3—
THE INSTITUTION OF THE SUBJECT:
A READING OF THE KNIGHT'S TALE

9—
The Knight's Critique of Genre I:
Ambivalence and Generic Style

Everyone is acquainted with movements in art—two examples: Mannerist painting of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Art Nouveau in painting, architecture, furniture and objects—which do more than simply "have a style." Artists like Parmigianino, Pontormo, Rosso, Bronzino, like Gaudi, Guimard, Beardsley and Tiffany, in some obvious way cultivate style. They seem to be preoccupied with stylistic questions, and indeed to place the accent less on what they are saying than on the manner of saying it.

To deal with art of this type . . . a term like "stylization" . . . is needed. "Stylization" is what is present in a work of art precisely when an artist does propose the by-no-means inevitable distinction between manner and matter, theme and form. When that happens, when style and subject are so distinguished, that is, played off against each other, one can legitimately speak of subjects being treated (or mistreated) in a certain style.

. . . "Stylization" in a work of art, as distinct from style, reflects an ambivalence (affection contradicted by contempt, obsession contradicted by irony) toward the subject matter. This ambivalence is handled by maintaining, through the rhetorical overlay that is stylization, a special distance from the subject.
Susan Sontag, "On Style"

Epic

It seems likely that the issue of impersonation has given readers more trouble in the Knight's Tale than in the tales of the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath at least in part because, unlike those two pilgrims, the Knight has no declared interest in self-presentation. At the end of the General Prologue he agrees in a bare three lines to tell the first tale (I, 853–55) and commences at once on the narrative: "Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,/Ther was a duc . . ." (859–60). Since his announced aim is only to tell a story, and he is not his own subject as the Wife and Pardoner are theirs, it is not surprising that his voice is relatively recessive and self-effacing, directing us more toward the narrative than the narrator, even when, as he does at the end of Part I, he steps back

to address the audience directly: "Yow loveres axe I now this questioun:/Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun?" (1347–48). Even those critics who have been willing to consider the role of the Knight in the Knight's Tale have tended to follow its narrator's lead and minimize his agency, his active working on and with the story. They are inclined to categorize the traces of him they find not as conscious self-presentations but as self-revelations, frequently of the unconscious or self-betraying kind. We have heard—when the issue of the story's narrator has been raised at all—of a naive and idealistic Knight who does not see how his own story questions his beliefs, a romantic Knight caught by reality but aspiring to the ideal, a Knight in bad faith whose successes have led him to dodge the darker implications of his world. I do not know of an interpretation that consistently gives the Knight credit for understanding and facing his own tale, for being fully capable of seeing in it what we see.^[1]

Yet a voice-oriented reading of the tale brings out a narrator who is the consistent agent of the full range of the poem's effects: its humor and pathos as well as its splendor; its horror and grim realism as well as its shining idealism; its insistence on chaos, madness, and the brute misery of the human condition as well as its praise of order and the noble life. Such a reading restores to the Knight two areas of concern that are ordinarily seen primarily as background, as matters of conscious concern, if at all, to Chaucer as maker of the poem rather than to the Knight as teller of the tale, and in so doing restores to him his disenchantment as well. The two areas I have in mind are the relation of the tale to the historical state of knighthood in the fourteenth century and the relation of the tale to its literary sources. In the first instance, I will be concerned to show that the tale functions as both a

[1] Let me at once single out Neuse, "The Knight," as an honorable, if ultimately only partial, exception to this generalization. Neuse's article remains for me the best single discussion of the tale and the nearest precursor of my own approach to it. For examples (by no means exhaustive) of the versions of the Knight listed in the text, see the following: (1) Naive and idealistic: Howard, Idea, who, despite his penetrating remarks on what he calls the obsolescence of knightly ideals in the fourteenth century (94–97, 113), does not allow the Knight himself access to the ironic vision that reveals it (esp. 227–37); Salter, "Introduction," in Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale, 7–36; Spearing, "Introduction," in Selected Tales from Chaucer: The Knight's Tale, 48–50; Thurston, Artistic Ambivalence, esp. 68. (2) Realistic but aspiring: Foster, "Humor in the Knight's Tale. " (3) Bad faith or worse: Ebner, "Chaucer's Precarious Knight"; Helterman, "Dehumanizing Metamorphoses"; T. Jones, Chaucer's Knight, passim.

representation of and a response to the well-attested decline of chivalry in the period: the mercenary greed, the constant treachery and switching of sides, the brutal and unnecessary violence visited on the defenseless, and the continual subordination of chivalric ideals to political necessities that fill the pages of Froissart and Terry Jones, to search no further afield. Whatever may be said against Jones, he can tell us what the Knight has seen because he provides a set of glosses on what is more obliquely, but no less insistently, represented in the tale itself. If we can see these things, and if, despite William Brandt, Froissart could see them, it should come as no surprise that the Knight sees them too and that, again like the Wife and the Pardoner, he has attitudes toward the social conditions that constitute his estate.^[2] Like Froissart, the Knight is aware that if chivalry is to be sustained as a viable ideal, it must come to terms as best it can with those human weaknesses of the strong that make them so dangerous and with the demands of practical politics. Ultimately I will argue that the tale itself is such an act of coming to terms with historical and social reality, an instance of the doing of knighthood. Both the Knight's maintenance of chivalry and his disenchanted criticism of it are the story he tells.

In fact, the track of the Knight's historical disenchantment with chivalry as an institution is most clearly registered, at least at first, in his dissatisfaction with its most cherished fantasies, which are also his own. From the beginning he places the tale in relation to its "sources" in the larger sense of the generic discourses of epic and romance that

[2] In the case of Froissart this is not the place to make the argument. The reader is directed, however, to the tale of the ill-fated Franco-Burgundian and Hungarian expedition against the sultan Bajazet that occupies much of the latter portion of Book IV of the Chronicles, especially to the extraordinary chapter 89 of that book and above all to the Count de Nevers's report of the Turks' opinion of the schism in chapter 91: "The sultan thought our faith erroneous, and corrupted by those that ought to have kept its purity; and the Turks laughed and made their jokes at it. . . . I believe they are perfectly well acquainted . . . with our schisms in the church, and how the Christians are at variance with one another, respecting the two popes of France and Italy; and the Saracens are wonderfully surprised how the kings of the different countries suffer it" (654). Such outspoken assessments are not rare in Book IV. Brandt's Shape of Medieval History has been an influential exponent of the historical structuralist position that "most aristocratic writers [of chronicles] assume aristocratic stances even while they write about them; they do not notice things that do not cohere within those stances" (81). Though he specifically exempts the socially marginal Froissart from the extreme form of this class-conditioned perception, he does not recognize the actual critical and analytical thrust of the Chronicles. I do not wish at this point to enter into the controversy over Terry Jones's book. For a sensible recent contribution, see Brown and Branch, Review of Terry Jones, Chaucer's Knight.

supply much of its ideological justification in mystified forms. It is important to see that the details of the tale operate in the context of these larger discursive fields, that they are "stylized" in Sontag's sense of the word. Here we can turn immediately to the text, which provides a clear, if complex, characterization of the speaker's attitude toward his sources at its outset:

Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour
That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne;
What with his wysdom and his chivalrie,
He conquered al the regne of Femenye,
That whilom was ycleped Scithia,
And weddede the queene Ypolita,
And broghte hire hoom with hym in his contree
With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,
And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.
And thus with victorie and with melodye
Lete I this noble duc to Atthenes ryde,
And al his hoost in armes hym bisyde.

And certes, if it nere to long to heere,
I wolde have toold yow fully the manere
How wonnen was the regne of Femenye
By Theseus and by his chivalrye;
And of the grete bataille for the nones
Bitwixen Atthenes and Amazones;
And how asseged was Ypolita,
The faire, hardy queene of Scithia;
And of the feste that was at hir weddynge,
And of the tempest at hir hoom-comynge;
But al that thyng I moot as now forbere.
I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere,
And wayke been the oxen in my plough.
The remenant of the tale is long ynough.
I wol nat letten eek noon of this route;
Lat every felawe telle his tale aboute,
And lat se now who shal the soper wynne;
And there I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne.
          (859–892)

This opening passage enacts a motion, which the tale itself will recapitulate, from the there and then ("whilom") of fable, the ideal and

heroic past, to the colloquial immediacy of here and now on the pilgrimage. The Knight is isolating his particular tale from the vast storehouse of "olde stories" in which it is embedded, bringing it forward for his present audience. His initial act thus calls attention to itself as a selection from sources and in particular an act of compression in the fiction that is analogous to Chaucer's act of selecting, editing, and compressing Boccaccio and Statius (the latter is a source the Knight acknowledges himself [2294]) outside the fiction.^[3]

This selective operation on what we can identify in a broad sense as a prior text^[4] identifies the Knight's telling as an act of rereading the generic discourse of chivalry something like the Wife of Bath's recounting of her autobiography and even more like the Pardoner's handling of his exemplum. Of course any retelling of a story the teller does not make up is like this, but what makes the more active editorial image apposite in the Canterbury Tales generally and in the Knight's Tale in particular is the way the text features a set of attitudes toward the source as such. At the simplest level the Knight is aware, and says so, that the story in its original form (something like "The Deeds of Theseus," perhaps) is not suitable to the present occasion: at the very least it is too long. But the text also registers the attraction that storied world has for him, and nowhere more than when he begins to disengage himself from it. The number of things he announces that he will not tell us (growing more and more concrete and detailed up to the tempest, when he breaks off) and the way the voice lingers over the repeated rhymes, femenye/chivalrye, Ypolita/Scithia, all betray a reluctance to let go of what "I wolde have toold yow," the clear and noble representation of his own tradition enshrined in the old books. This attraction is in tension with, and finally controlled by, the Knight's awareness of the need to discipline his imagination, to accede to the

[3] Compare the discussion of Janekyn's book and the sources of the Wife of Bath's Prologue above, chapter 5. There is a convenient summary of Chaucer's use of the Teseida in Riverside Chaucer, 827, and a helpful account of the general tenor of his changes in Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 117–21.

