Chaucer and the Poets

An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde

Winthrop Wetherbee

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501707094
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this sensitive reading of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Winthrop Wetherbee redefines the nature of Chaucer's poetic vision. Using as a starting point Chaucer's profound admiration for the achievement of Dante and the classical poets, Wetherbee sees the Troilus as much more than a courtly treatment of an event in ancient history—it is, he asserts, a major statement about the poetic tradition from which it emerges. Wetherbee demonstrates the evolution of the poet-narrator of the Troilus, who begins as a poet of romance, bound by the characters' limited worldview, but who in the end becomes a poet capable of realizing the tragic and ultimately the spiritual implications of his story.

[1]

The Narrator, Troilus, and the Poetic Agenda

The importance of the classical tradition for the Troilus and the complexity of the poet’s engagement with that tradition are evident from the opening lines of the poem. The narrator begins with a solemn and sweeping statement of his theme, defining the noble status of his hero and the outlines of his tragedy:

The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,
That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye,
In lovynge how his aventures fellen
Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie,
My purpos is, or that I parte fro ye.

[1. 1–5]

It is hard to know to what extent or in what sense Chaucer intended his opening lines to recall the opening of a classical epic. Their sheer sonority and the sureness and economy with which they trace the arc of Troilus’s experience are impressive; but their very comprehensiveness tends to call attention to the shape of the story and its implicit moral, rather than set off any heroic attribute of Troilus himself. Moreover, a number of details conspire to offset whatever impression of epic grandeur the lines may seem to convey. The poet can hardly be said to leap in medias res, and indeed his opening is not far from the “Fortunam Priami,” which Horace cites as a classic example of how not to begin a poem.1 The very resonance of the repetition in “Troilus” and “Troye” is anticlimactic2 and interrupts the sweep of the poet’s overview of his story. There is perhaps a further hinting at the not-quite-epic nature of his theme in the revelation that the adventures of the Trojan prince befell him “in lovynge” rather than in war. This hint is strengthened if we hear (as I will later suggest we should) an echo of Dante in the opening line: for when Dante’s Vergil uses the formula of the “double sorrow” to sum up the theme of Statius’s Thebaid, he associates it not with love but with “cruel arms.”3

Whatever solemnity the opening of the poem manages to attain is further disrupted by the lines that follow the initial overview. All this I intend to tell, the narrator declares, “or that I parte fro ye.” In this abrupt shift from the statement of high purpose to a direct address to his audience we are given a first hint of what we will come to see as the narrator’s characteristic uneasiness with the weighty responsibilities of serious poetry, his need to descend from time to time and speak as a mere man in the reassuring presence of sympathetic listeners.4 But after appealing to us with this touch of domesticating humility, the narrator shifts again, even more abruptly than before:

Thesiphone, thow help me for tendite
Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write.

[1. 6–7]

The summoning of the Fury stands in jarring contrast to the human bond that the poet had established with his hearers in the previous line. In the wake of its disorienting effect, the poet’s “weeping” verses seem similarly dislocated, not simply a projection of his own emotion like Boccaccio’s verso lagrimoso (Fil. 1. 6), but as if charged with an energy of their own.

Shocking and puzzling in itself, the appeal to Tisiphone assumes an added complexity if we hear in it an allusion to the one precedent for it that earlier poetry provides. Again the allusion invokes Statius’s Thebaid, this time directly: when Chaucer’s narrator, in the “derknesse” of his private alienation from love, calls on the “cruel furie,” his gesture bears an odd and striking resemblance to the prayer of the blinded Oedipus, who calls out from the “eternal night” of his self-damnation to summon this same “cruel goddess” Tisiphone, and by so doing sets in motion the plot of Statius’s poem (Theb. 1. 56–87). At least as striking as the resemblance, however, is the contrast it suggests between the perspectives of the two poets, or their narrators, on the stories they are about to tell. Statius begins his work by claiming for himself the inspiration of the Muses, and traces Theban history back to the rape of Europa and the banishment of Cadmus before settling on the house of Oedipus and the war of the Seven against Thebes as his subject. It is only after he has given a summary of the war and dwelt briefly on the fates of the Argive heroes, revealing in the process a moral perspective on the violence to come and compassion for the human suffering it causes, that Oedipus appears, to invoke the Fury, pronounce a terrible curse on his twin sons, and give utterance to all that is impious and savage in the world of the Thebaid.

Statius will reveal himself to be deeply and at times almost helplessly involved with the dark forces that ravage the world of his poem. He takes pains to show how the demoralizing and spiritually enervating burden of Theban history affects both his characters and his own attitude toward them and threatens to undermine his resolve to affirm the value of piety and heroic virtue. But he clearly wants at the outset to assert his authorial distance from the horrors with which he must deal. The effect of Chaucer’s summoning of the Fury is to eliminate any such distance, and with it much of the narrator’s claim to a controlling perspective. He too begins with a brief overview of his material, but within the very opening stanza of the Troilus he is himself suddenly caught up in the world of the story and drawn, like Statius’s Oedipus, into a new and strange kind of collaboration with fate and tragedy. The Fury, traditionally the avenging agent through whom the gods punish impiety and effect violent change in human life, has become a sort of Muse. It is hard to know how to deal with a poetic situation in which Tisiphone is invoked, not simply as a catalyst to the tragic action, but as the power from whom the poet himself professes to derive his inspiration.

