3—
Allegory:
The Canterbury Tales and Dantean Allegory
(Geryon and the Nun's Priest's Tale)

In arguing for the intertextuality of the Comedy and The Canterbury Tales I mentioned pilgrimage as a central structural feature shared by both poems. Ironically, this shared feature could also be seen as setting the two at opposite poles. The pilgrimage in Dante's Comedy is everything, almost, that the one in The Canterbury Tales is not: it is otherworldly, allegorical, and individual, whereas the other is thisworldly, literal, and collective. For generations of critics this contrast could well serve as a compact symbol of what they have perceived as the unbridgeable poetic gulf between the two poets and their poems. C. S. Lewis's statement, made more than half a century ago, to the effect that "nowhere in Chaucer do we find a radically allegorical poem," today still expresses pretty much the prevailing view.^[1] The early "experiments" in allegory, like the Book of the Duchess and Parliament of Fowls, are of course recognized as such, but the major works are regarded as basically realistic and nonallegorical.

Contrary to the critical consensus, I argued earlier that not only are there individual allegorical tales—like Melibee, discussed at the end of chapter 2—but there is also an overarching allegory in The

[1] C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, p. 166. In specifying "radically allegorical" Lewis covers himself very effectively. Depending on how one interprets his adverb, one might conclude that there is no author who has written a "radically allegorical" poem!

Canterbury Tales paralleling that of the Comedy, which has to do with the question of the human image. It is the idea of allegory in the two poems that I now want to examine from its theoretical and thematic aspects. Granted that the Comedy 's otherworld setting is from the start an invitation to allegory that the road to Canterbury is not, or not necessarily, both poems nonetheless share a basically similar orientation toward allegory.

That The Canterbury Tales continues the kind of allegory initiated in the Comedy is the explicit contention of Robert Hollander:

In his mimetic intention Dante is greatly different from the poets of the thirteen hundred years since Virgil, the poets of his own time, and the poets of the three hundred years following him, with the single exception of the author of that other fourteenth-century "Divine Comedy," the Canterbury Tales . These are the only two major works until the sixteenth century which, like the Bible, treat the literal as historical, and thus must perfect the techniques of mimesis as well as those of doctrine.^[2]

Naturally, such pairing of the Comedy and The Canterbury Tales fits in very well with the purpose of this chapter. Unfortunately, however, it is predicated on an idea of allegory that seems to me subject to question. Developing the thesis propounded by C. S. Singleton, Hollander argues that Dante set out to imitate "God's way of writing" by modeling the allegory of the Comedy on a system of scriptural interpretation that distinguishes four types or levels of meaning summed up in a familiar tag:^[3]

littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,
moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.

(The literal teaches what happened, allegory what you
       should
believe, the moral what you should do, and anagoge what
       you
should strive toward.)^[4]

Dante, according to this theory, then proceeded to compose a nar-

[2] Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante's "Commedia, " p. 53.

[3] See C. S. Singleton, "'In exitu Israel de Ægypto.'" Though Singleton originated the theory of Dante's fundamentally theological allegory in this century, as early as the fourteenth century there were commentators who held very similar views; see Appendix I, "The Fourteenth-century Commentators on Fourfold Allegory," pp. 266–96 in Hollander, Allegory in Dante's "Commedia ."

[4] Quoted from Jean Pépin, Dante et la tradition de l'allégorie, p. 83.

rative that, though obviously fiction, nonetheless insists on its own literal truth. Many so-called realistic narratives, and many fantastic ones as well, do the same, but Dante's insistence on the "historical" truth of his otherworld journey is seen by Singleton, and Hollander, as a different matter, evidence of an ambition to go beyond merely poetic allegory and to imitate the Bible by means of a visionary fiction that would represent an authoritative basis for theological allegory. Not content with the poet's allegoria in verbis, an allegory depending on the multiple (metaphoric) meanings of words, Dante tried to approximate an allegoria in facto, "God's way of writing," in the sense that God "writes" not in the medium of language but in that of historical events, which he charges with prophetic significance.^[5] The Bible, needless to say, represents the record of God's historical "writing"; Dante, in turn, makes the Comedy into the record of his fictive journey, which he treats as if its events were not merely true but also charged with the prophetic content that, strictly speaking, only God could endow them with.

With this theory we certainly have an answer to the question discussed in the preceding chapter: What does the ambitious Christian poet do? According to Singleton and Hollander, he composes, not an "appendix" to the Bible, but a poetic text that will replicate its allegorical structure and thus possess the same truth claim as the Bible. Now, if that truth claim is doctrinal, that is, confined to the strictly allegorical levels, it is relatively unproblematic but also unexciting. But if the truth claim is also meant to cover the literal level, then it becomes either self-contradictory or too grandiose for its own good.

In addition, Dante's own theoretical statements about allegory in no way bear out the theory. The Letter to Can Grande, a kind of author's preface like Spenser's Letter to Raleigh prefixed to The Faerie Queene, describes the Comedy as a "polysemous" allegory, suggesting that Dante has a primarily verbal rather than "factual" or "historical" allegory in mind.^[6] He does, to be sure, go on to explicate the opening of Psalm 113, "When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech," in terms of the traditional four senses. However, he then promptly indicates that his real in-

[5] For the distinction, traditional since Augustine, between allegoria in verbis and allegoria in facto, see Pépin, p. 47.

[6] Assuming it is Dante's, a matter on which there is as yet no definitive consensus; see, e.g., Colin Hardie, "The Epistle to Can Grande Again."

terest is in the literal-allegorical distinction. "And although these mystic senses have each their special denominations, they may all in general be called allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical; for allegory is derived from alleon, in Greek, which means the same as the Latin alienum or diversum ."^[7] For his Comedy, accordingly, he goes on to claim no more than a twofold subject: "The subject of the whole work, then, taken in the literal sense only, is 'the state of souls after death,' without qualification, for the whole progress of the work hinges on it and about it. Whereas if the work be taken allegorically the subject is 'man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of the freedom of his choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing justice.'"^[8] As Carolynn Van Dyke points out in commenting on this passage, "the subject of the Divine Comedy  . . . is not punishment, purgation, and beatitude; not justice, but man as subject to justice. Some distance between immediate and ultimate referent is the irreplaceable representation of the human relationship to truth."^[9]

In an earlier work, the Convivio, Dante has a lengthy discussion of allegory in the course of which he appears to make a distinction between the "allegory of the theologians" and the "allegory of the poets." But as Hollander himself admits, the effect of his discussion is to blur rather than establish the distinction between the two.^[10] Dante's purpose in this is, I suspect, to allow poets like himself to cross over into biblical and related territory without subjecting them to the exegetical shackles of the theologians. The same or a similar motive probably underlies the extraordinary emphasis Dante places on the primacy of the literal level, claiming—as the biblical exegetes did not and indeed could not—that it is the indispensable basis from which the "spiritual" senses are derived.^[11]

[7] Epistola X [to Can Grande della Scala], translated by Philip H. Wicksteed, p. 348, in A Translation of the Latin Works of Dante Alighieri, Temple Classics (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1929). The Latin reads: "Et quanquam isti sensus mistici variis appellentur nominibus, generaliter omnes dici possunt allegorici, cum sint a litterali sive historiali diversi. Nam allegoria dicitur ab 'alleon' grece, quod in latinum dicitur 'alienum' sive 'diversum.'"

[8] Ibid.

[9] Carolynn Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth, p. 216.

[10] Hollander, Allegory, p. 33.

[11] According to Robert P. Miller, "Allegory in the Canterbury Tales, " in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland, the exegetical tradition of the Church had become a fixed method, "a habit of mind which attaches to ideas, events, qualities,and things a series of standardized 'meanings,' primarily those developed and conventionalized within the system of clerkly authority" (270–71).

And in thus expounding, the literal should always come first, as the one in the meaning whereof the others are included, and without which it were impossible and irrational to attend to the others, and especially to the allegorical. It is impossible, because in everything that has an inside and an outside it is impossible to come at the inside save we first come at the outside. Wherefore inasmuch as in the scriptures [the literal sense] is ever outside, it is impossible to come at the others without first coming at the literal. Again it is impossible, because in every natural and artificial thing it is impossible to proceed to the form without first duly disposing the subject on which the form must be impressed. Just as it is impossible for the form of gold to accrue if the material, to wit its subject, be not first digested and prepared; or for the form of a chest to come if the material, to wit the wood, be not first disposed and prepared. Wherefore inasmuch as the literal meaning is always the subject and material of the others, especially the allegorical, it is impossible to come at the knowledge of the others before coming at the knowledge of it. Further, it is impossible because in every natural or artificial thing it is impossible to proceed unless the foundation be first made; as in a house, and as in study. Wherefore since demonstration is the building up of knowledge and the literal demonstration is the foundation of the others, especially the allegorical, it is impossible to come at the others before coming at this.

Again, suppose it were possible it would be irrational, that is to say out of order, and would therefore be carried on with much irksomeness and with much error. Wherefore, as saith the Philosopher in the first of the Physics, nature wills that we should proceed in due order in our learning, to wit by proceeding from that which we know better to that which we know not so well. I say that nature wills it, inasmuch as this way of learning is naturally born in us. And therefore if the other senses are less known than the literal (which it is manifestly apparent that they are) it would be irrational to proceed to demonstrate them if the literal had not been demonstrated first.^[12]

The variety of arguments Dante musters to demonstrate that the literal sense contains the others—"quello ne la cui li altri sono inchiusi"—indicates the importance he attaches to this point. The primary analogy he establishes is with Aristotelian hylomorphism, the literal being to the allegorical as the material substrate is to the formal principle. This analogy involves obvious difficulties, like the fact that a text, being linguistic, does not consist of formless matter but al-

[12] Philip Wicksteed, trans., The Convivio of Dante Alighieri, pp. 64–66. Cf. Busnelli and Vandelli, eds., Il Convivio, pp. 100–103.

ready has a determinate form, that is, meaning. It is not the same kind of object as the gold piece or wood chest (arca ) to which Dante compares it. On the other hand, if we consider the text from the perspective of the mind seeking to understand it, the literal meaning may be said to point beyond itself to principles (or "intentions") in terms of which it becomes evermore intelligible.^[13] In other words, the interpretation of a "polysemous" text involves not a one-time decoding but a series of attempts at comprehension, and it is this fact that authorizes Dante, citing a principle of Aristotle's Physics,^[14] to parallel a person's "innate" need to proceed from the better- to the less-known with the progression from literal to allegorical. The analogy neglects Aristotle's distinction between what is better known to us (quae sunt nobis magis nota ) and what is more knowable in nature (ea quae sunt magis nota naturae ).^[15] But that is presumably just the point: from the perspective of the interpreting mind the distinction becomes superfluous, since the act of interpretation constantly turns what is "out there" into what is "in here," and vice versa.

The Aristotelian principles Dante introduces into his discussion suggest that since the literal level is an analogue of the experiential world, the reader's orientation toward the text must be empirical, taking nothing for granted. In her excellent discussion of Dante's allegory, Carolynn Van Dyke rounds out this picture by observing that in the Comedy the literal level of the narrative is quite literally the "world" as its narrator, what she calls the "persona," experiences it, and must be interpreted as such by the reader:

Auerbach and Singleton properly insist that the story itself is no disposable surrogate for the implicit Realities. It is, rather, a different order of being: the empirical observations and recollections of the persona. The empirical perspective is unremitting here, never giving way, as in Bunyan, to allegorical omniscience. Even in the passages sometimes called personification allegory—the Beatricean pageant, the opening of the Inferno, and so forth—the

[13] At the beginning of the Physics Aristotle states that "we do not think we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles" (Physica, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, p. 218). The Convivio itself starts with a citation from Aristotle's Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to know" (Temple Classics trans.).

[14] Actually, Aquinas's Commentary on the Physics, as Pépin, Dante, p. 91, points out, following Busnelli and Vandelli, p. 102n.

[15] See Pépin, Dante, p. 92. The Latin phrases are from Aquinas's Commentary 1.1.lect. 1, cited by Busnelli and Vandelli, p. 102.

objects seen by the persona require interpretation, being at least partially opaque to whatever Realities they manifest. If intelligibles are named directly as agents and objects in Prudentius' narrative code, in Dante's they are intermittently visible, incompletely reconstructable antecedents from which the narrative, like the visible world, seems to have been derived.^[16]

Later, I will have more to say about matter "at least partially opaque" to intelligibles that might cast doubt on the Platonism implicit in the statement quoted above. Dante's almost aggressive Aristotelianism in the Convivio suggests that Van Dyke's idea of the experiencing subject or persona as central to Dante's allegory is right. At the same time this subject's experience is obviously not confined to an external world but encompasses another, internal world of thought and feeling such as Paul Piehler postulates for his idea of the "allegorical plot."

In his book The Visionary Landscape, Piehler locates the archetype of this allegorical plot in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, which presents its protagonist-prisoner in a moment of crisis from which he is rescued by a personification of superior wisdom and metaphysical order who engages him in a dialogue that is at once enlightening and therapeutic.^[17] Dante's most important innovation in this scheme, according to Piehler, was to substitute for the "authority figures" like Boethius's Philosophy and Alan of Lille's Nature (in the twelfth-century Plaint of Nature ) "concrete personalities" like Virgil and Beatrice to guide the pilgrim out of his predicament. Not that these personalities are antithetical as such to theology or metaphysics, but since they do not possess any recognized authority, the chief reason for their introduction is clearly their link with the protagonist's personal history. This personal dimension, according to Piehler, constitutes Dante's most significant departure from the model established by Boethius.