[4] "The Knight's learning comes not, as a clerk's learning would have, from books, but from a body of lore some of which was preserved in books but most of which was probably passed on orally. It is useful when we think of medieval oral traditions to suppose that there were separate traditions for separate groups—a 'folklore' of the people, a 'knightlore' of the aristocracy, a 'clerklore' among churchmen." Howard, Idea, 228. It is worth remembering, however, how often the Knight refers to his sources as "olde bookes" and the like. It seems clear that at least in the case of this story the speaker thinks of it as a predominantly literary thing, though generic rather than specific.

claims (perhaps the impatience) of others, and to make something of his story that recognizes the demands of the situation in which he speaks. The motion from past to present and literature to life is also a motion from nostalgia to social responsibility. But the speech is structured in such a way as to bring out the effort as well as the control, the sense that there is something to be controlled. It is important to keep this double attitude or ambivalence firmly in view since it is one of the great stylistic facts of the poem and ultimately a key to its meaning.

The Knight's Tale is a romance grafted onto an epic, the story of the loves of the young Theban knights Palamon and Arcite for the Amazon Emelye, sister-in-law of Theseus, in the aftermath of Theseus's conquest of Amazonia, "the regne of femenye," and in the wake of his equally epic destruction of Thebes itself. The poem presents itself as a continuation of the last book of the Thebaid of Statius. This structural fact, which has been variously noted by critics,^[5] is itself the index of a particular way of proceeding on the part of the narrator: he tells a story (a love story) that is easiest to identify as a romance, but he begins with a set of epic themes in an epic world, and here already the ambivalence that concerns me is manifest.

In the foreground of the narration of the conquest of Thebes that opens the story proper is the heroic image of Theseus, "In al his wele and in his mooste pride" (895), hastening off to right the wrongs of the Theban women before he has even brought his bride home to Athens and slaying the villain Creon (the apparent source of the evil) "manly as a knyght/In pleyn bataille" (987–88). This heroic image is fostered by the often-noted stylization of this world, a kind of epic formality of language and clarified largeness of gesture whereby distressed ladies faint ceremonially before speaking their formal complaints of Fortune's false wheel.^[6] The generic intent of this stylization, its epic vouloir dire, is to abstract and idealize the action so as to celebrate the

[5] The most useful discussion of the relations of the tale to epic remains Haller, "Epic Tradition." There are good brief treatments of the issue as well in Cooper, Structure of the Canterbury Tales, 91–93, and Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 117–11. Important new ground is broken, especially with regard to the different treatments of Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer in relation to one another, in Hanning, "'Noble Designs and Chaos.'"

[6] The best discussion of this kind of epic style, including the staccato parataxis typical of the opening of the Knight's Tale, is Auerbach, Mimesis. The first five chapters are relevant, but see especially the account of Tacitus and late classical historiography, 29–35, and chapter 5, "Roland Against Ganelon," 83–107. Compare Brandt's account ofwhat he calls the aristocratic style in medieval chronicles, Shape of Medieval History, 81–105. In both cases first-rate structural and stylistic description is to a degree vitiated by failures of interpretation.

clarity and decisiveness of the heroic individual and his deeds, untrammeled by more realistic considerations. Indeed the text concentrates so firmly on Theseus and his might that the image of the hero tends to overpower the larger forces in whose name he putatively acts. The Argive women may be waiting in the temple of clementia for redress of grievances they ascribe to Fortune, but it is Theseus they have been awaiting for two weeks (928–29), and it is to him as the "Lord, to whom Fortune hath yiven/Victorie" (915–16) that they appeal—not just anyone's clemency will do. When the ladies have dramatized their low position on Fortune's wheel with a symbolic (and simultaneous) fall (948–511), it is Theseus alone who raises them:

Whan he saugh hem so pitous and so maat,
That whilom weren of so greet estaat;
And in his armes he hem alle up hente,
And in his armes he hem alle up hente,
And hem conforteth in ful good entente.
          (955–58)

Realistic description (all of them?) is subordinated to the symbolism of the single sweeping gesture of lifting up as an image for the redress of what the second line construes as a sad case, the casus feminarum illustrium. The language presents Theseus as dominating and controlling the motion of the wheel, as if he had replaced Fortune. Similarly, when the hero rides to Thebes:

The rede statue of Mars, with spere and targe,
So shyneth in his white baner large
That alle the feeldes glyteren up and doun;
And by his baner born is his penoun
Of gold ful riche, in which ther was ybete
The Mynotaur, which that he wan in Crete.
Thus rit this duc, thus rit this conquerour . . .
          (975–81)

That banner does not announce "Mars is coming" but "Theseus is coming." The image of the god is part of the splendor of the hero's display, almost like the trophy of his earlier deeds, the Minotaur, that

accompanies it: the hero is more real than the god. The Knight's concentration on Theseus and his glory thus stresses the primacy of the duke's heroic will. He is initially presented not so much as the embodiment of larger forces of order that much criticism has seen in him later in the tale but rather as an independent generator of action, the lord of Fortune and more effective than the gods, who makes order in the interest of his own heroic reputation: he swears "Upon the tiraunt Creon him to wreke/That al the peple of Grece sholde speke/How Creon was of Theseus yserved" (961–63).

Though the general attitude in the tale toward the deeds of Theseus seems clearly positive, those deeds also have darker implications. The conspicuously brusque epic style of the description has its traditional effect of concentrating attention on the celebration of the hero, but it also sometimes works to bring the darker implications forward in a way that smokes the edges of the bright image of the hero's glory. Thus the description of Theseus's first sight of the mourning women:

"What folk ben ye, that at myn homcomynge
Perturben so my feste with criynge?"
Quod Theseus. "Have ye so greet envye
Of myn honour, that thus compleyne and crye?
Or who hath yow mysboden or offended?
And telleth me if it may been amended,
And why that ye been clothed thus in blak."
          (905–11)

Awareness of potential envious enemies comes first here, almost as a reflex. It is followed by awareness of an alternative—the presence of a wrong, instantly conceived by Theseus as "to be righted—by me"; only then, apparently, does the visual detail of the black garments register. It is as if Theseus's actual visual perception were preprogrammed to give priority to the details of sensory data most relevant to his heroic being.^[7] This is the first instance in the poem of an attention to the processes of visual perception that will issue later in an extended treatment of the masculine gaze. For the moment, however, it is enough to note how the presentation catches the element of heroic self-regard in epic seeing, the jealous and contentious care for one's own reputation that are characteristic of this ethos. Similarly, if the

[7] See Van, "Theseus and the 'Right Way,'" 86–87.

single combat with Creon presents the good side of the heroic capability for violence, the effects of that violence on Thebes—"And rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter" (990)—seem less easily justified.^[8]

The Knight completes his narration of Theseus's noble deed with a brief account of the burning of the desecrated Argive corpses, leaving the sacrilege atoned and the "noble conquerour" resting in possession of "al the contree as hym leste" (1004). He follows immediately, however, with a more realistic image of the "pilours" ransacking and stripping in "the taas of bodyes dede" (1005). This more disenchanted description lets something harsher, and closer to the concrete experience of war, invade the stylized world of the tale. It sounds a theme that will later be embodied in the Temple of Mars and Arcite's broken body and does so in a style that departs noticeably from the rhetorical level of what precedes it. Not that this sort of treatment of defeated armies is unusual or even necessarily reprehensible in Chaucer's time; it is neither, as M. J. Keen's discussion of sieges in The Laws of War in the Later Middle Ages (119–33) makes clear.^[9] Rather, it is a question first of literary decorum. This concentration on details of war that are at once violent and mundane sorts a little uncomfortably with the less concrete and more elevated image of combat that precedes it, and it introduces a specific and "modern" note that contrasts with the relatively timeless epic world. The passage qualifies, and perhaps questions slightly, the smoothness of the celebratory epic surface in a way that can be brought back to Theseus as well. Its echo of the Argive widow's account of what Creon did—"Hath alle the bodyes on an heep ydrawe" (944)—makes it easier for us to reflect that in disposing of one heap of corpses, Theseus has created another.

Such touches suggest that the Knight is not entirely uncritical of the epic ideal as he finds it embodied in his "olde stories." There is something disturbing about the purity of Theseus's epic self-assertion, even

[8] Questions about this act of Theseus have often been raised in the literature: by Van, "Theseus and the 'Right Way'"; by Webb, the first modern assassin of the duke's character, "Reinterpretation of Chaucer's Theseus," 290–91, with citations of fourteenth-century protests against pillaging; by Underwood, "First of The Canterbury Tales, " in Owen, Discussions of the Canterbury Tales, 39; and by James Smith, "Chaucer, Boethius," who blames the Knight for Theseus's vacillating character.