We can hardly suppose the narrator capable of any such malign intention toward his lovers as that which leads Oedipus to incite Tisiphone against his progeny. Indeed as the story unfolds, his involvement with the forces that doom the lovers is as unwitting as their own. At the level of conscious intention, there would seem to be no reason for questioning the banal justification he offers for the summoning up of Tisiphone—that her “dreariness” is appropriate to his own sad mood and story. Set in contrast to the deliberate impiety of the embittered Oedipus, such a motivation suggests an innocence of intention worthy of “sely Troilus” himself. But however innocent the narrator’s engagement with Tisiphone may be, the pressure she exerts is nonetheless real, and a fuller consideration of what she represents may help us understand the literary challenge Chaucer is taking on in the Troilus.

The Fury’s role in the poem conforms to her function in epic tradition insofar as she reinforces in her collaborator a radically subjective and limited outlook on the coming action. Though the narrator of the Troilus is linked with his protagonists by a vicarious identification with their love rather than by hatred, his attachment to them has a desperate intensity such that at times the fulfillment of his own emotional need through their union becomes all-important to him. At such moments, that larger perspective that enables him to see the love as inevitably doomed and to regard the lovers with an enlightened charity becomes wholly inaccessible. In a similar way, to the extent that Oedipus’s curse and Tisiphone’s power define and govern the action of the Thebaid, that action is reduced to a contlict of private passions. Its historical dimension and anything that might anticipate the final redemptive intervention of Theseus are obscured as we watch the working out of this contlict and experience the narrator’s near despair in the face of it. For both poets, then, Tisiphone is the symbol of an obsessive involvement with the tragic action which the narrators of both poems finally manage to transcend with great difficulty, but which dominates their vision during the unfolding of the action and threatens at times to overwhelm them. And in both cases the narrators’ struggle to achieve a perspective on their material retlects a certain uneasiness in the poets themselves about their relation to a poetic tradition whose tragic vision is informed by no clear saving awareness of a spiritual goal.

But while there are deep affinities between Chaucer and Statius, the invocation of Tisiphone in the Troilus exhibits a combination of flamboyance and innocence that has no Statian equivalent, and the implied lack of control expresses Chaucer’s sense of the special predicament of a medieval poet vis-à-vis the classical tradition. For Statius this is the only tradition, and if he falters in addressing it, he does so in the face of challenges and dangers clearly recognized. But Chaucer is working in the tradition of medieval romance as well as that of classical epic, and it is the peculiar dilemma of his narrator to be torn between a “romance” attachment to his characters’ love and a reluctant awareness of the larger pattern of historical forces by which their love is unalterably governed. Invoking the Fury, yet at the same time attempting to restrict her function to commiseration and collaboration in his treatment of the love story, expresses this dilemma and points up the narrator’s utter inability to define his role in a consistent way. His intention is to minister to the emotional needs of lovers as a quasi priest. Through his story he will seek to alleviate their inevitable sorrow by sympathizing with their pain and offering them the hope of a future “solas.” But despite his priestly commitment he himself is chronically alienated from the power he invokes, resigned to a vicarious identification with the joys and sorrows of others. His will to affirm the reality and value of the happiness that can be attained by lovers is continually threatened by an awareness that “peyne and wo” are the lot of most lovers most of the time and that the danger of losing what one loves is ever present. Foreknowledge of the outcome of his story controls his emotions and leads him in his office as priest to pray that the god of love, in his mercy,

So graunte hem soone out of this world to pace,
That ben despeired out of loves grace.

[1. 41–42]

In dealing with this dark aspect of the narrator’s self-presentation it is important to recognize that his rueful reflections on his own “unlikeliness” as a lover are more than a comic touch or an appeal to sentimentality: like Statius’s Oedipus, though for very different reasons, he is motivated in large part by deprivation. The deep personal need that underlies his vicarious identification with Troilus and the willed optimism that enables him to ignore the final implications of the story he is about to tell are always in danger of giving way to frustration, envy, and bitterness. Like Pandarus, who is in this respect his surrogate within the poem, and whose emotional involvement with the lovers we can never wholly trust, the narrator has invested all his hope of happiness in the love of Troilus and Criseyde, to the point at which, during the consummation scene of Book 3, he can imagine trading his very soul for a moment of such bliss as he imagines them to know. And in proportion as he commits himself to a vision of love as the supreme bliss, he is haunted by a sense of the loss of love as a kind of hell. Hence his inner darkness, too, is a function of his obsession. At this early stage, one effect of his engagement with his “auctor,” with literary tradition, and with history, is seemingly to exclude the spiritual as a valid category of response to the story he is telling. The intensity of his involvement, the sense in which he both possesses and is possessed by the lovers, imposes on his version of the story a foreshortening of spiritual perspective which complements Pandarus’s emphasis on the finite end of sexual consummation. Together Pandarus and the narrator maneuver the lovers into an unwitting collaboration with the laws of change and the inevitabilities of history; the dire prophecy of the Proem and our awareness of the fate of Troy loom over the action.

The narrator becomes dimly aware at certain moments that his relation to his material is ambiguous. Thus he seeks to explain away our misgivings and his own by claiming to be at the mercy of his source, and hence of the sexual mores of a remote place and time, in rendering the action of the poem (2. 12–49). At times, too, he excuses possible discords in his language on the grounds of his ignorance of love (2. 19–21; 3. 1401–14). But he never fully recognizes the contradictory demands imposed on him by the different traditions with which he is working until the moralizing outbursts of the poem’s concluding stanzas, where, as new awareness dawns, he seeks to exorcise the values of romance and classical poetry together. In the meantime the conventions that program his narration override his better judgment. As the story moves toward the “grete effect” at its center, he is increasingly willing to accept Pandarus’s rationalizations and affirm the pseudo-religious assumptions of courtoisie as a seductive alternative to recognizing the true nature of his involvement with his material. Hence he is wholly unprepared when he is inevitably betrayed by these conventions. Once compelled to recognize their inadequacy to control the larger forces that are shaping the course of events in his poetic world, he is easily brought to the point of despair, an...