Allegory, in this view, is no longer an abstract structure but rather the dramatization of an existential crisis or problem as this works itself out in the "consciousness" of one or more of the characters involved. The terms of an allegory are thus peculiarly double-edged, on the one hand referring to a perceived "external" reality (whether concrete or ideational) and, on the other hand, characterizing the "internal" state or disposition of the perceiver. And the complexity of the allegory will increase as the crisis that sets the allegorical action

[16] Carolynn Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth, p. 215.

[17] Paul Piehler, The Visionary Landscape . Chapter 7 deals with Dante.

in motion becomes itself more enigmatic. In pre-Comedy allegories the causes and the nature of this crisis are usually well defined and of a broadly philosophical nature; in the Comedy, however, they remain mysterious and unspecified beyond the imagery of being lost in the dark forest and confronted by the beasts on the hillside in the opening canto.

In lieu of a "crisis," Paul de Man, taking his cue from Baudelaire's essay on comedy, posits a "fall" as the originary moment in the plot of allegory or its twin, irony.^[18] Whether it is literal or alludes to that of Adam and Eve, the fall creates in the protagonist a sudden awareness of his doubleness, turning him into a "disinterested spectator" of his phenomenal self.

In the idea of fall thus conceived, a progression in self-knowledge is certainly implicit: the man who has fallen is somewhat wiser than the fool who walks around oblivious of the crack in the pavement about to trip him up. And the fallen philosopher reflecting on the discrepancy between the two successive stages is wiser still, but this does not in the least prevent him from stumbling in his turn. It seems instead that his wisdom can be gained only at the cost of such a fall. The mere falling of others does not suffice; he has to go down himself. The ironic, twofold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification. The ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity. This does not, however, make it into an authentic language, for to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic.
("The Rhetoric of Temporality," p. 214)

This scheme lends itself rather neatly to Dante's "allegorical plot," which starts with a "fall" revealing a self existing "in a state of inauthenticity"; simultaneously there emerges another self with a purely linguistic mode of existence, which in pre-Dantean allegory would be a personification like Boethius's Philosophy that by means of therapeutic dialogue leads the "empirical self" to an understanding of its condition.^[19] The Comedy, as Piehler suggests, has figures

[18] Baudelaire's "De l'essence du rire," in Curiosités esthétiques: L'Art romantique et autres (Euvres critiques, ed. H. Lemaître, pp. 241–63 (Paris: Garnier, 1962), forms the basis of Paul de Man's discussion of irony in its relation to allegory in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight, pp. 208ff.

[19] Cf. Seth Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue, p. 32: "Cicero, Augustine, and Fulgentius anticipate Boethius in that they all postulate a mind in conversation withitself; that they express this conversation between the figures of student and teacher; and that their conversations always produce a readable work which will engage a future imaginary audience in constant colloquy with its authors."

like Virgil and Beatrice that perform a parallel function, but Dante's real innovation, it is now evident, is a true Baudelairean dédoublement by creation of the role of poet-narrator as the dialogic double or counterpart to the "empirical" Pilgrim.

In the Comedy, the self-duplication of Poet and Pilgrim, we might say, begins as an allegory of writing, the act of composing a poem that "records" the discovery of a self existing "in a state of inauthenticity" and the quest to recover or, as the case may be, discover a state of authenticity. The reader will have noted that the language of existentialism can readily be replaced by the biblical and theological language with which earlier I described the Dantean pilgrimage as a quest for the human image. Both concepts are obviously problematical and both involve a general, philosophic (or theological) idea as well as something intimately personal and "existential." The self-duplication of Poet and Pilgrim is, then, the ideal instrument for the quest after the "authentic image," and without turning the poem into a psychodrama, it gives the allegory a distinct psychological edge. The self-duplication, that is, sets a pattern that invites the reader to see the poem's various dramatic encounters as also self-encounters (and self-divisions) pointing to "a discontinuity and a plurality of levels within a subject that comes to know itself by an increasing differentiation from what is not."^[20]

The allegory in The Canterbury Tales works in a fashion more or less analogous to what I have sketched so far for the Comedy, as I will discuss later in this chapter. In the first place, then, there is the larger quest for the clarified human image, a quest growing out of the private and individual "impulse to pilgrimage"—itself the result of a crisis? a fall? And then there is the reiterated "allegorical plot" of tale-telling en route, with its own repeated dédoublement of the "empirical" pilgrim and his or her dialogic double, the pilgrim-narrator. My discussion of the Clerk's Tale and the Merchant's Tale in the last two chapters of this book will attempt a full-scale exploration of Chaucer's allegorical plot in which allegory itself is at the center of the "crisis."

[20] de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," p. 213. At Par . XXII.112ff. there is an invocation to Gemini or Twins as the constellation that is the source of the Poet's ingegno ; this is a point to which I shall return.

I turn now to a discussion of the Geryon episode in cantos XVI and XVII of the Inferno as a perfect example of the dédoublement —in its most startling, Kafkaesque form—at the center of Dante's allegorical plot, the chief allegorical "knot" of the entire Comedy, in which its very genesis is enacted. It is intended as a paradigm for the self-conflicted character of allegorical narrative in both the Comedy and The Canterbury Tales, and I will therefore deal with the episode at some length. Let us briefly consider first of all the literal narrative.

At the edge of the seventh circle of hell, the progress of the pilgrims is stopped by a steep precipice. Here Virgil has the Pilgrim remove the girdle (corda ) from around his waist and then cast it into the abyss. A novelty (novità ) is bound to respond to such a novel sign (novo cenno ), the Pilgrim says to himself (115–16).^[21] Virgil tells him:

Tosto verrà di sovra
ciò ch'io attendo e che il tuo pensier sogna;
tosto convien ch'al tuo viso si scovra.
                                                 ( Inf . XVI.121–23)

(Soon will come up what I look for and what your mind
        dreams
of . . . ; soon must it be discovered to your sight. [S])

And so the Pilgrim sees "through the dense and darkened air . . . a figure swimming, rising up" ("per quell' aere grosso e scuro / venir notando una figure in suso," l. 130f.). Let us note, first of all, how the scene recapitulates the opening of the Inferno when the Pilgrim, driven back into darkness by the she-wolf, is in near despair. At that moment there appears before his eyes ("dinanzi a li occhi mi si fu offerto," l. 62) a faint figure that identifies itself as Virgil. From the perspective of the Geryon episode we can see that the historical figure, born "sub Julio " (70), represents a true dialogic double to the Pilgrim. Not only can he read the latter's mind, but in canto XVI he all but becomes part of that mind, its muse and intellectual midwife, by which the Pilgrim is led to a novità, new vision promising new understanding, perhaps a "new life."

[21] I am deliberately translating with awkward literalness because the terms in parentheses seem to me important, and they get lost in the more idiomatic rendering of Singleton and Mandelbaum: "And surely something strange must here reply," / I said within myself, "to this strange sign." For Dante, n(u)ovo in all its forms would seem to be at all times a highly charged term.

In canto XVI, this novità —the figure whose name is revealed in the next canto as Geryon—will (ex hypothesi ) be another "double" of the Pilgrim, but this time by way of a Sphinx-like figure rather than of any recognized historical or fictional character. This fits with the symbolic manner in which Virgil reenacts the Pilgrim's "fall." As we saw, he casts his girdle down the abyss (and follows it with his eyes), and the girdle now is a metonymic symbol of the Pilgrim's self. I will return to these symbolic doublings later, but first I want to propose that the scene at the edge of the seventh circle is yet another reenactment, namely, of the genesis of the entire Comedy . As I picture it, in this genesis Virgil—not the man but the "embodied" text (as I have discussed in chapter 2)—plays a central role. Through the agency of this Virgil, so I go on to speculate, the possibility arose of an epic poem in which the past might be rewritten or rewrite itself in such a way as to recuperate a lost authenticity.

The moment in which this possibility dawns upon the Poet is imaged by Geryon rising to view in what seems a poetic autobiogenesis, as the infernal abyss—imaged by the space between cantos XVI and XVII—turns into the hidden depth of the Poet's mind, which Virgil has not so much compelled as enticed to yield its dream image. The poem looks at this point, in other words, as if it were generating itself from within its own fictive text, a particularly striking confirmation of Philippe Sollers's idea of the Comedy as "un texte en train de s'écrire."^[22] In this connection it is surely no coincidence that by the end of the canto a perfectly docile Geryon, carrying two poets on its back down to the eighth circle, looks for all the world like another Pegasus.

As it descends, the monster—la fera (114)—is actually swimming through the air or void: "Ella^[23] sen va notando lenta lenta" ("She goes swimming slowly slowly," XVII.115). Susan Noakes has made the excellent suggestion that notando is a pun here and that the beast, whose name she derives from Greek geruon, "speaking, singing" (gerus, "voice"), not only "goes swimming" but also "goes along by writing slowly, slowly."^[24] Needless to say, this fits perfectly with

[22] See "Dante et la traversée de l'écriture," originally published in Tel Quel 23 (1965), and reprinted in L'Écriture et l'expérience des limites ; trans. as Writing and the Experience of Limits . Jeremy Tambling, Dante and Difference, p. 67, cites Sollers's essay in discussing Dante's textuality.

[23] English translations like Mandelbaum's and Singleton's miss the change of grammatical gender here, which in the Italian is dictated by fera as the antecedent.

[24] Susan Noakes, Timely Reading, p. 65.

my suggestion that Geryon "is" the Comedy "en train de s'écrire." And the same wordplay is obviously at work earlier when the Pilgrim first saw "venir notando una figura" (131): a shape, image, or character come swimming, like a diver returning to the surface (ll. 133–36), and writing (itself). Within four lines of this notando, furthermore, there is its cognate, note, in the Poet's address to the reader prior to the actual emergence of the beast:

Sempre a quel ver c'ha faccia di menzogna
de' l'uom chiuder le labbra fin ch'el pote,
però che sanza colpa far vergogna;
ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note
di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro,
s'elle non sien di lunga grazia vote,
ch' i' vidi per quell'aere grosso e scuro
venir notando una figura in suso,
maravigliosa ad ogni cor sicuro.
                                              ( Inf . XVI.124–32)

(Faced with that truth which seems a lie, a man
should always close his lips as long as he can—
to tell it shames him, even though he's blameless;
but here I can't be still; and by the lines
of this my Comedy, reader, I swear—
and may my verse find favor for long years—
that through the dense and darkened air I saw
a figure swimming, rising up, enough
to bring amazement to the firmest heart.)

These note are, of course, the poem's "lines" (Mandelbaum), the "notes" recording the poet's pilgrimage, and the "musical notes" or "strains" ("As if the poem were a song")^[25] that make up the poem as a whole (questa comedìa ), and they appear to be part of the technical vocabulary of Dante's poetics, as when Bonagiunta has the secret of the dolce stil nuovo explained to him by the Pilgrim:

        I' mi son un, che quando
Amor mi spira, noto,  e a quel modo
ch'e' ditta dentro vo significando.
                                                                         ( Purg . XXIV. 52–54; my italics)

[25] This is the interpretation favored by Singleton in his Commentary, ad loc.: "As if the poem were a song" (p. 292). Cf. Purg . XXX.91f., where the Pilgrim hears "'l cantar di quei che notan sempre / dietro a le note de li etterni giri," "the song of those who ever sing in harmony with the eternal spheres."

(I am one who, when Love inspires me,  takes note,  and
goes setting it forth after the fashion which he dictates
within me.  [S])

Jeremy Tambling's comment on these lines gives an accurate sense of the pervasive doubleness of Dante's poetics. "When love speaks," writes Tambling, "Dante takes notes — . . . he writes it down, both inside, in the 'libro de la mia memoria,' and outside, in the poem."^[26]

At this point some crucial questions arise. In the Vita Nuova Love speaks and so provides its poems' note . But such is not the case in the epic "text that writes itself." Where, then, do its note come from? Who or what inspires them? If the text is an infernal Pegasus, furthermore, will it not take its poet-passengers far from any authentic image? The Poet-narrator shows his consciousness of these questions by a rather fantastic joke: he swears to the truth (authenticity) of what he is telling by le note di questa comedìa, in short, the very note whose character and source are in question. The joke is compounded in light of the possibility that questa comedìa, usually taken to indicate the title of Dante's epic, can equally well refer to the Geryon episode, thus turning the latter into a kind of gloss on the whole poem.^[27] And the problem with that is Geryon's total ambiguity. With a "faccia di menzogna"^[28]and a "faccia d'uom giusto," it is truly two-faced, a veritable emblem of fraud:

E quella sozza imagine di froda
sen venne, ed arrivò la testa e 'l busto,
ma 'n su la riva non trasse la coda.
La faccia sua era faccia d'uom giusto,
tanto benigna avea di fuor la pelle,
e d'un serpente tutto l'altro fusto;
due branche avea pilose infin l'ascelle;
lo dosso e'l petto e ambedue le coste
dipinti avea di nodi e di rotelle.
Con più color, sommesse e sovraposte
non fer mai drappi Tartari né Turchi,
né fuor tai tele per Aragne imposte.
                                        ( Inf . XVII. 7–18)

[26] Dante and Difference, p. 98.