[9] But see the documents cited in Webb, "Reinterpretation of Chaucer's Theseus," passim.

in a good cause, because it seems too heedless of consequences, especially social and political ones, and the style of the description tends to bring this out. If the heroic individual is given the powers of Fortune and the gods, he is also identified as the source of the bad effects of those powers as well as the good. The role of style in promoting this effect is especially clear in the passage that concludes the first, epic phase of the tale and introduces the protagonists of what is to follow:

Nat fully quyke, ne fully dede they were,
But by hir cote-armures and by hir gere
The heraudes knewe hem best in special
As they that weren of the blood roial
Of Thebes, and of sustren two yborn.
Out of the taas the pilours han hem torn,
And han hem caried softe unto the tente
Of Theseus; and he ful soone hem sente
To Atthenes, to dwellen in prisoun
Perpetuelly—he nolde no raunsoun.
And whan this worthy duc hath thus ydon,
He took his hoost, and hoom he rit anon
With laurer crowned as a conquerour;
And ther he lyveth in joye and in honour
Terme of his lyf; what nedeth wordes mo?
And in a tour, in angwissh and in wo,
This Palamon and his felawe Arcite
For everemoore, ther may no gold hem quite.
        (1015–32)

Though not much is made immediately of what Theseus has done to Thebes, the lineage of Palamon and Arcite keeps their public and political identity marginally alive in the passage and supplies a tacit reason for Theseus's actions. But although it is likely that he imprisons the Theban princes because they are members of a family that might otherwise cause him trouble, the fact that we are not told why he does it deflects attention from Theseus's concern for order or even realpolitik and stresses once again the arbitrariness of his power and his individual will.^[10] The last lines, with their hieratic, wheel-of-Fortune contrast of the magnificence of the conqueror and the wretchedness of

[10] Kolve has written well on the initial harshness of the image of Theseus, Imagery of Narrative, 98–102.

the vanquished, contribute to this effect by presenting the situation as if it were concluded and without further consequences, "perpetuelly," "for evermoore." As we shall see, Palamon and Arcite's political identity continues to dog the tale to its end, though they themselves do all they can to suppress and evade it. But even on first reading we cannot but be aware that the story has barely begun, and this recognition enforces a generic awareness of literary probabilities: conventional expectations about a story of this sort include the expectation that complications will soon follow, as of course they do. The Knight's voicing here, therefore, represents not his own assessment of the situation but the rhetorical miming of an epic style that subordinates questions of the consequences of heroic action to the memorializing of the hero's res gestae.

This sort of controlled but continual exaggeration of the hieratic stiffness of an antique, epic style, which I have been tracing throughout the opening of the poem, bespeaks the presence of a narrator for whom it is the embodiment of an antique, inadequate vision, one that will ultimately need to be brought up to date so as to render the heroic individual more responsive, and responsible, to the requirements of order and the noble life. This is the last time in the poem that we will see Theseus so abstractly and absolutely. From now on he will constantly be dealing with the consequences of this briefly frozen moment, exposed to increasingly realistic and modern pressures that will finally transform him, bringing him forward from the idealized past into the Knight's real world.

Romance

The image of Palamon and Arcite torn from the heap of Theban bodies is presented in such a way as to suggest a new birth, and something of that effect is immediately reinforced by a shift in generic style from epic to romance, from heroic combat and the cries of the vanquished to the flowering of springtime and lovers' groans. Political issues appear to fade away, and war becomes something undertaken, if at all, in the service of love. Among the things that register this shift are a new concentration on nature (including human nature, in line with the interest of romance in the seasonal rhythms of generation) and on psychological experience:

This passeth yeer by yeer and day by day,
Till it fil ones, in a morwe of May,
That Emelye, that fairer was to sene
Than is the lylie upon his stalke grene,
And fressher than the May with floures newe—
For with the rose colour stroof hire hewe,
I noot which was the fyner of hem two—
Er it were day, as was hir wone to do,
She was arisen and al redy dight,
For May wole have no slogardie anyght.
The sesoun priketh every gentil herte,
And maketh it out of his slep to sterte,
And seith "Arys, and do thyn observaunce."
This maked Emelye have remembraunce
To doon honour to May, and for to ryse.
Yclothed was she fressh, for to devyse:
Hire yelow heer was broyded in a tresse
Bihynde hir bak, a yerde long, I gesse.
And in the gardyn, at the sonne upriste,
She walketh up and doun, and as hire liste
She gadereth floures, party white and rede,
To make a subtil gerland for hire hede;
And as an aungel hevenysshly she soong.
       (1033–55)

This description, a set piece unlike anything in the poem that precedes it, concentrates on natural, seasonal energy and its general effects, though it is scarcely a realistic description of nature. The description has a leisurely, aestheticizing quality and manifests its willingness to take time, not over the deeds of the hero, but over what Auerbach calls "graceful vignettes of established custom, one might say of a ritual which shows us courtly society in its setting of highly developed conventionality."^[11] The lady's individuality is of little importance to the forces being described here—so little, in fact, that she is assimilated to the season, made its embodiment and one of its effects, like the lily and the rose.^[12] Indeed, as it proceeds, the description increasingly sublimates and chastens the erotic restlessness it conveys at its beginning. By the end of the passage artifice has taken over: the lady's hair moves

[11] Mimesis, 114. The quotation, describing Chrétien's Yvain, is taken from chapter 6, "The Knight Sets Forth," 107–14, which presents a description of romance style as fertile and suggestive as the preceding discussion of epic (see above, note 5).

[12] The blending of girl and season is noted by Spearing, Knight's Tale, 40.

into a braid, and the flowers into a garland; the pricking of the seasonal urge is contained in a courtly garden and a May song, and the lady herself is etherealized away from her wakeful stirrings into an angel. The passage is an instance of the way art, the cultural art that makes poetic reverdies as well as gardens, strives to tame the forces of sexuality, just as human making strives to contain other forces of disorder in great dungeon towers like the one "evene joynant to the gardyn wal" (1060).^[13]

But as with the epic earlier, the containment of unruly forces in this romance world is incomplete, for the same power at work in Emelye as she "romed up and doun" in the garden (1069) is also stirring in Palamon, who "Was risen and romed in a chambre an heigh" (1065) and now "Goth in the chambre romynge to and fro" (1971).^[14] The verbal echoing hints at the seasonal component in Palamon's "wo," the erotic energies looking for an outlet, and the description of his falling in love at first sight confirms it:

And so bifel, by aventure or cas,
That thurgh a wyndow, thikke of many a barre
Of iren greet and square as any sparre,
He cast his eye upon Emelya,
And therwithal he bleynte and cride, "A!"
As though he stongen were unto the herte.
          (1074–79)

The fortuitousness implied by "aventure or cas" is qualified by the stress given to Palamon's aggressively active vision ("cast his eye") and the weighty obstacles it overcomes on its way to the lady.

Though Palamon's looking is portrayed as active, the prince himself experiences its effects passively as something he undergoes. This passivity suggests that the active character of his desire is not conscious and that he does not know he is looking for an object even before he finds it. It is clear from the presentation that there is more projecting

[13] The images of prison and garden in the tale, and their connectedness, have been analyzed by Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 85–157, and by Green, World Views and Human Power.

[14] The complex verbal play on "romynge," which extends well beyond this passage, has been noted and analyzed by Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 89–91, though he reads it, rather more romantically than I do, as an affirmation of the cousins' will to freedom.

than perceiving going on here: this second account of a male look in the poem is linked to the reverdie that precedes it—is in fact a kind of extension of it—because both glances, the narrator's and Palamon's, gaze at a woman but see a goddess:

"I noot wher she be womman or goddesse,
But Venus is it soothly, as I gesse."
And therwithal on knees doun he fil,
And seyde, "Venus, if it be thy wil
Yow in this gardyn thus to transfigure
Bifore me, sorweful, wrecched creature,
Out of this prisoun help that we may scapen.
And if so be my destynee be shapen
By eterne word to dyen in prisoun,
Of oure lynage have som compassioun,
That is so lowe ybroght by tirannye."
       (1101–11)

Here we catch Palamon in the act of shifting, like the tale itself, from epic to romance. By constituting Emelye as Venus, Palamon makes it possible to ask her for things no real lady could be expected to supply, and the things he asks for testify to his primary concerns: his own fate and that of Thebes. It might be said that Palamon displaces his previous epic situation into his loving, in the sense that he conceives love as an answer to, or replacement for, his political problems. The poem thus moves from Theseus's heroic gaze to Palamon's romantic one, but in such a way as to suggest that the two styles of looking are connected behind their surface differences. As we soon discover, he plans to do for romantic reasons—to gain Emelye—what he might previously have done anyway for political-heroic ones: raise an army and attack Theseus (1281–90, 1482–86).

The same displacement, whereby old situations continue in force under cover of new ones, is equally apparent in Arcite. He construes Palamon's cry on seeing Emelye as a response to their imprisonment— a natural enough mistake, but one that also reveals what is most on Arcite's mind, especially since he proceeds to give a lecture on it:

"Why cridestow? Who hath thee doon offence?
For Goddes love, taak al in pacience
Oure prisoun, for it may noon oother be.
Fortune hath yeven us this adversitee.

Som wikke aspect or disposicioun
Of Saturne, by som constellacioun,
Hath yeven us this, although we hadde it sworn;
So stood the hevene whan that we were born.
We moste endure it; this is the short and pleyn."
          (1083–91)

Arcite seems unusually concerned not only to establish the fated, unalterable character of their situation but also to blame it on forces of destiny and powers above, about which little can be done. When his turn to fall in love comes a few lines later, like his cousin he immediately conceives the lady as an object of worship, but he does so in keeping with the passivity in the face of the gods and the stars displayed earlier. If Palamon asks too much of the lady, Arcite seems to ask too little: "And but I have hir mercy and hir grace,/That I may seen hire atte leeste weye,/I nam but deed; ther nis namoore to seye" (1120–22).

What is really striking about the wrangling that follows their vision of Emelye is how quickly the two knights move away from any concern with the lady herself. She becomes a kind of stipulation, a conventional unattainable object, and Palamon and Arcite concentrate on their relationship to one another. Each of the cousins conceives of himself as a victim, driven and fated to both imprisonment and love, but what this victimization seems to mean is that they feel free, paradoxically, to use their loving as an excuse to engage one another more competitively and with less regard for ordinary conventions of civility than they otherwise would. The adverbs that characterize their speeches, "despitously" (Palamon, 1124) and "ful proudly" (Arcite, 1152) catch the contentious quality of the discussion and its greater concern with individual ethos and self-justification than with Emelye: "And now thow woldest falsly been aboute/To love my lady, whom I love and serve" (1142–43, emphasis added).

