: Women
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index