[27] See Singleton's note ad loc. for the standard interpretation of questa comedìa, which certainly seems to be supported by the reference to "la mia comedìa" of Inf . XXI.1. However, I see no problem in the use of comedìa as both title and designation of a generic mode.

[28] Recalling the bella menzogna that at Convivio II.i.3 is said to be the means for concealing a truth in classical fable.

(And he came on, that filthy effigy
of fraud, and landed with his head and torso
but did not draw his tail onto the bank.
The face he wore was that of a just man,
so gracious was his features' outer semblance;
and all his trunk, the body of a serpent;
he had two paws, with hair up to the armpits;
his back and chest as well as both his flanks
had been adorned with twining knots and circlets.
No Turks or Tartars ever fashioned fabrics
more colorful in background and relief,
nor had Arachne ever loomed such webs.)

Here is indeed an insidious duplicity, a benign or seductive exterior behind which there lurk bestial violence and cruelty. For the Pilgrim the beast is a source of terror recalling his emotions in the selva oscura of canto I. During the flight down to the eighth circle he is in constant fear of falling off, like a later visitant to the otherworld, who implores his Muse:

Return me to my Native Element:
Least from this flying Steed unrein'd, (as once
Bellerophon,  though from a lower Clime)
Dismounted, on th' Aleian  Field I fall
Erroneous, there to wander and forlorn.
                                      ( Paradise Lost,  VII.16–20)^[29]

The Pilgrim's fears suggest the Poet's sense that his poem has developed a mysterious, beastlike life and force of its own and is apparently beyond his control. So his oath by the note of his Comedy / comedy is perhaps not a joke after all? But here we must observe that there is the other poet, who from the start seems to be familiar with the beast and exclaims against it in terms of vehement contempt:

ecco la fera con la coda aguzza,
che passa i monti, e rompe i muri e l'armi;
ecco colei ch tutto 'l mondo appuzza!
                                                        (XVII.1–3)

(Behold the beast who bears the pointed tail,
who crosses mountains, shatters weapons, walls!
Behold the one whose stench fills all the world!)

[29] Just as Milton's invocation to the Muse occurs exactly halfway through the poem—"Half yet remaines unsung" (PL VII.21)—so the Geryon episode occurs precisely midway through the Inferno .

Despite this denunciation, Virgil goes on to negotiate with the beast for a kind of shuttle service, and during the ride through space he speaks to it as to a reasonable fellow human being. Unlike the Pilgrim, furthermore, Virgil remains perfectly calm throughout and shows himself an expert pilot or rider in control of the beast.

To Virgil, in other words, Geryon presents neither a moral nor a poetic problem, but is simply an instrument to be used. As such, the Roman poet helps to allay, perhaps, some of the anxieties, implied in the appearance of the beast, that I mentioned earlier. Virgil shows that it is possible to control the apparently treacherous and fraudulent medium and make it serve one's purpose. Inspired by Virgil's example, the reader, too, can see how by a slight shift in perspective the seemingly horrific appearance of Geryon turns into a subtle, and subtly self-parodying, description of the Comedy . The "twining knots and circlets" with which Geryon's serpent flanks are adorned (dipinti ), for instance, lose their sinister associations when we consider that the fabrics of Turks and Tartars and Arachne's webs are, like the Comedy, works of art, and woven, Latin textus, thus textual .^[30] The sommessa and sovraposta —essentially, interweaving varicolored threads—and the tele imposte by which these weavers create their exotic designs are like highly compressed descriptions of the Comedy 's textual devices with their capacity for producing a sense of receding depths and shifting foregrounds, all on an apparently flat surface.

Via its Ovidian subtext in the Metamorphoses (VI.5–145), the story of Arachne might be seen as yet another version of the Comedy 's allegorical plot. In a weaving contest with Pallas Minerva, Arachne creates a "divine comedy" picturing the gods' philandering with mortals that outdoes Minerva's own "poema sacro" in cloth. The goddess punishes Arachne for this act of hubris by destroying what she has woven. Arachne thereupon tries to commit suicide by hanging herself, but at the crucial moment is saved by Minerva, who turns her into a spider hanging by a thread. Allegorically, Arachne attains the ambiguous immortality of a poet spinning beautiful fictions out of her own body. And I might add that the spider's web

[30] Italian testo ; cf. Inf . XV.89 and Purg . VI.29, the latter instance referring to a verse in the Aeneid . Cf. Martha C. Nussbaum's distinction between the Platonic and the Sophoclean soul, the latter like "Heraclitus's image of psuche : a spider sitting in the middle of its web, able to feel and respond to any part of the complicated structure": The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 69.

with its concentric "circles" bears a remarkable resemblance to the abstract design of the Inferno, and ultimately of the entire Dantean cosmos.

The (writing of the) poem, then, has done its work of saving the Poet-Pilgrim from falling irretrievably. But that is not, after all, a resolution of the problems—having to do with the nature of the poem and the source of its inspiration—that I mentioned earlier, because what the Poet-Pilgrim seeks is not simply life or even poetic immortality, but "authenticity," the recovery of the authentic human image in this life, in this life, in this flesh, but by poetic means. And here the guidance of the Roman poet is perhaps of limited help. Both intellectually and poetically the Poet-Pilgrim must venture beyond the classical ideal of an ultimately fixed and stable order, whether in human nature or in human art. In somewhat different terms, the quest of the Comedy must risk fraud, error, failure because, as I shall argue, it must accept the ambiguity of all images and the radical instability and duplicity of the poet's language. Only by beginning with such acceptance can the Poet hope to create more than, in Mazzotta's words, "a prodigious crystal, an idolatrous self-referential construct."^[31]

The description of Geryon at the beginning of canto XVII cited earlier evokes certain notions about human nature, going back to classical antiquity, that envision it as a composite of rational and bestial elements. When the Poet calls Geryon "that filthy image of fraud," therefore, I believe he is thinking, not of an allegorical abstraction labeled "Fraud," but of an image that is fraudulent or deceptive, first of all, for those who accept it as authentic. And this is consistent with a basic assumption of the allegory in the Comedy, particularly the Inferno,^[32] that the denizens of the otherworld are where and what they are by virtue of a conscious act of self-projection—whether in act or thought—that determines the "image" in which they appear in the poem. By a demonic self-duplication, the image embraced by the sinner thus combines moral cause and effect, a self-conception that is its own instant realization.

Now, Geryon is presented initially as if it were a singular, fixed image, but, as we shall see, this is itself deceptive, and the beast

[31] Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, p. 237.

[32] In the two later canticles the person comes to be defined less and less in terms of an external, visible image, and increasingly by way of speech, tone of voice, facial expression, and so forth.

eventually proves to be a shifting constellation or kaleidoscope of possible images. In canto XVII the image is particularized in relation to the Pilgrim, the critical detail being "the face of a just man." In itself the phrase is undecidable—a face is, after all, an adjustable mask—but behind it, as it were, there is an entire tradition of classical anthropology that ranks and classifies human souls and also holds that the specifically human (the face) must rule or suppress the animal or subhuman in the name of justice or morality. Reason must control the bestial in man.^[33]

This assumption of classical anthropology is placed under a critical lens in the figure of Geryon, which is characterized by what I would call an amphibiousness that projects the countless ways in which human beings cross the boundary between one species and another and between one realm and another. In classical mythology, he was a three-headed, three-bodied giant living in the stream Oceanus until Hercules killed him; but Dante's Geryon, though doubtless related to this giant, also merges with another figure from classical mythology, the shape-shifter god of the sea, Proteus.^[34] In the Odyssey Proteus plays a role as a reluctant or unexpected helper not altogether unlike Geryon's role in the Comedy . As Virgil is able to persuade the monster to provide transportation for the travelers, so Menelaos, by a trick learned from Proteus's daughter, catches the sea god, and despite the latter's attempts to elude him through various metamorphoses, compels Proteus to reveal to him the way home.^[35]

In the Comedy, certainly, the pilgrimage is a nostos, or journey home, a concept that surely encompasses the "human image," whose quester is himself destined to be gradually transformed in conformity

[33] The idea of reason or the divine part as the properly ruling element of the soul is prominent in Plato and the Stoics. For the Christian transformation of the idea, see Robert Javelet, "La réintroduction de la liberté dans les notions d'image et de ressemblance conçues comme dynamisme." Justice as the goal of political society, and of the soul that is its prototype, is a central theme in a number of Plato's dialogues. For the idea that the person who fails to master his bodily passions will eventually reappear on earth transformed into "some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired," see Timæus 42B (trans. Jowett); similar imagery occurs at Timæus 70D-E.

[34] I acknowledge here various hints from Theresa Kelley's excellent article, "Proteus and Romantic Allegory," which argues that behind such characters as Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer there can be discerned the figure of Proteus. My guess is that her theory applies to a good deal of pre-Romantic allegory as well.

[35] Odyssey IV.399ff. Boccaccio, in Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, vol. 1, VII.ix, summarizes the Homeric episode and Virgil's imitation of it in Georgics IV.387ff.

with what he seeks. The various shapes of which Geryon is composed thus make him into a kind of retrospective epitome of the Pilgrim's life, but also an anticipation of the future, a prophecy of the Pilgrim's desire. As the following passage from the Metamorphoses indicates, Proteus is the perfect mythic archetype of the Pilgrim's capacity for self-transformation. The river god Achelous is speaking to Theseus:

               sunt, o fortissime, quorum
forma semel mota est et in hoc renovamine mansit;
sunt, quibus in plures ius est transire figuras,
ut tibi, conplexi terram maris incola, Proteu.
nam modo te iuvenem, modo te videre leonem,
nunc violentus aper, nunc, quem tetigisse timerent,
anguis eras, modo te faciebant cornua taurum;
saepe lapis poteras, arbor quoque saepe videri,
interdum, faciem liquidarum imitatus aquarum,
flumen eras, interdum undis contrarius ignis.
                                                                  (VIII. 728–37)

(Some there are, bravest of heroes, whose form has been
once changed and remained in its new state.  To others
the power is given to assume many forms, as to thee,
Proteus, dweller in the earth-embracing sea.  For now men
saw thee as a youth, now as a lion; now thou wast a raging
boar, now a serpent, whom men would fear to touch; now
horns made thee a bull, often thou couldst appear as a
stone, often again, a tree; sometimes, assuming the form
of flowing water, thou wast a stream, and sometimes a
flame, the water's enemy.)^[36]

This passage is particularly relevant to the Inferno, whose residents, as I said earlier, have undergone a one-time, self-willed change and remain fixed there, as opposed to the Pilgrim, who is in a state of becoming, of striving ad imaginem, toward the realization of the image intimated (but not defined) in Genesis 1.26, when God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."^[37] The Pilgrim's

[36] Trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library ed., vol. 1, p. 457. Dante's Geryon and Proteus share the serpent form and at least the paws of a wild animal, and also a general amphibiousness.

[37] For the concept of human existence as a progressive striving to conform oneself ad imaginem, that is, to the imago Dei, see the discussion in chapter 1 and the article by Javelet (above, n. 33), as well as Ludwig Hödl, "Die Zeichen-Gegenwart Gottes und das Gott-Ebenbild-Sein des Menschen in des Hl. Bonaventura 'Itinerarium Mentis in Deum' c. 1–3." That Dante thinks of himself as a Protean creature is made explicit at Par . V.98f.: "io che pur da mia natura / trasmutabile son per tutte guise!" "I, who by my very nature am subject to every kind of change."

capacity for self-transformation is thus viewed in a somewhat different light from that of the "mortal Proteus" celebrated by Pico della Mirandola in the Oration on the Dignity of Man almost two hundred years after the Comedy . For Pico, man's Protean capabilities are largely conscious, a matter of exuberant free play; for Dante, as the Geryon episode suggests, the transformation happens largely unbeknownst to the subject and may lead to self-imprisonment as well as a greater freedom or understanding. This is illustrated in the second half of the Inferno, where Geryon's amphibiousness is reimaged and reinterpreted in the condition of various residents who are immersed, to a greater and lesser degree, in a confining "medium," down to Lucifer up to his middle in ice (XXXIV.28–29).

Let us recapitulate for a moment the argument up to this point concerning Geryon. The episode occurs halfway through the Inferno and marks a decisive moment in the Pilgrim's progress when his conception of himself undergoes a subtle but significant change. The episode at the same time affords the poet of the Comedy an opportunity to define the general character of his allegorical plot or pilgrimage as an encounter with a past experience (real or imagined) leading to a gradual clarification of that experience (in all its various forms) and of the soul's slow release from its oppressive burden, a release that at the same time brings with it an access of hitherto unknown powers.^[38]

This summary does not pretend to do justice to the Geryon episode, which is both prospective and retrospective. Nor is it just to Dante's "polysemous" allegory insofar as it implies that it is reducible to a neat philosophic paradigm.^[39] As "the text writing itself," Geryon resists reduction and control, whether by author or reader. A figure of fantastic allegory, as we may call it—mindful of Todorov's

[38] The simile, cited earlier, of the diver who disengaged the anchor from an obstacle hidden in the sea (XVI. 133–36) would seem to fit into this context. As we shall see, the image is echoed at the end of canto XVII.