To compare these events to their counterparts in the Teseida, where Palemone and Arcita stay close and sympathize with one another's hopeless passion for the same lady, is to realize how un courtly the situation here remains and how little of a civilizing effect the romance situation exerts on the cousins. The despair at their public situations that lurks behind their initial speeches finds its way as well into their dealings with one another after the vision of Emelye, in the form of a

thoroughly dark assessment of human relations and human possibility. Though it is certainly true that there are contingencies at work that the cousins can do little about, nothing requires that they abandon control of those aspects of the situation they do command. Arcite's espousal of the old clerks' saw "who shal yeve a lovere any lawe" (1164) need not produce the wholesale breakdown of human ties implied by his image of dogs wrangling over a bone (1177–80) nor his despairing conclusion, "And therfore at the kynges court, my brother,/Ech man for hymself, ther is noon oother" (1181–82). It may be in line with Arcite's passivity, his sense that love overrides all conventional distinctions, for him to say that a man must love despite himself "Al be she mayde, or wydwe, or elles wyf" (1171), but the statement too easily ignores differences that most people, even lovers, manage to sustain.^[15]

Thus, throughout the romance reopening of the tale the tendency of romance to abstract from the real world a celebratory image of idealized courtly social behavior as "an absolute aesthetic configuration" is never quite achieved.^[16] There is a continual sense that incompletely tamed motives, from the erotic impulses associated with, and directed at, Emelye to the aggressive ones that arise between Palamon and Arcite, are at work just beneath the surface: the romance style of the tale gives us a sublimation that does not fully conceal what it and the characters attempt to sublimate.

But these observations are not only mine. As with the epic situations earlier, here the speaker not only uses romance situations and language: he also takes positions with regard to them and to the characters who are involved in or employ them. The Knight's handling of the following episode, in which Perothous secures Arcite's release, suggests that he is alert to the questionable aspects of the scene he has just recounted between Palamon and Arcite. The Knight makes something of the juxtaposition by making the relationship between Theseus and his friend a tacit comment on what has gone before:

A worthy duc that highte Perotheus,
That felawe was unto duc Theseus
Syn thilke day that they were children lite,
Was come to Atthenes his felawe to visite,

[15] See Smith, "Chaucer, Boethius," 4–12, and Robinson, Chaucer and the English Tradition, 123.

[16] Once again I follow Auerbach, Mimesis, 120.

And for to pleye as he was wont to do;
For in this world he loved no man so,
And he loved hym als tendrely agayn.
So wel they lovede, as olde bookes sayn,
That whan that oon was deed, soothly to telle,
His felawe went and soughte hym doun in helle—
But of that storie list me nat to write.
Duc Perotheus loved wel Arcite,
And hadde hym knowe at Thebes yeer by yere,
And finally at requeste and prayere
Of Perotheus, withouten any raunsoun,
Duc Theseus hym leet out of prisoun
Frely to goon wher that hym liste over al,
In swich a gyse as I you tellen shal.
          (1191–1208)

The Knight's brief digression, highlighted all the more when he recognizes it as such and breaks it off, holds up the achieved and sustained ideal of brotherhood in the "olde bookes" and measures his disapproval of Palamon and Arcite against it. He conspicuously takes a moment out from the story to remind himself and us that not all sworn brothers are like the Theban cousins before returning to the plot.^[17]

A cluster of attitudes toward romance conventions that is fully as complex as those taken toward epic ones (and rather more fully developed) emerges again in the speaker's handling of the twin formal complaints of Palamon and Arcite that close Part I of the tale. The complexities are consistently registered as shifts of voice:

How greet a sorwe suffreth now Arcite!
The deeth he feeleth thurgh his herte smyte;
He wepeth, wayleth, crieth pitously;
To sleen hymself he waiteth prively.
He seyde, "Allas that day that I was born!
Now is my prisoun worse than biforn;
Now is me shape eternally to dwelle
Noght in purgatorie, but in helle.
Allas, that evere knew I Perotheus!

[17] This function of the passage has been noticed by Cooper, Structure of the Canterbury Tales, 94. She points out that "the Classical legend of Pirothous is different; it is Chaucer who specifically turns it into an example of friendship stronger than death," but she does not ascribe it to the narrating Knight. See Hoffman, "Ovid and Chaucer's Myth of Theseus and Pirothoüs," 252–57.

For elles hadde I dwelled with Theseus,
Yfetered in his prisoun everemo.
Thanne hadde I been in blisse and nat in wo.
Oonly the sighte of hire whom that 1 serve,
Though that I nevere hir grace may deserve,
Wolde han suffised right ynough for me.
O deere cosyn Palamon," quod he,
"Thyn is the victorie of this aventure.
Ful blisfully in prison maistow dure—
In prison? Certes nay, but in paradys!
Wel hath Fortune yturned thee the dys,
That hast the sighte of hire, and I th'absence.
For possible is, syn thou hast hire presence,
And art a kynght, a worthy and an able,
That by som cas, syn Fortune is chaungeable,
Thow maist to thy desir somtyme atteyne.
But I, that am exiled and bareyne
Of alle grace, and in so greet dispeir
That ther nys erthe, water, fir, ne eir,
Ne creature that of hem maked is,
That may me helpe or doon confort in this,
Wel oughte I sterve in wanhope and distresse.
Farwel my lif, my lust, and my gladnesse!
           (1219–50)

The Knight's enjoyment in developing the elegant paradoxes and hyperboles of this complaint is patent; he likes working up the rhetoric, miming it, and giving himself to it—so much so that he then turns around and does it again with Palamon. One effect of the often-noted careful balancing of speeches between the two knights in the first part of the tale is that we can be treated to (and the Knight can produce) twice as much of this nonsense as we might otherwise get. The Knight is well aware that it is nonsense. The image of Arcite lying in ambush for himself (1222) pushes his woe in the direction of parody, as does the too-close look at Palamon a little later:

the grete tour
Resouneth of his youlyng and clamour.
The pure fettres on his shynes grete
Weren of his bittre, salte teeres wete.
           (1277–80)

Palamon's yowling and the fact that he has great shins are matters too closely observed, too physical, to sustain the decorum of courtly grief.

But it is precisely because the Knight does not take these performances too seriously that he can enjoy them as performances.

About halfway through Arcite's complaint, however, something curious happens:

Wel oughte I sterve in wanhope and distresse.
Farwel my lif, my lust, and my gladnesse!

Allas, why pleynen folk so in commune
On purveiaunce of God, or of Fortune,
That yeveth hem ful ofte in many a gyse
Wel bettre than they kan hemself devyse?
Som man desireth for to han richesse,
That cause is of his mordre or greet siknesse;
And som man wolde out of his prisoun fayn,
That in his hous is of his meynee slayn.
Infinite harmes been in this mateere.
We witen nat what thing we preyen heere;
We faren as he that dronke is as a mous.
A dronke man woot wel he hath an hous,
But he noot which the righte wey is thider,
And to a dronke man the wey is slider.
And certes, in this world so faren we;
We seken faste after felicitee,
But we goon wrong ful often, trewely.
Thus may we seyen alle, and namely I,
That wende and hadde a greet opinioun
That if I myghte escapen from prisoun,
Thanne hadde I been in joye and perfit heele,
Ther now I am exiled fro my wele.
Syn that I may nat seen you, Emelye,
I nam but deed; ther nys no remedye.
          (1249–74)

It is a little difficult, on first reading, to decide who is speaking here. Arcite's "Farwel my lyf" (1250) has a ring of finality sufficient to give the sense of a new beginning to the more general reflections that follow. Since those reflections themselves appear to comment critically on the practice of complaining about Fortune that Arcite has just been indulging in, it is tempting to construe them as the narrator's comment on Arcite's speech rather than as a continuation of it.^[18] This effect is

[18] The effect was not lost on the scribes of Ellesmere and Hengwrt, both of whom insert before line 1251 the paragraph sigil that does duty in their manuscripts for quotation marks indicating a change of speaker.

strengthened by the generality of the passage, the way it carefully avoids the first-person singular and any direct reference to Arcite's specific situation except as one general example ("And som man wolde out of his prisoun fayn") out of a number that illustrate not only the uncertainty of the human condition but also its wretchedness. The examples—a desire for riches that causes murder or simply eventuates in "greet siknesse," the released prisoner slain by his treacherous servants, the oddly concrete yet obscurely allegorical drunkard taken from Boethius—generate a rather dark image of the world at large in terms remote from frustration in love. Only when Arcite comes back to his own situation, at "Thus may we seyen alle, and namely I," can the speech be securely located as his. There is a momentary effect of disjunction in the text here whereby its voicing seems to slip, to become dislocated momentarily, and then to be reascribed to Arcite.

Something similar happens again in Palamon's complaint. There are no withheld pronouns here to create confusion about who is speaking; the speech is clearly ascribed to Palamon: "Thanne seyde he,'O crueel goddess'" (1303). The peculiarity is rather that there are sections of the speech that seem both strongly felt and oddly arbitrary or irrelevant in Palamon's circumstances. We do not see how he got here from the pangs of love and jealousy:

What governance is in this prescience,
That giltelees tormenteth innocence?
And yet encresseth this al my penaunce,
That man is bounden to his observaunce,
For Goddes sake, to letten of his wille,
Ther as a beest may al his lust fulfille.
And whan a beest is deed he hath no peyne;
But man after his deeth moot wepe and pleyne,
Though in this world he have care and wo.
Withouten doute it may stonden so.
The answere of this lete I to dyvynys,
But wel I woot that in this world greet pyne ys.
          (1313–24)

Once again the trouble is not that no sense can be made of these reflections as coming from Palamon. But it is a little surprising to find him suddenly so philosophical—and to judge from the bathos of the concluding lines, in which he gives up the problem as beyond his powers, Palamon is a little surprised too, or at any rate he is out of his depth.

