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Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus' Bed and Chaucer's Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Evan Carton
Evan Carton*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Abstract

The relationship between speaker and hearer, between auctour (author and authority) and reader, is central to Chaucer's work. In the Canterbury Tales, speaking and hearing are conceived as equally creative functions whose practitioners jointly constitute meaning. Troilus and Criseyde, too, is constituted and sustained through a union of speakers and hearers whose verbal intercourse generates sexual intimacy. Pandarus' activity is paradigmatic for each partner; each manipulates language to gain control over events and over others while seeking absolution from responsibility by pleading subservience to external authority. In recognizing the complex interdependency of authoring and reading, Chaucer denies autonomous control to the one and insular passivity to the other and suggests that complicity is the essence of linguistic exchange and of worldly experience. Consideration of the evasions, insinuations, signals, and strategies comprised in communication in Troilus and Criseyde supports this position and generates a substantially new reading of the poem.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 47 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), p. 5.

2 Quotations of Chaucer's works herein are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1957). Line numbers are noted Within parentheses in the text.

3 The best extended treatment of the Carterbury Tales as “a book about the world” is Donald R. Howard's The Idea of the Cunterbury Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976).

4 Bloomfield, PMLA, 72 (1957), 14-26; rpt. in Chaucer Criticism, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor, u (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1961), 196-210.

5 Dorothy Bethurum argues that the narrator's “reiteration that he is only an outsider and the power and truth of his picture are completely contradictory and Produce the ambivalence that is so strikingly characteristic of the poem” (“Chaucer's Point of View as Narrator in the Love Poems,” PMLA, 74 [1959], 511- 20; rpt. in Chaucer Criticism, u, 211-31). L agree with this general statement. What 1 hope to do here is to Specify the nature and ihe implications of the ambivalence that Bethurum notes and to suggest that the Narrator's denials of involvement are belied, not by anything as abstract and undemonstrable as “the power and truth of his picture.” but by the entire conception 4nd operation of communication in the poem. Donald R. Howard in “Chaucer the Man” (PMLA, 80 11965), 337-43) offers, in passing on to other concerns, several Sbservations about the Troilvs narrator. He notes that the narrator is “a reader” and that he is “therefore like Surselves.” Howard also calls Pandarus “a kind of mir- 'Or image of this narrater.” Finally, E. Talbot Donald- Son, in his Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970, 1972), pp. 65-83, deftly points up some of the Oddities and ambiguities of Criseyde's characterization 4nd attributes them to the narrator's “wildly emotional attitude” (p, 68) and inability to see his heroine “from any consistently detached, objective point of view” (p. 67). Again, I am attempting to address�more squarely, I believe, than has been done�the issue of what it means, to the poem and to us, for observations like these to be correct.

6 Troilus, it may be noted, never laughs until he looks down from the eighth sphere, but Pandarus and Criseyde laugh often, and their laughter invariably functions in one of two ways: either it ironically punctuates a disayowal of sexual inference or it signifies recognition of a sexual pun or conspiratorial suggestion.

7 Speirs, “Troilus and Criseyde,” Scrutiny, 11 (1942), 93.

8 Beryl Rowland in “Pandarus and the Fate of Tantalus” (Orbis Litterarum, 24 11969}, 10) notes occasions� in the Merchant's, Wife's, and Parson's Tales-�when Chaucer plays on the phallic suggestiveness of the knife. In Criseyde's bedroom, on the morning after the consummation of her affair with Troilus, Pandarus offers her a sword and asks her to behead him. The context strongly supports the case for a sexual meaning.

9 Ross, “Troilus and Crisevde, 1.582~587: A Note,” Chaucer Review, 5 (1970), 137-39.

10 Donaldson, Chancer's Poetry (New York: Ronald, 1958), p. 968.

11 Donald R. Howard also makes this point in his suggestive essay “Literature and Sexuality: Book Three of the Trotlus” (Massachusetts Review, 8 [1967], 446-48).

12 Christmas, “Troilus and Criseyde: The Problems of Love and Necessity,” Chaucer Review, 9 (1975), 290.

13 Braddy, 'Chaucer's Playful Pandarus,” Southern Fotklore Quarterly, 34 (1970), 80.

14 Shanley, “The Troilus and Christian Love,” ELH, 6 (1939), 277; rpt. in Chancer Criticism, Ww. 142.

15 Covella, “Audience as Determinant of Meaning in the Troilus,” Chaucer Review, 2 (1968), 239.

16 Jordan, “The Narrator in Chaucer's Troilus,” ELB, 25 (1958), 257.