[39] On theoretical grounds there is reason to doubt the translatability, "without remnant," of the literal text into its allegorical meaning, though Paul Ricoeur argues that there is a univocal philosophic (or other) discourse that can be substituted for a metaphoric one; indeed, he sees such a discourse as the very raison d'être of metaphor; see his The Rule of Metaphor, especially Study 8, "Metaphor and Philosophic Discourse." Jacques Derrida attacks this same notion as the expression of a metaphysics in which the (abstract) Idea is enthroned; see "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," in Margins of Philosophy, pp. 207–71. Ricoeur has a critique of Derrida's essay in The Rule of Metaphor, pp. 284–89; Ricoeur's critique is in turn criticized by Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, pp. 301ff.

warning that the fantastic is imperiled by the presence of allegory because of allegory's tendency to replace the supernatural and the uncanny by the bloodless categories of reason^[40] —it serves to arrest the reader's rush to allegorical interpretation, the impulse to look through or past the literal for the allegorical meaning. Lastly, my summary does not touch upon the critical questions that, I suggested, arise in the course of the episode, and it is to these, particularly as they bear on the apparent duplicity and instability of language, that I will now turn.

The reflexive wordplay that we observed earlier in connection with nota/re is obviously crucial here. It represents a meditation of sorts on the nature of language as the poet's medium, the central question being whether the poet can so mold his language that his text will possess a substantial reality or structure that will make its meaning unmistakable rather than the plaything of variously interpreting minds. Now, punning would seem to be a paradoxical way of trying to establish the possibility that words have a substantiality independent of their temporal, communicative function. But the wordplay involving nota/re draws attention to the word as possessing the very characteristics that it signifies or points to, the auditory and musical, thus forming a perfect circle in which sound and meaning coincide. The line describing Geryon's wingless "flight" through the abyss brings out the "sensory component" in all language use:^[41] "Ella^[42] sen va notando lenta lenta" (XVII.115), which can be translated as "She goes swimming, singing, speaking, writing, taking note(s) slowly, slowly." The dense multiplicity of meaning combined with the fact that notando helps to enact what it means—the sound of speech, the rhythm, flow, and music of the line's note —all this tempts one to commit the "archetypal error," as de Man calls it, of confusing sign and substance.^[43]

If it is indeed an error, the temptation to commit it exists every-

[40] See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 63f. Todorov defines the fantastic as the realm where one hesitates between the real and the illusory or imaginary (pp. 24ff.).

[41] The phrase is taken from "The Rhetoric of Blindness," in de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 127.

[42] The grammatical androgyny of Geryon that this prominently placed pronoun (in apposition to fera ) suggests, is perhaps intended to underline her/his/its self-generative character.

[43] "The Rhetoric of Blindness," p. 136. The complete sentence reads: "The rhetorical character of literary language opens up the possibility of the archetypal error: the recurrent confusion of sign and substance."

where in the Comedy, which presents itself throughout its cantos and canticles as something sung and spoken and heard. As an example, there is the opening of Inferno XXI:

Così di ponte in ponte, altro  parlando
che la mia comedìa cantar  non cura
venimmo.

(Thus from bridge to bridge we came along,  talking  of
things of which my Comedy is not concerned to  sing .
                                                      [S; italics mine])

The magic in this particular web derives in part from its apparent casualness. Here is a conversation between two friends—which continues from canto to canto, bridges over silence—as something to be sung (or not), and also reported (to the reader) as if a conversation between friends were being resumed with the start of the new canto.

A different example. In Purgatorio XXX nota/re is used in a musical sense:

'l cantar di quei che notan  sempre
dietro a le note  de li etterni giri.
                                              (92–93)

(the song of those who ever  sing  in harmony with [i.e.,
following the notes  of] the eternal spheres.
                                  [S; italics and bracketed insertion mine])

The reference is to the song of angels, and it seems as though its link with the music of the spheres should give music a cosmic status and reality. But whether that is what happens remains an open question. Possibly even the note of the eternal spheres that the angels follow are no more than "Saussurian signifiers" that erase themselves the moment they have been sounded. And if that is true of them, how much more is it likely to be true of the "note de la mia comedìa" by which we heard the Poet swear. All merely play their momentary part in "a diachronic system of relationships,"^[44] the self-consuming artifact that is music.

[44] "The Rhetoric of Blindness," p. 131. The full sentence reads: "Like music, language is a diachronic system of relationships, the successive sequence of a narrative ." This essay, incidentally, is a critique of Derrida's critique of Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues (with a discussion of music)—a nice confirmation of Tambling's remarks in the quotation below.

Not being grounded in any substance, the musical sign can never have any assurance of existence. It can never be identical with itself or with prospective repetitions of itself, even if these future sounds possess the same physical properties of pitch and timbre as the present one.^[45]

The whole vast structure of the Comedy, then, has no more status than an evanescent sign? I think that the Geryon episode, though it also registers a demurrer against this idea, ultimately does confirm it, as well as the correctness of Tambling's conclusions in his commentary on Purgatory XXIV.52–54:

"Vo significando" suggests the sign-nature of writing; it can only point towards some reality; indeed the phrase implies the sense that there is only the Saussurian "signifier" here, which does not point to some final "signified," since all "signifieds" are themselves signifiers. Amor "ditta dentro": "ditta" may have the sense of "composes," "writes works of poetry," though it also means "speaks" simply, as at Purgatorio XIV.12. Dante frames words to set forth what that poem is: a poem signifies another poem; language points to more language, writing to more writing.^[46]

The finale of the Geryon episode illustrates this indefinite deferral of the signified by the abrupt disappearance of the beast itself. At the same time, in leaving a number of questions unresolved, suspended in the void, as it were, the disappearance of Geryon also suggests that there is no final answer to questions concerning the ontological status of the poet's language. By the time it has set Dante and Virgil down in the eighth circle, Geryon has undergone a transformation, though much of that transformation is the result of similes that place Geryon in a new light. Here is the account of Geryon's spiral descent for the landing:

Come 'l falcon ch'è stato assai su l'ali,
che sanza veder logoro o uccello
fa dire al falconiere "Omè, tu cali!"
discende lasso onde si mosse snello,
per cento rote, e da lunge si pone
dal suo maestro, disdegnoso e fello;
così ne puose al fondo Gerïone
al piè al piè della stagliata rocca,

[45] Ibid., p. 128; de Man is summarizing Rousseau's viewpoint, but it is clearly one he finds congenial.

[46] Tambling, Dante and Difference, pp. 99–100.

e, discarcate le nostre persone,
si dileguò come da corda cocca.
                                                     (127–36)

(Just as the falcon long upon the wing—
who, seeing neither lure nor bird, compels
the falconer to cry, "Ah me, you fall!"—
descends exhausted, in a hundred circles,
where he had once been swift, and sets himself,
embittered and enraged, far from his master;
such, at the bottom of the jagged rock,
was Geryon, when he had set us down.
And once our weight was lifted from his back,
he vanished like an arrow from a bow.)

These lines concluding the canto and the episode present a final variation of the Baudelairean themes with which we began our discussion. There is a fall, or the fear of it, and the doubling of the self that, according to Baudelaire, is a consequence of the fall. But here their order is reversed: falcon and falconer—like the horses and charioteer in the soul allegory of the Phaedrus^[47] —represent a more elaborate version of the animal-human duality we saw in the figure of Geryon, and this duality here precedes any notion of a fall. A second, more startling reversal involves the relationship between the two selves represented by falcon and falconer. In Baudelaire's scheme, the falling or fallen self is observed in his comic discomfiture by the other, philosophical self, the "disinterested spectator." But in this instance, the spectator self is in error, because the falcon is not falling at all, but only acting independently of the falconer's commands.^[48] Furthermore, the relative importance of the two selves is reversed: not only is the falconer mistaken in his observation, but the falcon, instead of being the comic butt or object, is presented as an autonomous subject justifiably enraged at his "master"—presumably for

[47] This image Dante may well have known indirectly, since in the Timæxus, which was known in the Middle Ages in Latin translation, Plato alludes to it when he has the Demiurge assign each soul to a star and "there placed them as in a chariot" (41E; Jowett trans.). Phaethon and Icarus are spectacular examples of falling and also remarkable parallels to the soul images of the Phaedrus, Icarus being like the winged soul, Phaethon the charioteer who loses control of the chariot (of the sun).

[48] In his note to Inf . XVII.128, Singleton points out that a "falcon is trained not to descend until it takes its quarry or is called down by the falconer, who whirls the lure ('logoro') about his head as a signal to recall it." Perhaps Virgil anticipates the falconer's gesture when he casts the cord-girdle-lure down the abyss.

keeping him up in the air so long. And the element of surprise does not end there, for it is in the falcon's bitter frame of mind—così —that Geryon sets down his passengers and abruptly vanishes. The reader hardly expected to get such an "inside" view of a monster earlier treated with contempt.

The simile may be taken as a commentary on the entire Geryon episode. At the philosophical level, it suggests an altogether different view of the "human image" discussed earlier, one in which the rational part does not simply control the animal part. The falcon, presumably the "animal" soul—though as winged creature it could just as well be more "spiritual" than the earthbound falconer—rebels against the idea of its purely instrumental function and asserts an independent will and dignity that the falconer has been unwilling or unable to recognize.

This brief analysis, and the fact that Geryon's state of mind parallels the falcon's, will already have suggested the direction in which the "textual" allegory will take us. As one who transports our two poets through the void, Geryon defines itself as a metaphor, derived from Greek metafora, which the Roman rhetoricians translated as translatio, the act of transporting or transferring. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, traditionally ascribed to Cicero and well known during the Middle Ages, defines the term as follows:

Translatio est cum verbum in quandam rem transferetur ex alia re, quod propter similitudinem recte videbitur posse transferri.^[49]

Metaphor occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another, because the similarity seems to justify this transference.

Metaphor, then, contains two members and an act of transfer from one, the "vehicle," to the other, the "tenor," which modern terms also neatly indicate the essentially instrumental view of the first member. Traditionally, too, the transfer within metaphor is regarded as "upward," raising the once humble signifier to a higher level. But in canto XVII that is reversed: Geryon takes its passengers down, effecting a translatio from a traditionally higher to a lower level, whether we want to define these as abstract and concrete, conceptual and literal, spiritual and physical. But this downward transfer is not a sign, as some commentators seem to believe, that the language of the Inferno is becoming increasingly "infernal," "dead,"

[49] XXXIV.45 in the Loeb Classical Library ed., trans. Harry Caplan, p. 342f.

and "petrified." The contrary seems to me true, and a further look at the falcon-falconer simile will provide at least the rationale for this viewpoint.

Like metaphor as traditionally understood, our simile contains two members, and its importance in this context is that it radically redefines their role and relative valuation. Falcon and falconer are connected not by similarity but by a certain functional interdependence; in this perspective, one cannot exist without the other, and the "transfer" that takes place between them is based on a mutual recognition of the other's being. Now, in the simile the falcon, like Geryon, descends —to earth—but, unlike Geryon, it does so of its own accord, and the falconer is led to the erroneous conclusion that it is falling ("Omè, tu cali!"). The falcon has demonstrated a volition and feelings of its own that the falconer has, for the moment, stupidly forgotten.

The conclusions to be drawn from the simile are obvious enough. In metaphor as in allegory—recall the argument once again of the Convivio —both members have equal dignity, and one must not be treated as mere "vehicle" for the other. And yet, in the final analysis, this proves to be an unrealizable ideal. Geryon may feel the bitterness the falcon feels for its maestro at the idea of having been used, of its dignity having been slighted. And this "proves," of course, that the beast, too, has its subjectivity—at least by reflection, as it were, from the falcon simile. But this subjectivity, the potential infinity of its meaning, would seem to be controlled by a superior force, an intention, that narrows it down to a determinate signification.

This is perfectly expressed in the canto's final simile describing Geryon's disappearance "come da corda cocca" ("like an arrow from the bowstring"). The image is a recurrent one in the Comedy and points to the inevitable instrumentality, goal-directedness, even of a poetic language. It also suggests that the rhythm of tension and the release of tension is a basic element in the Geryon episode and in the Comedy as a whole. I suspect we can even see it in the term corda, with which the episode begins and ends. At the beginning, the reader will recall, Virgil asks Dante to take off the corda tied around his middle (XVI.106), with which the Pilgrim had thought to catch the leopard with the painted hide (XVI.107–8). Now, as the beast returns to invisibility in the underworld like an arrow shot from a corda, it is the difference between the first and the second corda that is crucial. In the first instance it is a lure, allegorically speaking, for

the mind to relax and allow itself to be possessed by language, dream, unconsciousness. The second is the tension of the mind's bow when it has discovered its target, the novità that, without knowing it, it was aiming for. The conscious tension ("in-tension") followed by release is the very rhythm of speech utterance itself, as Virgil's "Homeric" address to the Pilgrim makes clear:

               "Scocco
l'arco del dir, che 'nfino al ferro hai tratto."
                                            ( Purg . XXV.17–18)

("Discharge the bow of your speech, which you have
drawn to the iron."[S])

And this same rhythm is anticipated on an unconscious level by the much earlier simile of

        one returning from the waves where he
went down to loose an anchor snagged upon
a reef or something else hid in the sea.
                                                        (XVI.133–35)

Just as the ship is first held back and can now continue on its way across "lo gran mar de l'essere" ("the mighty sea of being," Par . I.113), so the bow of the mind can shoot at the target that it has caught in its sight.