The effect in both of these complaints is of a certain dark, Boethian seriousness entering the tale suddenly and a little awkwardly. Both speeches allude to the Consolation and are to that degree anachronistic, belonging more to the world of the narrator than that of the characters. In this and other ways the text contains the traces of the speaker behind the characters, making them more philosophical and imparting his concerns and language as it were around them or over their heads, so that the speeches are double-voiced, functioning one way "in character" and another as intimations of the Knight's interests. The Knight is surely mocking Palamon's lovesick jealousy with such things as his outrageous homographic pun "So woodly that he lyk was to biholde/The boxtree" (1301–2). He lets the two complaints play off against one another and the situation so as to bring out the projections and passivity of the Thebans. He does not, however, seem entirely unsympathetic to Palamon and Arcite's intimation of a profound and uncaring senselessness at the heart of things; it is an intimation he seems to share and one he here goes out of his way to bring into the tale. It is as if he were looking for a means to express these concerns and finding it difficult to do so. The extent to which Palamon and Arcite are confounded by these serious matters, unable to deal with them or even to express them without confusing their own feelings with whatever laws—if any—may govern the universe, is an indication of the extent to which the tale itself as presently constituted is unfit to express such concerns with the seriousness the Knight feels they deserve. His restlessness with this situation produces the oddities of impersonation and voicing just analyzed, the effect of certain issues intruding on a context that does not contain them comfortably.

A voice-oriented reading of Part I, then, produces a record of the speaker's transactions with his preexistent story, the ways he finds both to pass the story on and to convey his feelings about it. As it unfolds, his telling embodies the range of those feelings: he is attracted to and enjoys not only the events of the tale but also the conventional styles in which they are packaged, and he shows this enjoyment by producing polished versions of epic and romance topoi, heroic battles, courtly landscapes, and lovers' complaints. At the same time the Knight maintains a certain distance from the tale and the conventions of its telling; he is amused by their pretentiousness and is not above parodying them. Finally, he is disturbed by certain aspects of the same idealism that attracts him and the same irresponsibility that amuses

him. He takes some of the issues the story raises more seriously than the tale itself, in its present form, appears to do.

It is characteristic of the Knight's way of conducting the tale in its opening stages that his questioning and qualifying of the story proceeds by indirection, that is, by tacit juxtaposition of plot elements and contradictory speeches. He repeats the tale pretty much as it comes to him from the old books, and the attitudes he displays toward the story tend to express themselves situationally or structurally, by implication and at the edges of the action. One reason for this indirection is no doubt that, as I have suggested before, the Knight is attracted to the language, attitudes, and conventions of his sources even when he also finds them silly or disturbing. In any case the fact that all of these attitudes find expression relatively indirectly is an index of the problem: the Knight has not yet managed to make the tale speak for him; his own voice speaks from the sidelines or in the ironic twist of a phrase, or conspicuously and somewhat uncomfortably appropriates the speeches of the characters. The relation between speaker and characters remains primarily that of teller here, tale there.

10—
The Knight's Critique of Genre II:
From Representation to Revision

The Knight: Disenchantment and Agency

When at the end of Part I of the Knight's Tale the Knight returns explicitly to the occasion of the telling here and now on the pilgrimage, he makes a gesture of socialization whose perfunctory incompleteness confirms his disengagement. The demande at the end of the Franklin's Tale, "Which was the mooste fre, as thynketh yow?" (V, 1622), is a genuine request, an attempt to give what the Franklin has made of his story fulfillment in the world of the pilgrims and make his tale a genuinely social act.^[1] By contrast, the Knight's demande, "Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun?" (I, 1348), primarily conveys his judgment of the inconsequentiality of the story thus far for us here and now. It is fit only for this sort of trivial courtly game, a judgment the Knight enforces by refusing to stop to play it: "Now demeth as yow liste, ye that kan,/For I wol telle forth as I bigan" (1353–54). In context the gesture seems like a passing nod to the audience, a recognition of their presence and a reaffirmation of the teller's responsibility to do more than amuse or enchant himself with the courtly games of ancient nobility, which by now make him a little impatient. In line with this impulse, from the very beginning of Part II of the tale the Knight asserts his presence more actively and explicitly and adopts a more overtly skeptical and critical attitude toward the world of the story and the self-dramatizations of the characters. This attitude comes out, for example, in such things as the conventional description of the lovelorn Arcite back in Thebes, hollow-eyed and pale, pining alone (1355–71), a description capped by the blunt statement:

[1] See Berger, "F-Fragment," 155–56; for the demande in the Knight's Tale, see Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire, 210, and Fichte, Chaucer's "Art Poetical," 85.

And in his geere for all the world he ferde
Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye
Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye,
Engendred of humour malencolik
Biforen, in his celle fantastik.
            (1372–76)

Arcite's behavior suggested not merely lovesickness but actual clinical insanity or mania. A similar effect is obtained by the later description of Arcite musing in the grove:

Into a studie he fil sodeynly,
As doon thise loveres in hir queynte geres,
Now in the crope, now doun in the breres,
Now up, now doun, as boket in a welle.
            (1530–33)

The Knight's willingness to generalize ("thise loveres") and his over-homely colloquialism make plain his lack of identification with the state of mind of a romantic lover. Clearly he is more willing to speak out about such matters in Part II than he was in Part I.

One result of this willingness is the foregrounding of the Knight himself as an agent, whose activity as a storyteller comes to occupy a more central position in the telling. Indeed, as the tale proceeds he goes out of his way to call attention to his telling by making the seams of the story awkwardly conspicuous, as, for example, in his presentation of the meeting of Palamon and Arcite in the grove. The presence of the escaped Palamon hiding in the bushes deflects attention from the lyric intensity of Arcite's soliloquy reviewing the irony of his fate (1542–71) because it stresses the way some of the things he says are there to satisfy the needs of exposition: "But ther as I was wont to highte Arcite,/Now highte I Philostrate, noght worth a myte" (1557–58) is something Palamon needs to know for the action to proceed. A few lines later Arcite concludes his meditations with appropriate despair by falling into a trance "a longe tyme" (1573). Palamon, feeling a cold sword slide through his heart at his cousin's revelations, "As he were wood, with face deed and pale" (1578), starts up out of the bushes to deliver an impassioned denunciation. We, alas, wondering what happened to the awkward pause that must have occurred while Palamon waited for Arcite to wake up, may notice how conspicuously the

narrator is sacrificing narrative consistency to local effect. His manner of proceeding brings out his presence and agency in the story, the extent to which he is rigging it for his own purposes as he proceeds.^[2]

It is in this light, I think, that we must view the various allusions to Fortune, destiny, and the hidden order governing human life in this part of the tale. Far from functioning as serious attempts to identify a larger pattern of meaning in the events of the story, these reflections are placed so as to call attention to the improbable tissue of coincidences, the bits of lucky timing and the fortuitous meetings, that make up the plot.^[3] The Knight goes out of his way to remind us "Yet somtyme it shal fallen on a day/That falleth nat eft withinne a thousand yeer" (1668–69)—that is, to remind us just how unlikely it is that not only Palamon and Arcite but also Theseus should end up in the same grove at the same time. Passages like "The destinee, ministre general" (1663ff, discussed above in the Introduction, pp. 4–5) or "feeld hath eyen and the wode hath eres" (1522), precisely because they are overblown in their contexts and invoke too grandiose a set of causes for the minor events they are supposed to cause, make us more aware that the story is being rigged by its narrator to arrange the events of the plot to suit his own ends and, indeed, to comment on the tale as it comes to him from the old books.

The point is not that the Knight is telling his story ineptly. Rather, he is deliberately exaggerating certain of its features to bring out more clearly the buried assumptions about human action that are prepackaged in the style as well as the events of old heroic tales. This purpose is one reason he is so interested in conventions and conventional language, in epic styles of warring and romance styles of loving: he knows that conventional style, like any style, is itself a form of action in the world with its own particular implications. If the skeptical humor of his comments suggests that he is not enchanted by courtly

[2] See Blake. "Order and the Noble Life," 17–18.

[3] "The Knight's narrow selection from the Teseida of times, places and characteristics of the players in the drama deepens the story's already inherent improbability and throws into relief a series of momentary events which, because they are not related in logical and obvious ways, invariably produce conflicts of perception. In general, the Knight's emphasis on disconnected moments and tableaux instead of on sequence and motivation has the effect of focusing our attention on the curious dichotomies under whose auspices life and action take place." Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire, 235. See her discussion of "The destinee, ministre general," 236–37.

conventions, in the sense that he is not taken in by them, and is on the whole disinclined to credit a romantic view of knightly loving, the consistent bearing of his interventions makes the further point that he is also disenchanted in the more technical sense that we have already examined in the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath: what the characters and the old books see as the product of transcendent forces the Knight identifies as humanly originated.

This disenchanted perspective is in fact present in Part I, though in the relatively tacit form characteristic of that section of the poem. As a contrast to the Theban cousins' general and constant tendency to ascribe their condition to all sorts of cosmic powers—to Arcite's "So stood the hevene whan that we were born" (1090) or to Palamon's "But I moot been in prisoun thurgh Saturne,/And eek thurgh Juno, jalous and eek wood" (1328–29)—the Perothous episode, for example, calls attention to a more proximate and practical level of causality in the story. Most immediately, Palamon and Arcite are not in prison because of Fortune or the gods but because of Theseus.^[4] It is he who put them there, and it is he who releases Arcite without ransom, not because of fate but because of his old friend (and Arcite's) Perothous. A similar effect is provided by juxtaposing the circumstantial account of the "forward, pleynly for t'endite" (1209) that Theseus lays down for Arcite's exile (1210–18) with Arcite's long-winded courtly woe at receiving his freedom, in which he speaks of Fortune, providence, the elements, and the uncertainty of the human condition without once mentioning Theseus's part in his misfortune. When Palamon, bewailing his own continuing imprisonment, remarks that now Arcite will be able to go back to Thebes, raise an army, and win Emelye (1285–94), the fact that this course of action never occurs to Arcite stresses his continuing passivity, the unquestioning way he accepts whatever life hands him and treats it as fate. His comment "Now is my prisoun worse than biforn" (1224) points up the extent to which his manacles are mind-forged and his prison more a state of mind than a set of real circumstances since he continues to inhabit it once he is out. Even in Part I of the tale the Knight's presentation continually suggests a set of

[4] As A. J. Minnis succinctly puts it, "Although Theseus has sentenced Arcite and Palamon to life-imprisonment, they tend to blame their plight on fortune and the stars and not on their captor." Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 122. Chauncey Wood has a trenchant analysis of the cousins' misuses of astrology, Chaucer and the Country of the Stars, 45–47.

causes of the action—"natural" or sexual forces, political expediencies or social relations—to which Palamon and Arcite apparently remain unresponsive and which in fact their projective, cosmically obsessed style of consciousness actively prevents them from seeing. In Part II, however, these causes are brought forward and displayed more prominently in what amounts to a representation of practical consciousness in action and a fuller representation of the institutional character of genre.

Palamon and Arcite: Epic and Romance as Practice

Let us return to Arcite's lonely vigil in Thebes. After his misery has lasted "a yeer or two," a period the Knight dismisses a bit impatiently with "What sholde I al day of his wo endite?" (1380), Arcite has a vision in a dream:

Hym thoughte how that the wynged god Mercurie
Biforn hym stood and bad hym to be murie.
His slepy yerde in hond he bar uprighte;
An hat he werede upon his heris brighte.
Arrayed was this god, as he took keep,
As he was whan that Argus took his sleep;
And seyde hym thus :"To Atthenes shaltou wende,
Ther is thee shapen of thy wo an ende."
And with that word Arcite wook and sterte.
            (1385–93)

The presentation here allows the suspicion that this vision is less a Macrobian oraculum than a product of Arcite's condition.^[5] We have already been told that he is disordered in his "celle fantastik," the part of his brain that is responsible for producing images, and "Hym thoughte" keeps the question open. But more important is the comic brusqueness of the god's appearance and message because of the way it is played off against a more detailed account of the consequences. Though Arcite begins by deciding heroically to see Emelye and die (1394–98), he quickly recognizes the new advantages of his changed appearance:

[5] The point is noted by Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk, 44.

And with that word he caughte a greet mirour,
And saugh that chaunged was al his colour,
And saugh his visage al in another kynde.
And right anon it ran hym in his mynde,
That, sith his face was so disfigured
Of maladye the which he hadde endured,
He myghte wel, if that he bar hym lowe,
Lyve in Atthenes evermoore unknowe,
And seen his lady wel ny day by day.
And right anon he chaunged his array,
And cladde hym as a povre laborer,
And al allone, save oonly a squier
That knew his privetee and al his cas,
Which was disgised povrely as he was,
To Atthenes is he goon the nexte way.
             (1399–1413)

The theatricality and self-consciousness of Arcite's gesture (there is no mirror, large or small, in Boccaccio) is heightened by the immediacy and detail of his mental calculations, which focus on the practical possibilities of his appearance, and this practicality is extended to the rest of the episode. Arcite returns to Athens romantically all alone— save for a squire carefully disguised to match his master. Arcite offers himself romantically "to drugge and drawe" (1416) for his ladylove, and this action is only reasonable since, as the Knight unromantically explains a few lines later, "he was yong and myghty for the nones,/And therto he was long and big of bones" (1423–24). It appears that Arcite's plan to serve in romantic humbleness has not taken sufficient account of his innate "gentilesse," a quality that is at once apparent to everyone (1417–21, 1431–41), and results in his rapid advancement in Theseus's service. But even this storybook rise is presented with a less-than-romantic attention to the financial considerations that help make it possible. Theseus, impressed with the young man, puts him into more "worshipful servyse" (1435) so that Arcite can exercise his "vertu" and gives him "gold to mayntene his degree" (1441). Moreover:

And eek men broghte hym out of his contree,
From yeer to yeer, ful pryvely his rente;
But honestly and slyly he it spente,
That no man wondred how that he it hadde.
          (1442–45)

Throughout the episode both the supernatural instigation of the events and their idealized romantic quality are subordinated to the decisive and well-planned character of the enterprise and undermined by the Knight's insistence on how well everyone knows how to "go on" in their mastery of the practical human actions and necessities on which the alarums and excursions of the romance image are grounded.

The Knight presents Palamon's escape from Theseus's prison similarly. First the hero's plight is summarized with grisly relish:

In derknesse and horrible and strong prisoun
This seven yeer hath seten Palamoun
Forpyned, what for wo and for distresse.
Who feeleth double soor and hevynesse
But Palamon, that love distreyneth so
That wood out of his wit he goth for wo?
And ek therto he is a prisoner
Perpetully, noght oonly for a yer.
          (1451–58

Palamon is in jail perpetually, that is, within nine lines he will be out:

It fel that in the seventhe yer, of May
The thridde nyght as olde bookes seyn,
That al this storie tellen moore pleyn),
Were it by aventure or destynee—
As, whan a thyng is shapen, it shal be—
That soone after the mydnyght Palamoun,
By helpyng of a freend, brak his prisoun.
        (1462–68)

The ascription of that most useless of facts in a story of this kind, a precise date, to the old books does indeed bring them forward for a moment in all the irrelevance and diffuseness the Knight is trying to reduce to order. Such features of their style as the cavalier dispensing of vast amounts of time and the lip service paid to notions like "aventure or destinee" are quickly overwhelmed by matters of more immediate concern and by more proximate causes: the "helpyng of a freend," the detailed recipe for the narcotic that gets the jailer out of the way (1470–74), and Palamon's practical plans to raise an army when he gets back to Thebes. Once again the text focuses on what the heroes do for themselves and how they go about doing it.

It is, I think, sufficiently clear in the examples just examined that neither the characters nor the "original" version of the story from which the narrating Knight is working quite share his disenchanted perspective. That perspective is conveyed by his extrafictional comments and by his disposition of narrative and stylistic elements that in themselves do not reflect the emphasis on human agency that this telling generates, which suggests that part of his aim is a reflexive critique of those elements themselves. That is, his active handling of the tale is increasingly directed toward exposing how conventional chivalry as an institution and conventional romance as a form encourage the mystification of human agency. He counters this mystification, to which the cousins are prey, by identifying his own agency and the demands of the practical world at work beneath the surface of style and events. He brings out a "real" situation which Palamon, Arcite, and the old books mistake for the operation of Fortune, destiny, and the gods—for the way things are.

For the Knight, the most important matters elided or glossed over by his sources are the workings of eros and politics in human life. It is significant that he insists on joining the two together when, for the first time in the tale, he steps back to reflect in his own voice on its meaning:

O Cupide, out of alle charitee!
O regne, that wolt no felawe have with thee!
Ful sooth is seyd that love ne lordshipe
Wol noght, his thankes, have no felaweshipe.
Wel fynden that Arcite and Palamoun.
          (1623–27)

It is precisely their confusion of the relations between love, lordship, and "felaweshipe" or society that most consistently draws the Knight's fire on Palamon and Arcite, as in the Perothous episode, and that he seems most at pains to bring out. He keeps us aware of these elements operating behind and controlling our view of the action and especially our view of the Theban cousins.

The most important political element in the poem is the Theban question, despite the fact that the story appears on the surface largely to disregard it. In fact Thebes is constantly present. In Boccaccio when Theseus takes the city, in Book II of the Teseida, he razes it to the ground and scatters its people at the instigation of the Argive women, so that when Arcite is released from Athens, he has no city to return to;

Book IV then details his wanderings over Greece. That the city is not destroyed in the Knight's Tale makes it easier for the narrator to keep "Thebes with his olde walks wyde" (1880, cf. 1331) hovering in the background of the story in a more sinister way and makes its exclusion from the foreground more conspicuous. The allusive relation of this story to the Thebaid has a similar function. As Haller points out ("Epic Tradition," 44ff), the story keeps bringing up kinstrife as a Theban tradition, here transposed from lordship to love: Palamon and Arcite are blood kin and sworn brothers whose relationship deteriorates in ways that recall Eteocles and Polynices, and the love-and-lordship passage, which articulates these themes, occurs at a moment when the cousins are about to repeat a version of the final single combat of the brothers.^[6] As Haller also suggests (71), Palamon and Arcite, being innocent of the meaning of Theban history or unable to learn from it, seem doomed to repeat it.