The process of writing the poem thus proves to be directly parallel to, if not identical with, the "process" (or progress) of the Comedy's otherworld pilgrimage. Imagistically, this is evident from Beatrice's speech in canto I of the Paradiso, about the divine order that makes the universe to be the likeness of God (103ff.) and where God, furthermore, is "the Archer who aims us at Himself":^[50]

La provedenza che cotanto assetta,
del suo lume fa 'l ciel sempre quïeto
nel qual si volge quel c'ha maggior fretta;
e ora li, come a sito decreto,
cen porta la virtù di quella corda
che ciò che scocca drizza in segno lieto.
                                                ( Par . I.121–27)

(The Providence that has arrayed all this
forever quiets—with Its light—that heaven
in which the swiftest of the spheres revolves;

[50] I am quoting from Singleton's note to ll. 125–26.

to there, as toward a destined place, we now
are carried by the power of the bow
that always aims its shaft at a glad mark.)

Finally, Geryon disappears after it has "discharged" the Pilgrim and Virgil: discarcate nostre persone . Without nostre persone, language, text returns to a dormant, unconscious state of mere potency. But there is more at stake in the phrase. The beast has "discharged" its passengers in the sense that they are, as I argued a moment ago, its metaphors, "creatures" produced by the text. But in the act of disburdening (carico, carco = "burden") itself of the two poets and vanishing, Geryon also establishes a further, crucial point: namely, that language and person are interdependent but also distinct. A person—nostra persona —is not (reducible to) a signifier or even a chain of signifiers but ultimately, from the textual perspective, something alien, unassimilable, a kind of burden. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that the concluding scene of canto XVII dramatizes a distinction that theoretically the poem, any poem, is incapable of making: the distinction between mere language, signifiers, images, and so forth, and characters who make or have some claim to being considered persons like ourselves (nostre persone ).

In the chapter on epic theater I develop this idea further, but meanwhile I propose the presence of a bilingual pun in the Geryon passage that, in my opinion, lends it further weight. I am thinking of Virgil's commands to the beast just before takeoff:

        "Gerïon, moviti omai:
le rote larghe, e lo scender sia poco:
pensa la nova soma  che tu hai."
                          (XVII.97–99; my italics)

        ("Geryon, move on now; let your circles be wide,
and your descending slow; remember the new  burden  that
you have."[S])

The italicized term, soma (= "burden"), I suggest, plays on St. Paul's term for the body, soma, as integral part of the human being, over against the body, sarx, as flesh, as that which is given over to mortality and opposed to spirit. This contrast comes out strongly in chapter 8 of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, where sarx is consistently associated with sin, and soma with its counterpart awaiting redemption. "For we know," writes Paul, "that the whole creation [omnis creatura ] groaneth and travaileth in pain until now."

And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body [tou somatos hemon ].
(Rom. 8.22–23)

Since it involves Greek, the reader may well consider the pun problematic. However, Dante repeatedly shows a knowledge of Greek terms, and since he obviously plays on the significance in Greek of the name Geryon, other Greek terms could well be lurking in its vicinity. And since my concern is with St. Paul's usage, the likelihood that Dante knew it seems that much greater. My suggestion, then, is that Virgil is advising Geryon not only of the new burden but also of the "new" body that is on its back. The reference to the Pilgrim's "new" body would then be in the nature of a prophecy that even at this stage of his pilgrimage is (gradually) being fulfilled.

There is another, more "textual" claim implied in Virgil's exclamation, I believe. It is that the Comedy represents a new departure in poetics by the fact that it places the nova soma, the glorified body, at the center of its project. In other words, not only does the Pilgrim experience the gradual redemption of his body as an integral part of his quest for "authenticity," but this same body is also integral to the human image that he seeks, is in fact the crucial element that various earlier definitions of that image have tended to slight. Poetically, we have seen, this body is impossible to represent, since it is that space where signifiers and their signified coincide, whereas the poetic text consists of signifiers that only point to other signifiers. The Dantean text by various means, as will be discussed further, attempts to "show" the absent body by creating precisely such "knots" as Geryon in its metaphoric structure through which a non-verbal, extratextual reality can make itself felt.

The disappearance of Geryon from the narrative, accordingly, does not mean that the "Geryon factor" disappears from the text. On the contrary, Geryon vanishes in one sense only so that it can reappear in countless guises, some of them more or less explicitly recalling the original image. One such is the figure of the Griffin, part eagle and part lion, that appears drawing the triumphal car in the procession through the Earthly Paradise in Purgatorio XXIX. 108ff.^[51] In

[51] It is, to say the least, intriguing that these composite creatures also have remarkably similar names: Gerion(e), Grifon, Chiron(e) (one of the Centaurs guarding the tyrants and murderers in the seventh circle; Inf . XII). Without being exactly a composite, the falcon so ubiquitous in the Comedy 's similes also seems to fit in here.

an article challenging the usual interpretation of the Griffin as representing the dual nature, divine and human, of Christ, Colin Hardie has argued that he is, rather, "a symbol of Dante's own nature restored,"^[52] and that when Dante sees the image of the Griffin in Beatrice's eyes (Purg . XXXI. 118–26) this anticipates the final vision in Paradiso XXXIII. Needless to say, this fits perfectly with the idea of the Pilgrim's quest and his concomitant evolution that I have been discussing. Instead of summarizing Hardie's argument, I will content myself with quoting from his article a provocative passage that is particularly germane to the thesis I am pursuing:

No longer is it the task of the rational soul to keep itself uncontaminated by bodily passions. The corruption of the spirit cannot be set right without restoring the vegetative and animal "souls" which it has infected, but on which it depends, and with which it must be linked again in harmony. Redemption does not descend from heaven to liberate the rational soul from its material embodiment; it comes up from under foot, from the antipodes, through matter and the body, through the vegetative and animal "souls" to the rational soul or spirit. Or, to express it otherwise, Dante must go down past the densest and most material centre of the earth (where the being, created most spiritual, Lucifer, is found to be lodged) to find the restoration of his vegetative and animal "Souls."
(Pp. 129–30)

By way of a concluding consideration of the Geryon episode I want to touch on yet another way in which it reflects the allegorical plot of the Comedy, particularly as it concerns the very idea of the spiritual journey or otherworld pilgrimage. My starting point again is the simile of the falcon and the falconer, a pair that clearly parallels the Pilgrim and Virgil (as well as Geryon and Virgil), Virgil being the maestro to the Pilgrim, as the falconer is to the falcon (see XVII.132). The simile, pointing to the analogy among the three, Dante, Geryon, and the embittered falcon, raises the question Is there reason to impute feelings of anger to the Pilgrim (as well as Geryon) even though the narrative gives no explicit indication of these? I think there is and suggest that it has to do with the fact, repeatedly emphasized in the Comedy, that Dante moves through

[52] "I.e., of his two 'Souls,' animal and spiritual, in close harmony"; cf. "The Symbol of the Gryphon in Purgatorio XXIX.108 and following Cantos," in Centenary Essays on Dante by Members of the Oxford Dante Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 123. For an account of the Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of the composite soul, see Statius's exposition at Purg . XXV. On the Griffin, see further Peter Armour, Dante's Griffin and the History of the World .

the otherworld in the flesh; that is to say, he still shares in "animal" nature even as he finds himself in a realm of spirits and guided by a spirit, in the first instance Virgil. The sense of exhaustion, anger, and sullenness that we impute to him via the falcon simile belongs to one who is nel mezzo del cammin through hell and asks himself what the point is of such an undertaking with its self-denial and highly uncertain goal.^[53] Is that fleshly existence in the here and now, however imperfect it might be by some standards, not its own justification and preferable to the arduous discipline of self-transformation of the pilgrimage, whose completion, furthermore, seems to be forever deferred?

The Pilgrim's dissatisfaction is surely in part directed at the Virgil who represents the spiritual, moral, and poetic authority imposing this painful quest. Contrariwise, the Pilgrim's identification with Geryon can be imagined, especially at that moment when the mental travelers dismount and the beast, relieved of its burden, vanishes and in so doing acts out the Pilgrim's own desire to escape, to have done with his ordeal. All this must be considered a kind of allegorical subtext, however. Overtly, the Pilgrim accepts that he is no (longer) Geryon and that he must continue his journey with its constant risks of falling, self-multiplication, and self-dispersal, because that, it is now abundantly clear, is the nature of the spiritual quest in the Comedy .

Turning from Dante's to Chaucer's epic pilgrimage, we are bound to be impressed by the contrasts between the two, contrasts that seemingly confirm the traditional notion of an allegorical Dante and a nonallegorical Chaucer. Chaucer's pilgrimage lacks virtually all the features we have associated with Dantean allegory. Instead of an otherworld and startling monsters, his pilgrims exist in a matter-of-fact here and now that the reader is inclined to accept as the real world. In spite of all that, I will argue that The Canterbury Tales has an "allegorical plot" comparable to that of the Comedy and that the two poems have a basically similar allegorical orientation.

At this point one may ask whether, quite aside from any allegorical

[53] Here is another way that the Geryon episode recapitulates the opening canto of the Inferno . An analogous situation occurs in canto 7, Book One, of The Faerie Queene, when the Redcross Knight, whose quest has more than a casual resemblance to that in the Comedy, sits down "in middest of the race" (stanza 5) and in a similar state of mind.

plot, The Canterbury Tales has any plot at all, any "action," in Aristotle's terms, that the poem as a whole "imitates" (Poetics VI.6). Criticism has certainly not been unanimous in its answer to that question. There is no problem, of course, with regard to individual tales or the pilgrimage "frame," whose plot begins clearly enough in Southwark and would presumably have come to some kind of conclusion, either in Canterbury or back in Southwark, had Chaucer lived long enough to complete his project. But what I am concerned with here is a plot, both in the common and in the allegorical sense, that encompasses both the tales and the frame, and there have in fact been some notable attempts to define such a plot, of which I single out two as especially relevant to my argument.

The first of these is Kittredge's idea that the tales function as dramatic utterances revealing the personality of their tellers. This combines pilgrimage frame and tales in one plot by making the narrators' dramatic self-display on the road to Canterbury a fundamental feature of the pilgrimage.^[54] Ralph Baldwin's The Unity of the "Canterbury Tales, " published forty years after Kittredge's book, considerably refined the latter's plot idea by insisting on the religious implications of the pilgrimage frame and attempting to see the tales as parts of a great morality drama in which the pilgrims grapple with questions affecting their salvation. Baldwin's thesis does involve some difficulties, among them the fact that not a few tales seem unconcerned with specifically religious problems, and it seems impossible, until we get to the Parson's Tale, to arrange the tales in a sequence, of increasing religious awareness, say, that would parallel (or indicate) the progress of the pilgrimage.

Some of these difficulties might disappear if we abandoned the idea of a linear plot and substituted for the drama of salvation on the road to Canterbury a slightly more philosophical one. What I am proposing is a roughly circular plot, like the labyrinth to which Donald Howard compares The Canterbury Tales,^[55] and like that of the philosophical symposium, in which each speaker takes up the same theme and in a sense starts anew even as he or she may also be responding to previous speakers. Though Chaucer would only have known of it indirectly through other people's works, I will take

[54] George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, ch. 5. Baldwin's book, mentioned in the next sentence, is vol. 5 of Anglistica (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1955).

[55] Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 327ff.

Plato's Symposium as the ideal type of the genre, in part because of its rather striking affinities with The Canterbury Tales .^[56] Both may be said to revolve around a basic if complex idea. In both the intellectual focus is bound up with a playfulness reflecting the festive sociability of the participants and an ironic awareness of the insufficiency of language to do what is expected of it. In both works, furthermore, an underlying "darker" purpose becomes apparent. At Agathon's house the various speeches in praise of Eros prove to be part of a theoretically endless debate—there is no concluding definitive speech, and the gathering dissolves in drunkenness—exemplifying the Socratic theme that real philosophy and life are coextensive, a quest in which every voice must be given a hearing. On the road to Canterbury a similar hidden agenda is revealed in the course of the tale-telling contest proposed by the Host.^[57] The first indication of it occurs when the Miller insists that he, and not the Monk, will tell a tale to "quite the Knyghtes tale" (I.3126f.), meaning he will not just "match" but also "challenge" the first tale with his own. The humble Miller is a "Socrates figure" of sorts, as I show in the next chapter, and he introduces the element of intellectual argument that will henceforth be a constant element in the tale-telling game. His impatience to tell his tale, furthermore, underscores the intimate connection between teller and tale that from now on as readers we take for granted, and it also expresses the dynamism of a narrative text that seems to be telling itself. The connection is a matter of

[56] There may be a reference to the Symposium in the F Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, 1. 526, "As telleth Agaton," since Plato's work was sometimes known as Agathon's Feast, and Macrobius calls it Agathonis Convivium (Saturnalia ii. 1); see notes ad loc. in Robinson and Benson editions of Chaucer. Alongside Rudolf Hirzel's monograph Der Dialog it would be good to have one on the symposium. William H. Stahl has pointed out the need for a study of the genre's development in antiquity, beginning with Plato and Xenophon and going up to Macrobius. See his Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, p. 26, n. 15. The later fate of the symposium as a genre would also be of great interest; for example, the title of Dante's Convivio clearly alludes to it. In the Etymologiae (XX.1.3) Isidore notes that "Convivium apud Graecos a conpotatione, apo tou potou . Apud nos vero a convictu rectius appellatur, vel quia vitae conlocutionem habet," "a feast among the Greeks is derived from drinking together, but among us it is more correctly so called from sociability or from what offers an occasion for conversation in life." Clearly the two etymologies are not mutually exclusive.

[57] Modern criticism is by no means unanimous, as Chaucer's contemporaries were, in calling Chaucer a philosophical poet. "Socratès plains de philosophie," Eustache Deschamps called him; Thomas Usk has Love refer to Chaucer as "Myne owne trewe servaunt, the noble philosophical poete in Englissh"; see J. A. Burrow, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Anthology, pp. 26–29.

personality, but that term is inseparable from intellectual conviction and belief, in short, from idea.^[58] Like the speeches in the Symposium, furthermore, the tales are not simply assertions but also questions, hypotheses awaiting confirmation, conjectures: "Let me see, is this what I really think? where I stand?"

The allegorical plot of The Canterbury Tales might, then, be described in the following manner. The tales represent recurrent occasions for the individual pilgrims to define a version or a view of the human image. If the pilgrims were actual persons, we could say they discover this image in relation to their own experience and existence. But since they are not, the readers must make the discovery for them, with the General Prologue portraits to guide them in each instance. In a sense, the reader becomes the pilgrim whose tale she is reading and finds in the tale reflections of the fictional identity that as reader she has temporarily adopted, reflections that clarify and also perhaps modify that identity.

It might be objected that "human image" is too broad and general a concept to describe the allegorical theme of a given work. Such an objection is not without force, but in the case of The Canterbury Tales the concept remains a useful one because there the large-scale philosophical and religious issues are at the same time particularized in minutely personal terms. The link remains intact between an objective and distanced, because narratively dramatized, reflection and existential anxieties. Like Socratic philosphy, furthermore, the quest for the human image is never finished. Dante, to be sure, concludes his Comedy by giving his Pilgrim a vision of just that image, but the image remains essentially undefined and undefinable, more like a moment of personal illumination pointing to possibilities of existence not yet realized. On a rather lesser scale, the tales of Canterbury, each from its particular perspective and informed by a particular eros, lead up to such a moment of illumination even as they contribute to a collective debate on the subject of nostra effige .

As in the Symposium, this debate, like the plot that it constitutes, is open-ended: there is always the possibility of another tale, as of additional pilgrims, like the Canon's Yeoman, and there is no final, definitive tale. Some commentators are inclined to see the Parson's Tale as at least a doctrinal summation of The Canterbury Tales, but

[58] Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin's observation that "the idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses"; see Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 88.

even if that idea were acceptable, and I don't think it is, Baldwin seems to me closer to the truth when he suggests that the Parson's sermon represents a transition from the fiction of The Canterbury Tales to the "real world" of Chaucer and his readers. It is not a tale in the way all the others are.^[59]

One tale does qualify, not indeed as the "definitive" tale, but as a veritable exemplum of the allegorical, tale-telling plot central to The Canterbury Tales . This is the Tale of Sir Thopas, which the pilgrim Chaucer tells in response to the Host's blunt question, "What man artow?" (VII.695). As I argued in the preceding chapter, the tale does represent an answer to that question; at the same time it embodies an "archetypal" pattern of action that has many of the basic ingredients once more of Dante's epic: the "knight" riding out into the forest that is always there as the scene of his adventures, and having to prove himself against a monster whose name may be Lucifer, Geryon, whatever. This knight is also a perfect fit for the poet leaving his world to conquer another, textual world so that he may find there the elf-queen of his dream vision. And ultimately the knight is or stands in for all tale-tellers with the urge to distance themselves from an everyday reality in order to discover possibilities ordinarily dismissed as the product of dreams and delusions.

Complementary to Thopas, there is preeminently one tale in which this "archetypal" pattern is itself subjected to ironic scrutiny. If in Thopas the emphasis falls on the second element in Aristotle's formula for plot, "the imitation of an action" (tes praxeos mimesis: Poetics VI.6), in the Nun's Priest's Tale the stress is all on the imitation, on the countless ways in which an action can be imitated, represented, reproduced, reinterpreted. The action is Chauntecleer's encounter with the Fox, another version of the giant who, in this case, to his loss, has only one head and one mouth. The encounter is first of all foreshadowed in a dream, and the significance of this dream, as of all dreams, is promptly subjected to a lengthy and inconclusive debate between the dreamer and his wife, recalling the opening of the House of Fame . The debate shows how verbalization becomes a goal in itself, displacing or replacing an extraverbal reality with which, in theory, it is attempting to deal. Thus the initial question of the truth-value of Chauntecleer's dream, and of dreams gen-

[59] See the entire Epilogue of Ralph Baldwin, The Unity of the "Canterbury Tales, " pp. 83ff.; also cf. the discussion of the Parson's Tale in Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 376ff.

erally, is by the end of this debate entirely replaced by the question of who will win the argument, which in turn comes to be seen as simply another skirmish in the interminable battle between the sexes.^[60] The debate, then, parallels the tale's mock-epic style, which constantly displaces or veils the action and its agents with a cloud of incongruous analogues suggesting that everything is already in the realm of imitation.

The Nun's Priest's Tale thus turns into a vast comedy of verbalism, of the inability of people—and animals—to stop talking, their insistence on giving an account of themselves and of what they know. Taking the verbal for the real, the tale-telling animal constantly betrays and deceives itself and yet, for all that, manages, for the most part, to survive and at times even to prosper. It is not just that in telling their stories the pilgrims imitate the same fundamental pattern of "action"; even their way of imitating it and the conclusions they might draw from it, the Nun's Priest's Tale seems to say, have already been anticipated by earlier generations. There is nothing new under the sun. The Nun's Priest's Tale thus hovers over all the Canterbury Tales as a kind of mocking critique or response to each of them, and as a commentary on the entire tale-telling game. I suggest that the tale somehow stands apart from the others, and one symbolic indication of that is perhaps the fact that it is the only tale that does not have a visualized narrator. The Nun's Priest is only mentioned in the General Prologue as one, or one of three, accompanying the Prioress, with not a word of description. It is of course possible that Chaucer planned to add a portrait at some later stage of revision,^[61] but as it is, the tale is like Ariel's music, "play'd by the picture of Nobody" (Tempest III.iii.127). As the very spirit of the allegorical plot, this narrator-pilgrim is entirely displaced by his verbal double, the tale. And this is a perfect instance of the way speaking and writing constantly impose themselves as something separate from speakers and writers, as a disembodied world of "spirit" or "intellect." The narrator of the Nun's Priest's Tale, in other words,

[60] For all the energy expended by the disputants and the importance they attach to their respective points of view, the debate also has no discernible effect on their subsequent practical conduct. Similarly, the Fox tempts Chauntecleer by making the latter's singing ability an essentially theoretical or academic problem, to which the cock responds with an equally "academic" demonstration. It should be noted that the Nun's Priest's Tale itself, though it appears to be "above the battle," could easily be viewed as the Priest's attempt to settle various (unspecified) scores with the Prioress.

[61] For this assumption, see Derek Pearsall, ed., The Nun's Priest's Tale, p. 135f.

is like Geryon, a tale telling itself, a bodiless voice (gerus ) speaking (geruon ) itself.

Or so it might seem, were it not for the fact that in the end-link of his tale the narrator is "unmasked" as very much an embodied spirit—even if we are not sure just exactly what his body looks like—when the Host addresses him:

"I-blessed be thy breche, and every stoon!
This was a murie tale of Chauntecleer.
But by my trouthe, if thou were seculer,
Thou woldest ben a trede-foul aright.
For if thou have corage as thou hast myght,
Thee were nede of hennes, as I wene,
Ya, moo than seven tymes seventene.
See, whiche braunes hath this gentil preest,
So grete a nekke, and swich a large breest!
He loketh as a sperhauk with his yen;
Him nedeth nat his colour for to dyen
With brasile ne with greyn of Portyngale."
                                                            (3447–59)

The Host's remarks are so similar to his earlier ones to the Monk (VII.1934ff.) that it is difficult to know whether to take them literally or ironically. One could of course resort to the frequent editorial device of suggesting that the lines were meant to be canceled,^[62] but they are obviously important to my argument in that they draw attention to the Priest's unmistakable physicality, be it impressive or pitiful, and in any case the reference to the hawklike eyes seems quite unambiguous.

There is another, more thematic reason for not regarding the Nun's Priest's Tale as a tale that tells itself. When the barnyard animals speak, and in the mode of the mock epic, the resultant incongruities serve to draw special attention to the fact that language is always the utterance of a speaker, whose needs and desires as a physical organism it expresses, and that all kinds of "category mistakes" result as soon as we forget this fact and treat a verbal utterance as a reality unto itself. The reader is kept aware of the speakers as physical organisms in the Nun's Priest's Tale, not least because the tale inverts the allegory and the anthropomorphism of the beast fable genre and insists that it is concerned with a literal barnyard. This is evident from the opening twenty-nine lines, which make up a kind

[62] For a brief discussion of this, see the Riverside edition, p. 941.

of prologue and together with the brief epilogue (3438–46) provide a more or less realistic frame for the fable itself, rather like the frame of The Canterbury Tales with its General Prologue and pilgrimage links. In the context of the "prologue," Chauntecleer, Pertelote, and the others are no mere tropes, and even the fact that they have personal names is wittily prepared for by the fact that the widow in whose barnyard the action takes place, remains, like her two daughters, anonymous, whereas her sheep is known as Malle (2831).^[63]

After the down-to-earth presentation of the setting, the narrative takes off with a highly allusive description of the protagonist and his seven wives. No device is spared to humanize and heroicize them, including the ability to speak a high-flown language: "For thilke tyme, as I have understonde, / Beestes and briddes koude speke and synge" (4070f.). "Frame" and "tale" thus pull in opposite directions, the style of the first insisting that this is a tale "of a fox, or of a cok and hen" (3439) in an actual farmyard, the style of the second saying it is about anything—and everything—but that. And in the brief epilogue the Nun's Priest addresses his audience:

         "But ye that holden this tale a folye,
As of a fox, or of a cok and hen,
Taketh the moralite, goode men.
For Seint Paul seith that all that writen is,
To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis;
Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille."
                                                          (3438–43)

His words draw on a long tradition of medieval allegory and biblical hermeneutics, some of which I discussed earlier in this chapter.^[64] Nonetheless, it is clear that they contain a trap for even the wariest reader, because to recognize the trap is not necessarily to avoid it. E. T. Donaldson, for example, has written that "the real moral of the tale is in the chaff—the rhetorical amplifications which make of Chauntecleer a good representative of western man trying to maintain his precarious dignity in the face of a universe and of a basic

[63] Near the end of the tale, when the widow and her daughters reenter in pursuit of the Fox, there is a brief return to the stylistic level of the opening lines, but with a sudden wrenching twist in the simile of Jack Straw and the killing of the Flemings (3394–96).

[64] This whole matter is conveniently summarized by Pearsall in The Nun's Priest's Tale, p. 256f., nn. to ll. 4631 and 4633, where he cites the relevant ancient and modern authorities.

avian (or human) nature which fail to cooperate with him."^[65] Even allowing for the fact that every commentary necessarily abstracts from the text, is Donaldson's not a statement of the tale's "moralite," if a considerably more sophisticated one than that proffered by the Nun's Priest himself? In making this a story about "western man," Donaldson would seem to have aligned himself with the "goode men" who regard as "a folye" the tale itself "as of a fox, or of a cok and hen."

Naturally, I am not saying that Donaldson's allegorical reading is wrong, or even that any commentary can escape the dichotomies that lurk like land mines in the Nun's Priest's epilogue. These are an integral part of Western thinking, and particularly of the allegorical "habit of mind." However, in the perspective of the Nun's Priest's beast fable, this habit of mind must be seen, like the urge to anthropomorphize, as an act of intellectual aggrandizement by which mankind lays claim to special domains of meaning as marks of its uniqueness and superiority to the other animals.

The tale, then, does not reject allegory but in the spirit of the Convivio keeps allegory dependent on the primary, literal level. And this means that for all their humanoid characteristics the animals must in the first instance be taken literally as animals. This point gains added significance in light of the many-leveled attack, in the tale, on the idea of human uniqueness and superiority in the scheme of creation. First, the claim to uniqueness on the basis of superior physical or mental endowment is disposed of by showing the barnyard animals, particularly Chauntecleer, to be endowed by birth with qualities and skills, like sexual vitality, the ability to fly, and astronomical knowledge, that would be the envy of most human beings. Second, in the sphere of practical intelligence, both Fox and Cock show that they are at least the equals of human beings. Having fallen victim to his own pretensions and the wiles of the Fox, Chauntecleer saves himself by his presence of mind. Both he and the Fox also promptly learn from their mistakes. By contrast, the Nun's Priest's mock-epic similes serve as insistent reminders of the fatal penchant of human beings for repeating rather than profiting from the disasters of history. Perhaps the most shocking of these reminders occurs in the simile comparing the people and dogs running after the Fox to "Jakke Straw and his meynee / . . . / Whan that they wolden any

[65] Cited by Pearsall, Nun's Priest's Tale, p. 257.