But it is not accurate to say that the Theban cousins are entirely unaware of the political dimension of their situation. Palamon's plan to bring an army back to Athens, for instance, which is twice enunciated though never carried out, is one of the ways the issue is kept before us, and it is bound to suggest that he has some awareness of political possibilities: he may well suspect that Thebes is only waiting for a leader like him.^[7] In fact, for men obsessed with love, both of the heroes think about Thebes a good deal from their first sight of Emelye on. Palamon looks to the lady, as Venus, for the relief of "oure lynage" (1 560) the first time he addresses her, and Arcite is still brooding about the fate of the city more than seven years later when he goes to pay homage to May in the grove. Both men keep the presence of Thebes alive in the story, though not, apparently, at the center of their attention, which is directed to Emelye. Arcite's soliloquy in the grove, framed as a lover's lament, provides one of the best and most suggestive examples of the effect:

[6] See also McCall, Chaucer Among the Gods, 90–91.

[7] Indeed, it is not clear to me that Arcite is entirely unaware of the bearing of Theban history on his situation. I find his remark, "And therfore at the kynges court, my brother,/Ech man for hymself, ther is noon oother" (1181–82, emphasis added), suggestive, as also his example of the released prisoner "That in his hous is of his meynee slayn" (1258), if only as examples of how his sensibility may have been formed by the Theban experience.

"Allas," quod he, "that day that I was bore!
How longe, Juno, thurgh thy crueltee,
Woltow werreyen Thebes the citee?
Allas, ybroght is to confusioun
The blood roial of Cadme and Amphioun—
Of Cadmus, which that was the firste man
That Thebes bulte, or first the toun bigan,
And of the citee first was crouned kyng.
Of his lynage am I and his ofspryng
By verray ligne, as of the stok roial,
And now I am so caytyf and so thral,
That he that is my mortal enemy,
I serve hym as his squier povrely.
And yet dooth Juno me wel moore shame,
For I dar noght biknowe myn owene name;
But ther as I was wont to highte Arcite,
Now highte I Philostrate, noght worth a myte.
Allas, thou felle Mars! Allas, Juno!
Thus hath youre ire oure lynage al fordo,
Save oonly me and wrecched Palamoun,
That Theseus martireth in prisoun.
And over al this, to sleen me outrely
Love hath his firy dart so brennyngly
Ystiked thurgh my trewe, careful herte
That shapen was my deeth erst than my sherte.
Ye sleen me with youre eyen, Emelye!
Ye been the cause wherfore that I dye.
Of al the remenant of myn oother care
Ne sette I nat the montance of a tare,
So that I koude doon aught to youre plesaunce."
       (1542–71)

It is clear enough that Arcite has not forgotten the plight of Thebes in pursuing Emelye. It seems instead to be constantly on his mind, something he feels the need to unburden himself of when he is alone, and in fact fully two-thirds of the speech is given over to it. The issue of hopeless love arises only in the last nine lines, so that when Arcite declares that his lovesickness sets his "oother care" at naught, we are inclined to doubt him. Juno and Mars are blamed most strongly at those points in the speech where if the gods were not against him, Arcite might well feel that his city and his lineage would require him to take some action against the very Theseus he now serves as a lovestruck squire. Arcite's pseudonym, Philostrate, says something about his motives in choosing it because it explicitly proposes (to Theseus,

among others) a role for him at court as love-struck, which confines him to a conventional form of loving and excludes political or heroic possibilities. The soliloquy suggests that this role has its burdens in terms of what it excludes. These are matters that, from a heroic point of view, Arcite cannot afford to consider too closely because of his position as servant to his mortal enemy. We see that he is blaming the gods where he might more plausibly blame Theseus, but we also see why.^[8]

In the light of all this badly displaced political concern, it looks as if Arcite, having named his rival and cousin together with the enemy he serves, switches abruptly to the overmastering pains of love as a means of escape from what would otherwise be a paralyzing consciousness of the contradictions that beset him and of the possibility that he might have to do something to resolve them himself. It is better, he seems to think, to concentrate on Emelye's eyes than to challenge Theseus. The speech is a paradigm of the conspicuous displacement of epic and political concerns into love and chivalry first noted with respect to Palamon's gaze at Emelye and typical of the first part of the poem in general. Those concerns are half concealed in such a way that they remain active, present-as-excluded to haunt the characters and the tale. Epic is not simply transposed by Chaucer or even the Knight so that, as Haller puts it, love "takes the place of the usual political center of the epic" "Epic Tradition," 68). Rather, we see that the Theban princes are portrayed as making this transposition themselves. They try to confine themselves to lovers' roles and defend themselves against unwelcome or insupportable practical and political responsibility by disclaiming it in favor of gods, fates, and the power of love. These characters are in mauvaise foi in the technical, Sartrean sense: they are actively concealing from themselves their complicity in their situations, a procedure Harry Berger, Jr., calls practical unconsciousness:

Let's assume with Giddens that 'every social actor knows a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a member,' and can draw upon 'tacit stocks of knowledge . . . in the

[8] I might note in passing that Arcite's account of Thebes and its fate moves at once from Cadmus and Amphion, the founders of the city, to himself, omitting the entire history of the royal line from Oedipus through Eteocles and Polynices to Creon. It thus skips over the relatively recent history of human choices and conflicts for which human responsibility might have to be assigned, in favor of a more flattened, fated image. The history most relevant to Arcite's current situation is conspicuous by its absence.

constitution of social activity': this is practical consciousness. Practical unconsciousness is then the tacit knowledge of techniques for occluding, ignoring, forgetting, whatever knowledge one has that interferes with belief in one's commitment to a discourse. The successful reduction of agents to conduits [for institutional structures] presupposes the discursive ability to find and apply the arguments by which they can convince themselves and, if necessary, deceive themselves. To give Kant's dictum a Sartrean skew, when it is necessary to curtail knowledge in order to make room for bad faith, practical unconsciousness is put to work.^[9]

What begins in the description of Emelye's garden as a gesture of the Knight's in shifting from one kind of literary world to another has, by this point in the poem, been identified more clearly as a psychic process of characters who adopt and internalize available conventions of behavior as a response to the difficulties of their situations. The Knight makes an issue of what it means to tell an epic story in romance terms by presenting us with characters who try to live their lives in terms of generic deflections of this sort.

We are now in a position to begin to account more fully for the Knight's uses of genre in the tale and for the attitudes those uses embody. The Knight would almost certainly agree with Northrop Frye that romance is a form of fantasy, "the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality, but will still contain that reality" (Anatomy of Criticism, 110), but he also agrees—in practice—with Fredric Jameson that "genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts . . . , whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact" (Political Unconscious, 106) and that such uses are themselves inherently ideological.^[10] The Knight's disenchantment extends to his treatment of the traditional genres of epic and romance: he sees that what others, including Palamon and Arcite, have taken for objective structures of experience is in reality a set of human constructions or institutions that

[9] Berger, "What Did the King Know?" 831.

[10] "Genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, . . . form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right" (Political Unconscious, 141). Jameson's chapter on genre and romance, "Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism," 103–50, which is in part a critical commentary on the sentence just quoted from Frye, is of great theoretical interest. Its discussion of romance, however, is of little use for Chaucer, in large part because of Jameson's concentration on what might be called post-precapitalist formations to the neglect, among other things, of medieval romance.

attempt to answer to human wishes and human fears. In the case of romance his portrayal of such things as Arcite's soliloquy shows his understanding of the practical psychological uses of courtly conventions, but his more general handling of generic styles demonstrates an awareness as well of the larger ideological interests and social agencies genres carry. This complex psychological and social awareness emerges most clearly in the early stages of the poem from the Knight's tracing of institutional relations and his presentation of the interplay between epic and romance elements.

When early in Part II Arcite goes to the grove to bewail his unhappy fate, the narration is full of studied verbal and situational echoes of the garden/prison scene in Part I. He rides "to doon his observaunce to May" (1500) on a courser "startlynge as the fir" (1502), which image evokes the pricking of the season in Arcite by a kind of synecdoche. When he arrives, he sings a song in praise of "faire, fresshe May," makes a garland as Emelye did (1507–12), and "rometh up and doun" as before. His soliloquy on the fate of Thebes and the malice of the gods is close in theme and spirit to his first speech in the prison, and when Palamon accosts him, the argument that develops between the two is essentially the same as it was at first, a point Palamon himself recognizes with his "As I ful ofte have told thee heerbiforn" (1584). The Knight goes to some trouble to evoke a sense of a scene replayed, which here has the effect of emphasizing how little difference the seven intervening years have made. Palamon and Arcite are still at the mercy of erotic forces they do not understand, still held prisoner by their own projective evasions of responsibility for their situations, still defensively repeating the same conventional postures.

But the evocation of similarity functions here as a ground for the presentation of differences so that the new elements play back on the opening of the tale. Just as the Wife of Bath reinterprets earlier moments of her prologue by later ones, so the Knight revises the first part of his story retrospectively by supplying a new version of it that fills in what was previously left out. In the case of the duel in the grove the new material centers on the issue of male competition and its relation to institutions. As the two cousins prepare for their combat, the Knight focuses on the oddity of knightly ritual conducted privately and solemnly in the wilderness. His description moves jarringly from the slightly absurd stiffness of the formalities between the two knights to the animal ferocity of their combat:

Ther nas no good day, ne no saluyng,
But streight, withouten word or rehersyng,
Everich of hem heelp for to armen oother
As freendly as he were his owene brother;
And after that, with sharpe speres stronge
They foynen ech at oother wonder longe.
Thou myghtest wene that this Palamon
In his fyghting were a wood leon,
And as a crueel tigre was Arcite;
As wilde bores gonne they to smyte,
That frothen whit as foom for ire wood.
Up to the ancle foghte they in hir blood.
And in this wise I lete hem fightyng dwelle,
And forth I wole of Theseus yow telle.
      (1649–62)

Theseus's observation that the two "fighten heere/Withouten juge or oother officere,/As it were in a lystes roially" (1711–13) catches some of the effect and again points up its peculiarity.