Fleming kille" (3394–96). This, the sole reference to contemporary history in The Canterbury Tales —which in this respect could not be more different from the Comedy —also involves what earlier I called a "category mistake," that is to say, a mistake produced by reliance on words and abstract logic as indices of the real. Flemings living in London were indeed killed during the so-called Peasants' Revolt (1381), in which Jack Straw was a leader. But they were in no sense the real target or cause of the rebellion. The error, therefore, in this case, I presume, lies in the equation of relatively well-to-do outsiders with the "enemy."^[66] Finding the enemy, or cause of one's problems, in the wrong places, however, is a recurrent one in history.

Finally, there are the theological reasons for considering man a unique creature, like the idea that he is imago Dei, the likeness of God.^[67] It is here, as we would expect from a sprightly priest, that the tale develops its most exuberantly comic allegory. The allegory involves Chauntecleer in a multiple and complex imitatio Christi, one of whose immediate purposes would seem to be, precisely, to demonstrate that the animal creation, too, is imago as well as similitudo Dei, so that here again, even in the theological realm, man's claim to uniqueness becomes questionable.^[68]

His encounter with the Fox shows Chauntecleer in a twofold "imitation of Christ," suffering a kind of crucifixion in the Fox's mouth and achieving a triumphant resurrection with his flight up the tree.^[69] The cabbage patch is at the same time the scene of Chaun-

[66] A related category mistake occurs a little earlier in the tale when Chauntecleer first sees the Fox: "up he sterte / As man that was affrayed in his herte. / For natureelly a beest desireth flee / Fro his contrarie, if he may it see, / Though he never erst hadde seyn it with his ye" (3277–81; my italics). The logical idea that "beasts" have "contraries" from which they "naturally" flee is certainly put in doubt by the context.

[67] The basic text here is Genesis 1.26, "And God said, Let us make man in our image [imago ], after our likeness [similitudo ]: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." For a useful discussion of medieval ideas about man's uniqueness and centrality in the creation, see Marian Kurdzialek, "Der Mensch als Abbild des Kosmos," pp. 37–75.

[68] The biblical parallels I will discuss as the basis of the Nun's Priest's allegory have all been pointed out in Chaucer criticism of the last few decades, but they have for the most part been treated as a kind of solemn supplement rather than as a vital part of the tale's comedy. I will cite the chief articles on this topic but will not attempt to give precise credit for every detail to the authors concerned. The most comprehensive treatment is that of Bernard S. Levy and George R. Adams, "Chauntecleer's Paradise Lost and Regained," which reviews earlier discussions and adds significant new details.

[69] The scene takes place on a Friday (3341–54) in spring (3187ff.), presumablyMay 3, around Easter. The Fox was earlier compared to "Scariot" (3227), and the pursuers yell "Harro!" (3380). All this is most fully discussed by Levy and Adams, pp. 182ff. Once started, there is no theoretical limit to the possibilities of allegorical exegesis. The reader will have to decide what he considers plausible, relevant, and illuminating. The widow with her dairy farm, for instance, could be seen as a symbol of the Church, which is frequently represented as a widow. The point is made by M. J. Donovan, "The Moralite of the Nun's Priest's Sermon," p. 505, and following him, by C. R. Dahlberg, "Chaucer's Cock and Fox," JEGP 53 (1954): 277–90, who cites, among others, Augustine (285, n. 43). It seems to me perfectly relevant, but it also leads to considerations that go beyond my concern with the allegorical theme of the human image.

tecleer's "temptation in the wilderness," where the Fox challenges him: "Lat se, konne ye youre fader countrefete?" (3321), as Satan did when he challenged Jesus to demonstrate his godhead by casting himself down from the pinnacle of the temple (Luke 4.9; Matthew 4.6). Chauntecleer, of course, succumbs to the flattering temptation of the Fox when he stands on tiptoe, closes his eyes, and crows. But if his imitation of Christ is thus imperfect, his presence of mind, as we have seen, nonetheless rescues him from the Fox's satanic jaws in a happy ending that combines the Easter story and the Temptation in the Wilderness story in a way that theologically foreshadows Milton's Paradise Regained .

After his resurrection Christ commanded his disciples, "Praedicate omni creature" ("Preach the gospel to every creature," Mark 16.15), a theme developed by Paul in his Letter to the Romans:

Nam exspectatio creaturae revelationem filiorum Dei exspectat. Vanitati enim creatura subjecta est non volens, sed propter eum, qui subjecit eam in spe. Quia et ipsa creatura liberabitur a servitute corruptionis in libertatem gloriae filiorum Dei. Scimus enim, quod omnis creatura ingemiscit et parturit usque adhuc. Non solum autem illa, sed et nos ipsi primitias spiritus habentes et ipsi intra nos gemimus, adoptionem filiorum Dei exspectantes, redemptionem corporis nostri. Spe enim salvi facti sumus. Spes, autem, quae videtur, non est spes; nam quod videt quis, quid sperat? Si autem quod non videmus speramus, per patientiam exspectamus.
(Ep. ad Romanos 8.19–25)

(For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to the vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we

ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope; for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for what we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.)

The phrase omnis creatura in both Mark's gospel and the Letter to the Romans clearly refers to the whole of (nonhuman) creation, though some later theologians interpreted it as referring to man the microcosm or image of the entire creation.^[70] Gospel and Letter imply that the extrahuman creation imitates or participates in the redemptive history initiated by Christ,^[71] and thus gives biblical authority of a sort to the Nun's Priest's theological allegory that we have been discussing. Equally important, however, in this connection, seems to me the way Paul in the Letter to the Romans links the yearning of omnis creatura for "the glorious liberty of the children of God" with "the redemption of the [human] body." Paul's text raises the (allegorical) possibility that "seeing" Chauntecleer in his natural, unconscious, nonmiraculous imitatio Christi, the reader recognizes him as a sign of his own redeemed body and physical nature. What for Paul, in other words, was still in the realm of hope and patient waiting, for the fourteenth-century Christian, according to the Nun's Priest's Tale, is an accomplished, "visible" reality.

In this sense, the Nun's Priest's Tale may reasonably be regarded as an Aesopian "divine comedy" whose mode or spiritual climate is that of the Comedy, as our earlier discussion of the redeemed body in connection with Geryon suggests. The Purgatorio, particularly the final cantos set in the Earthly Paradise, seems to me to come closest in its spiritual climate to the tale. Chauntecleer is a Dantean Adam or Everyman, Pertelote his Eve and Beatrice. His dream (2896–2907) recapitulates some features of the opening canto of the Inferno . Instead of Dante's three beasts, Chauntecleer sees only one, but the fear aroused by the vision still haunts him in the telling of it (2906), as it does Dante (Inf . I.6). Chauntecleer's is explicitly a dream or nightmare vision, whereas Dante only hints that his otherworld experience begins with a dream in the selva oscura (Inf . I.10–11). The dream of the Fox, then, is Chauntecleer's "Inferno" actualized when he finds himself in the "foul prisoun" (2897) of the Fox's mouth. His escape by flight to the treetop takes him back to

[70] See Marian Kurdzialek, "Der Mensch als Abbild des Kosmos," pp. 37–75.

[71] It was presumably to avoid this conclusion that some theologians read omnis creatura as referring to man; see article cited in n. 70.

his earthly paradise, which is of course the barnyard itself (I will have more to say about the tree in a moment). The fact that this escape is not due to any divine intervention, but represents Chauntecleer's own intellectual triumph,^[72] fits in well with what Kantorowicz has called Dante's secularized Adam-theology. Kantorowicz discusses this concept in reference to the dual-paradise passage of De Monarchia III.xvi and the scene in the Purgatorio where the pilgrim at length reaches the Earthly Paradise and Virgil, who has been his guide, proceeds to "crown" and "mitre" him over himself ("te sovra te corono e mitro," Purg . XXVII.142) in token of his having recovered Adam's sinless prelapsarian state.

It was left to Dante to re-"humanize" the idea of a recovery of Adam's original nature and again to release the "human" from the Christian aggregate of thought. For as a consequence of his philosophy of dualities or of his concept of perfection in both a terrestrial and celestial paradise, it was probably unavoidable to "secularize" also the current Adam-theology and build up a doctrine of a purely human regeneration which was not identical with the doctrine of Christian regeneration—though the one need not contradict the other.^[73]

We are at a point in our discussion of the Nun's Priest's Tale where it seems safe to conclude that the tale is indeed, at the level of its theological allegory, a summation of the debate about the human image that, I have suggested, constitutes the real plot of The Canterbury Tales . The human image is the biblical imago Dei, but in the perspective of the Nun's Priest's Tale it is no longer the exclusive possession of humankind but belongs instead to the entire creation, which since the Incarnation is fully redeemed and thus capable, in Dante's words, of achieving "beatitudinem . . . vite, que in operatione proprie virtutis consistit et per terrestrem paradisum figuratur" ("the blessedness . . . of this life, which consists in the exercise of his proper power and is figured by the terrestrial paradise," De Monarchia III.xvi.7 [Temple Classics ed., p. 277]). This passage refers of course to a specifically human "blessedness," but in the context of the Nun's Priest's animal fable, this secular blessedness is legitimately an attribute of the animal world as well, so that, as I have argued, human beings can look to the barnyard as a manifestation of their own redeemed nature. This is not to say, as the fable

[72] Note a further parallel: each hero bears the poet's name, CHAUnteCleER twice, since this name also means "the clear or famous singer."

[73] Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 484.

makes clear, that moral and metaphysical problems have disappeared, only that, as our discussion of Geryon indicated, there are no longer any obstacles requiring supernatural intervention to the exercise of human virtue.

As further confirmation of the general thesis I have been arguing, namely, that for the Nun's Priest the Christian redemption has been definitive, let us consider a central allegorical symbol in the tale. I refer to the tree to which, as we have observed, Chauntecleer flies (3417). The tree, which means life in a specific sense for Chauntecleer, has been prepared for, "planted" in the text. In the argument about dreams, Chauntecleer cites Croesus's dream:

Mette he nat that he sat upon a tree,
Which signified he sholde anhanged be?
                                                       (3139–40)

The same dream is described in the last of the "tragedies" the Monk tells just before the Nun's Priest tells his tale. His daughter Phania expounds Croesus's dream for him and tells him that the tree "the galwes is to meene" (2751) and that "thou shal anhanged be, fader, certeyn" (2755). The Monk's Tale ends significantly on this note of Croesus about to be hanged on the gallows tree, because it reminds the audience of Christ's death on the cross. But the Nun's Priest echoes this episode to give new life, as it were, to the familiar topos of medieval iconography and homiletics, in which the gallows crucifix is identified with the Tree of Life (Genesis 2.8), by suggesting that the crucifix has disappeared or been transformed into the Tree of Life, meaning that the sacrifice on the cross has redeemed the promise of "eternal" life contained in the Tree. Support for this idea is provided by the fact that the tree on which, according to Chauntecleer, Croesus dreamed he sat—like a bird!—is imagistically and etymologically related to the "bemes" (2942) or "beem" (3127) on which Chauntecleer sat when he had his dream and which at night he finds too narrow a perch on which to ride Pertelote (3167–69).

In the imagery of tree, gallows, and chicken perch, then, we see a specific instance of what the Nun's Priest's Tale's allegory projects: the reconciliation of natural and supernatural, animal and human, creature and creator. And in this connection I will cite one final illustrative detail, involving wordplay that supports this allegorical theme. Chauntecleer, we are told, is an instinctive "keeper" of solar time:

Wel sikerer was his crowyng in his logge
Than is a clokke or any abbey orlogge.
By nature he knew ech ascencioun
Of the equinoxial in thilke toun;
For whan degrees fiftene weren ascended,
Thanne crew he, that it myghte nat been amended.
                                                                     (2853–58)^[74]

And later, as part of her medical advice to Chauntecleer, Pertelote tells him: "Ware the sonne in his ascencioun" (2956). In both passages, ascencioun refers literally to "the increasing elevation of the sun in the heavens between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice" (OED s.v. 3), yet once we are aware of the theological overtones that the narrative constantly generates, it is difficult indeed to exclude another meaning of ascencioun, "the ascent of Jesus Christ to heaven on the fortieth day after His resurrection" (OED s.v. 2, attested as early as 1315). Through this wordplay, the Son's miraculous ascencioun is made as natural as the sun's daily ascencioun celebrated by the cock's hourly crowing. Christ, we might say, is in his heaven, but his splendor is here in the world for all to see and feel. And if human beings nonetheless fail to see and feel it, the Nun's Priest may be saying, let them look to the world quite literally at their feet. Indeed, in his "epilogue" he once more wittily indicates that it is the animals that know by instinct what human beings learn, if at all, by constant study and admonition. "Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille" (3433), he tells his audience, and his wording coyly avoids making the point too obvious: barnyard fowl do not need to be told to differentiate between "corn" and "chaff," since their lives depend on it.^[75]

[74] Chauntecleer's musical and astronomical skills make him a kind of seriocomic foreshadowing of Cusanus's ideas about man as the created being who, through the power of Christ, "completes" or "actualizes" the cosmos. Here is how Kurdzialek describes Cusanus's conception:

In ihm [i.e., man] erreicht nämlich "omnis creatura" die Fülle der Vollkommenheit. Dem Menschen ist somit nichts fremd, weder der Himmel noch die Erde. Indem er das alles vereinigt und harmonisiert, was in ihm ist, findet er in sich Prinzipien der Mathematik, Astronomie und Musik vor. Er findet sie vor und verwirklicht den Kosmos. ("Der Mensch als Abbild des Kosmos," p. 74)

[75] My reading of the Nun's Priest's Tale does not pretend to be exhaustive or definitive. I have avoided more ironic readings, which tend to make the tale more a defense than a critique of medieval "orthodoxy." For an interesting example, see Judson B. Allen, "The Ironic Fruyt: Chauntecleer as Figura." By the logic of my argument about Chaucer's (Dantean) allegory, such readings are of course entirely legitimate.

Earlier I stated that the Nun's Priest's Tale is also peculiarly the one tale that can serve as a more or less direct critique of every other tale in The Canterbury Tales . Perhaps we can now see rather more clearly why this is so. As in the matter of the theatrical principle, the tale stands somewhat apart from the others in relation to the theme of the human image. Its animal protagonists, as I have argued, subvert the notion of a distinctly human image and of the imago Dei as an exclusively human characteristic or prerogative. And even as it thus redefines and expands the idea of the (human) self in some unexpected and in some ways unimagined directions, it also presents an unorthodox vision of history in which the physical world with its bodies and their recurrent rhythms, rather than a spiritual principle with its desire for transcendence, plays a central role. And what is true of the idea of history applies equally to the idea of story. Like other stories, to be sure, this one presents itself as an "aventure" (cf. 3185), a going out into as yet uncharted space, but that turns out to be largely an illusion. Once defined at the start, the spatio-temporal boundaries of the Nun's Priest's Tale prove to be firmly fixed and are never really crossed. The narrator, to be sure, ranges over history and geography to "illustrate" his fable, but all that heterogeneous matter merely serves to enhance our idea of the archetypal "cosmogonic" theater,^[76] the barnyard on that morning in the (thirty-two days after the) "month in which the world bigan" (3187).^[77] In the Nun's Priest's Tale all time is contained in the cosmogonic Now.

To conclude discussion of this tale I examine in some detail its relationship to one other, and that perhaps the most obvious, since at least in name the Nun's Priest is defined by his relationship to the Prioress. Her tale is also of a widow, though this one lives in an Asian city and has a son who is murdered by Jews, rather than of a barnyard cock who is almost murdered by a fox. Her tale is classed as a Miracle of the Virgin, since through his devotion to her the murdered boy continues to sing in praise of her. (Chauntecleer nearly loses his life when he sings for the fox.) But the boy's murder also

[76] The yard "enclosed al aboute / With stikkes, and dry dich withoute" (2847–48) would seem to be a parody of the traditional cosmos surrounded by the river Oceanus, and it also recalls the "noble theatre" of the Knight's Tale, "walled al of stoon, and dyched al withoute" (1888).

[77] The text is corrupt in this passage, and I accept the usual emendation by which the action takes place on May 3. Nonetheless, the cosmogonic reference is obviously significant.

involves once again the idea of an imitatio Christi, a point underscored by the Prioress when she alludes to Hugh of Lincoln (VII.684ff.), another boy said to have been literally crucified by Jews in 1255. But the "resurrection" of the Prioress's "litel clergeon" (503) is a curiously muted affair, almost, one gets the impression, of hastily altered funeral arrangements. First, the murdered and still singing boy is rushed to burial by the monks of the local abbey. Then, after the abbot has removed the "greyn" from the boy's tongue, so that he finally dies, the monks suddenly

    tooken awey this martir from his beere;
And in a tombe of marbul stones cleere
Enclosen they this litel body sweete.
Ther he is now, God leve us for to meete!
                                                          (680–83)

That Ther of the last line is surely designed to confuse the reader, momentarily leading him to identify the marble tomb with heaven and, just as troubling, insinuating that the "litel body sweete" endures because it is enclosed by marble stones. For the Prioress, indeed, flesh and blood seem best when transformed into a marblelike hardness: "This gemme of chastite, this emeraude, / And eek of martirdom the ruby bright" (609), she earlier called the seven-year-old. And her narrative engenders the sense of a morbid physicality—the boy's murder, his gradual death, the drawing and hanging of the Jews—quite at odds with the ostensible purpose of celebrating a triumph of faith in the Virgin and her Son.

Another way of stating this point would be to say that for the Prioress the Christ event has not meant the redemption of the world and the flesh, which remain essentially still in the power of "oure firste foo, the serpent Sathanas, / That hath in Jues herte his waspes nest" (558f.). If is this point to which the Nun's Priest opposes his Easter allegory of the cock who would not die, and which turns the contrasts between the two tales into opposing arguments in the allegorical debate.^[78] As an example, let us look at the protagonists of these tales. The Prioress's schoolboy is a sexual and intellectual innocent, singing, even with his throat cut, the hymn whose Latin

[78] In "Definition by Comparison: Chaucer and Lawrence," Milton Miller suggests a parallel between Chauntecleer and the cock in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Man Who Died ; see Charles A. Owen, Jr., ed., Discussions of the Canterbury Tales, pp. 90–94.

words he does not understand. The Nun's Priest's cock is an intellectual who jokes in Latin, keeps seven wives sexually content, likes to sing pop tunes (2879), but also learns that there are times when singing is less than appropriate, when it is better to keep one's mouth shut (and eyes open). Then there is the law of vengeance. In the Prioress's Tale this law is conspicuously not abrogated, as witness the unspeakable collective punishment of the Jews. In the Nun's Priest's Tale we hear nothing of any vengeance being carried out against the satanic fox. The people and dogs running after the fox are, however, compared to "Jakke Straw and his meynee / . . . / Whan that they wolden any Fleming kille" (3394–96). The simile, as we saw earlier, bears, not on the peasants' justified anger at the thieving and murderous fox, but on the blind murderousness that can overtake a mob and that so often in history is directed at blameless outsiders. In that last respect the simile might well glance at the treatment meted out to the Jews in the Prioress's Tale. And it demonstrates at the same time that the Nun's Priest is not blind to this side of human nature and society, but also does not allow it to dim his vision of the creation as in the image of God.

In this chapter I have argued that Dante had a theory of allegory, much of which he put into practice in the Comedy, and that Chaucer, whether he was acquainted with the Convivio and the Letter to Can Grande or not, understood the basic points of Dante's theory and incorporated them into his design of The Canterbury Tales . I now briefly recapitulate what I consider to be the basic principles of Dantean allegory as I have tried to define them so far.

The first principle is, naturally, the fundamental importance of the literal level and its corollary, that any allegorical meanings must spring from the literal. To put the matter in the form of a maxim, allegory must not ob-litera-te the text, that is, "destroy . . . all trace, indication, or significance" of the lit(t)era of the story (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, s.v., obliterate ). The literal story is a mimesis of a hypothetical world and a hypothetical existence, and, so our second principle goes, as such provides the indispensable context in which the allegorical meaning is to be understood. The third principle is that there can be no perfect correlation between literal and allegorical meaning and that instead there will always be unresolvable differences between them, so that allegory will, from this standpoint alone, appear as something unclear, mysterious, a

"dark conceit," as Spenser calls it in his Letter to Raleigh. Surely one of the best symbols we have of Dantean allegory is the Dragon of Error at the very beginning of Spenser's Faerie Queene, because it represents so perfectly, and paradoxically, an insight into the many kinds of error that beset any attempt at allegorical interpretation. Redcrosse's problems, and errors, really begin after he has dispatched this particular dragon, and so it is with the reader who believes he has discovered the perfect key to the allegory. None of the Comedy lends itself to straightforward conversion or translation from one type of discourse to another. As an example, the basic premise that physical states stand for spiritual ones proves impossible to maintain with absolute consistency or precision and thus in its own way demonstrates that the physical realm is not clearly delimited from the spiritual and that the relation between the two is an enigma without a solution. The repeated stress, furthermore, in the Comedy, on the concrete physicality of the pilgrim Dante amidst the insubstantial shades of the otherworld is itself a reminder of the inevitable inconsistency of the allegory as well as a warning to the reader that the narrative must never be dissolved or ob-litera-ted into mere metaphor. Paul de Man has emphasized the need to keep the distinction between literal and metaphoric (or figural, as he prefers to call it) in mind, in a passage that reads like a perfect gloss on Dante's discussion of allegory:

Even if, as is often said to be the case for poetic language, the figure is polysemous and engenders several meanings, some of which may even be contradictory to each other, the large subdivision between literal and figurative still prevails. Any reading always involves a choice between signification and symbolization, and this choice can be made only if one postulates the possibility of distinguishing the literal and figural. This decision is not arbitrary, since it is based on a variety of textual and contextual factors (grammar, lexicology, tradition, usage, tone, declarative statement, diacritical marks, etc.). But the necessity of making such a decision cannot be avoided or the entire order of discourse would collapse. The situation implies that figural discourse is always understood in contradistinction to a form of discourse that would not be figural; it postulates, in other words, the possibility of referential meaning as the telos of all language. It would be quite foolish to assume that one can lightheartedly move away from the constraint of referential meaning.^[79]

[79] Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 201. The general distinction de Man makes between "grammar" and "rhetoric" is also of obvious relevance to Dante's literal-allegorical distinction; see "Semiology and Rhetoric," ch. 1 in Allegories of Reading .

What interests us in this statement is of course not just the importance of the distinction between literal and metaphoric, but also the difficulty, often, of making the distinction and of maintaining it. In The Canterbury Tales there is not the same temptation to "move away from the constraint of referential meaning" that there is in the Comedy . But as our discussion of the Nun's Priest's Tale has tried to indicate, there is the same need to distinguish between literal and allegorical. Indeed, as we shall see, there are occasions in the Tales when the reader is confronted with a kind of "allegorical crisis," the dilemma or necessity of deciding between a literal and a metaphoric reading. And the fact that this problem is left to the reader to resolve is directly connected to our fourth and final feature, rather than principle, in this case, of Dantean allegory, namely, the absence of a formal metaphysical or theological framework that would direct the flow of allegorical meaning and establish a hierarchy of relationships between literal and metaphoric, physical and spiritual, and so forth.

The absence of such a metaphysical framework in the Comedy is signaled in part by the fact, noted earlier, that in place of personifications like Philosophia and Natura of earlier allegories, Dante puts "concrete personalities" (Piehler). This does not mean that the reader is deprived of all guidance regarding the allegorical interpretation, to be sure. What it does mean, rather, is that the interpretive authority is no longer concentrated in one source but is now diffused among a whole series of more or less problematic figures, allowing for what, borrowing a phrase from Kenneth Gross, I would call the "allegorical struggle,"^[80] that is, the clash, without resolution, of different philosophical perspectives. In the Comedy, in other words, there is not a complete absence of allegorical authority, but a situation in which any "authority figure" will be perceived as historically determined, partial, relative, fallible, because he or she—I am speaking of Virgil, Cato, Statius, Beatrice, and others, though the situation with respect to the figures of the Paradiso is not fundamentally different—possesses no institutional authority and derives his or her special status largely from a personal relationship to the poet-pilgrim. This is not to say that they are a pure "Thou" to his "I"; they do have an independent status, whether as epic poet or hero of political

[80] See Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics ; see pp. 59–60 for the passage in which the phrase "allegorical struggle" occurs and shows that Gross also believes the allegorist's enterprise to be fundamentally critical.

history, but scarcely of a kind to give them metaphysical authority in the eyes of the Western tradition.

In The Canterbury Tales allegorical authority is further diffused and internalized. In the first place, there are the individual pilgrims. Their portraits in the General Prologue, as well as their comments as narrators, affect at least to some degree our expectations and interpretation with respect to the particular tale. Minimal as that may be, it does constitute at least some kind of authority, though obviously an even more problematic one than that of Virgil, Beatrice, and the others. Then there are the authority figures inside the tales, usually old-timers—like the sene who suddenly appears and tells Dante where he can find Beatrice (Par . XXXI.59) and later identifies himself as Bernard of Clairvaux. The clearest example in the Tales is probably the Old Hag in the Wife of Bath's Tale, whose bedroom lecture on gentilesse, which cites Dante as an authority (III.1125–30), establishes the moral-intellectual basis of the tale's moral allegory. Beyond or behind these various authority figures there is the poet himself, who both as private individual and public poet makes himself part of the fiction in The Canterbury Tales as in the Comedy . But precisely because he is so much a part of the fiction, his authority is not much greater, perhaps less, than that of his fictive surrogates. In neither poem is there a final, unifying authority, implicit or acknowledged, that can serve as a reliable guide to allegorical meaning. At a certain point the reader is pretty much on her own.