The Knight does not, however, view the combat simply as absurd. The animal imagery brings out as well a sense that the fight is not just a game and that powerful natural forces are in play and serious consequences at stake; the latter point is heightened by the intrusive simile on the "hunters in the regne of Trace" (1638):

That stondeth at the gappe with a spere,
Whan hunted is the leon or the bere,
And hereth hym come russhyng in the greves,
And breketh bothe bowes and the leves,
And thynketh, "Heere cometh my mortal enemy!
Withoute faille, he moot be deed, or I."
        (1639–44)

Only Robert Hanning has taken note of this extraordinary passage, which is, as he points out, unique to the Knight and Chaucer.^[11] He is right to call it Hemingwayesque; to my knowledge it is matched as a portrayal of the specifically psychological disturbances of the chivalric experience only by Froissart's eerie account of the Counts of Foix in Book III of the Chronicles. Here the voice of the narrator identifies in the present tense with the anxiety of the hunters and imagines it more

[11] Hanning, "'Noble Designs and Chaos,'" 536–37.

vividly than the actual combat between Palamon and Arcite with its conventional blood-up-to-the-ankles. The Knight's intervention allows some of the real terror of fighting to invade the more distant and literary scene.

But precisely because of this heightened intensity and realism there is something admirable about Palamon and Arcite's attempt to contain their violence in chivalric formality. Though the Knight may feel that these forms are misplaced and misapplied here, they nonetheless do much to keep animal ferocity in check and prevent the fight from being merely that struggle of dogs over a bone that Arcite had predicted, and they lend the proceedings a certain measure of dignity. There is something right about the two knights' instincts for control, if not about their enactment of them, and this sense is a clue to the value the Knight sees in romance forms and ideals.^[12] The duel in the grove is a moment when the undercurrent of aggression that has marked relations between Palamon and Arcite almost from the beginning of the tale threatens to explode into overt violence, and as such it supplies a gloss on the earlier scenes—on just such things as Arcite's dog-and-bone image, for example—of competitive wrangling between them. This sort of individualistic and violent contentiousness is of course more openly displayed in epic, which could be thought of as the ideology of this strife and striving at the roots of manhood and society, an ideology that glorifies as heroic character what is here more bluntly seen as a battle of beasts. From this perspective there is real value in romance when considered as the ideology of a chivalry that favors and sustains values like courtesy, loyalty, service, justice, and community over the strife of each against all that the unmitigated heroic ideal threatens to become. Seen in this light, the duel in the grove helps us read the initial move from epic to romance in the poem as the assertion of a more refined and more socialized drive to order, though one that is in the case of the Theban cousins mostly unconscious, and helps explain the positive side of the Knight's ambivalence toward courtly conventions.

The negative side of that ambivalence arises from the Knight's awareness that romance can too easily lose touch with the fundamental heroic contentiousness and self-assertion that it tries to sublimate and can too easily encourage the belief that what has been covered up

[12] The passage is well discussed by Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 112.

has thereby ceased to exist. This self-deceiving tendency in romance sensibility makes the Knight as suspicious of it as he is attracted to it and leads to the procedures whereby he continually questions his romance by continually calling attention to the displaced epic motives that underlie its chivalrous postures. In the case of Palamon and Arcite the trouble is that even given their freedom, the most they seem to be able to do—the most, so to speak, that they are presently fit for—is to reproduce these postures in a way that masks, without genuinely mitigating, the erotic and aggressive motives and the practical and political concerns they merely displace.

Though the Knight, by situating these romance conventions in the world of his more hardheaded and colloquial sensibility, can show that this is so, he does not find in Palamon and Arcite the capability to change things or the opportunity to bring his interests into the story more directly so as to give them more concrete embodiment and play. This situation has partly to do with the condensation of epic thus far in the story, with absolute power and heroic efficacy located exclusively in the figure of Theseus at the beginning of the tale and repressed elsewhere. One consequence of the flight of Palamon and Arcite from the epic and political implications of their situation is that they are strikingly subservient to Theseus throughout the story in the ways they think as much as in their actions. They are constantly accusing one another of being traitor to Theseus, and Palamon even accuses himself once: "I am thilke woful Palamoun/That hath thy prisoun broken wikkedly" (1734–35). The sterility of their conventional postures derives in part from the fact that they have little opportunity for more effective action, though the Knight also shows that they internalize and embrace their helplessness, however unconsciously. This helplessness is in large part, of course, a function of the plot. The totality of Theseus's achievement at the beginning of the poem, leaving him with moral superiority, military victory, and all the women, has ultimately something totalitarian about it. It creates an imbalance of power that blocks political compromise and resolution as well as natural generation and continuity. Theseus is so completely the primal father that I sometimes wonder at the paucity of psychoanalytic commentary on the tale, though in the Knight's world the tendency of competitive, heroic ellen to absorb all the available lof to itself, leaving those unable to compete unmanned if not precisely emasculated, seems more apt.

Theseus really is something like Beowulf, at least at the beginning of the tale.^[13]

At any rate, given the circumstances, there will have to be a redistribution of power. The hovering threat of Thebes will have to be recognized so that it can be dealt with, and sexuality and generation will have to find more direct and available channels of expression if the forces of eros and society—these are, after all, the classic themes of romance, love, and war—are to achieve adequate representation in the world of the tale. Since power over these forces is presently, if unrealistically, locked up in Theseus, and since no one else in the tale seems capable of gaining access to them, the only way to socialize his arbitrary power will be for him to give some of it up.

Theseus: Impersonation as Revision

The Knight's account of Theseus's hunting suggests that the duke also feels the prick of the season in his way, that he too is subject to its forces:

This mene I now by myghty Theseus,
That for to hunten is so desirus,
And namely at the grete herte in May,
That in his bed ther daweth hym no day
That he nys clad, and redy for to ryde
With hunte and horn and houndes hym bisyde.
      (1673–78)

In Theseus's case it is the aggressive or epic inflection of seasonal energy that is particularly stressed, in keeping with his heroic nature. Theseus's choice of prey gives the Knight the opportunity for verbal play with the notion of the "grete herte" (the latter word is repeated four times in fifteen lines),^[14] bringing out that for Theseus, to serve Diana after Mars (1682) is to sublimate his fundamental urge for mastery from war to hunting. We know, though Theseus does not, that Palamon and Arcite are in the grove "In which ther was an hert, as men hym tolde" (1689), and they are great hearts, men dangerous as wild beasts (as we are again reminded when they are described as fighting

[13] See Berger and Leicester, "Social Structure as Doom."

[14] The pun is noted by Van, "Second Meanings," 71–72.

"breme, as it were bores two" at 1699) and proper objects for Theseus's "vertu." It is thus no surprise that he throws himself between them and demands to know what they are doing.

As in the case of Arcite's journey to the grove, the description of the scene connects it with an earlier one, this time with the opening scene of the poem.^[15] Theseus is riding, as before, "With his Ypolita, the faire queene,/And Emelye, clothed al in grene" (1685–86). When he comes upon the dueling princes, "Under the sonne he looketh, and anon/He was war of Arcite and Palamon" (1697–98), which echoes "He was war, as he caste his eye aside" (896) in the earlier episode. Once again he acts immediately and decisively, and once again his assertion of control is harsh and direct, a judgment delivered without pause or second thought:

This is a short conclusioun.
Youre owene mouth, by youre confessioun,
Hath dampned yow, and I wol it recorde;
It nedeth noght to pyne yow with the corde.
Ye shal be deed, by myghty Mars the rede!
      (1743–47)

The point of these parallels emerges in what follows the closest of them, the reaction of the weeping women who throw themselves at Theseus's feet, crying "Have mercy, Lord, upon us wommen alle!" (1757), a direct echo of "Have on us wrecched wommen som mercy" (950), spoken by the Argive widow from a similar position. The Knight asserts his control of the story here and calls attention to this scene as a replay of the first to focus attention on what changes and on the light the changes cast retrospectively on the opening of the poem. It is clear that Theseus shows himself in a new light as he masters his ire, exercises his empathy with the lovers ("I woot it by myself ful yore agon,/For in my tyme a servant was I oon" [1813–14]), and applies new methods to a new situation. It is also clear that there is more empathy (from Theseus) and sympathy (from the women) available in this scene than previously. People are less hieratically separated from one another, better able to appreciate the feelings and problems of others, and more inclined to compromise and make exceptions. A fairly common observation of readers is that Theseus changes and even im-

[15] The echoes are noted by Cooper, Structure of the Canterbury Tales, 95.

proves.^[16] The effect of the change is that Theseus begins to give expression to precisely those concerns whose exclusion up to now has stalled the tale, and this brings him closer to the Knight.

The clearest evidence of this phenomenon is Theseus's speech on love:

The god of love, a benedicite!
How myghty and how greet a lord is he!
Ayeyns his myght ther gayneth none obstacles.
He may be cleped a god for his myracles,
For he kan maken, at his owene gyse,
Of everich herte as that hym list divyse.
Lo heere this Arcite and this Palamoun,
That quitly weren out of my prisoun,
And myghte han lyved in Thebes roially,
And witen I am hir mortal enemy,
And that hir deth lith in my myght also,
And yet hath love, maugree hir eyen two,
Broght hem hyder bothe for to dye.
Now looketh, is nat that an heigh folye?
Who may been a fool but if he love?
Bihoold, for Goddes sake that sit above,
Se how they blede! Be they noght wel arrayed?
Thus hath hir lord, the god of love, ypayed
Hir wages and hir fees for hir servyse!
And yet they wenen for to been ful wyse
That serven love, for aught that may bifalle.
But this is yet the beste game of alle,
That she for whom they han this jolitee
Kan hem therfore as muche thank as me.
She woot namoore of al this hoote fare,
By God, than woot a cokkow or an hare!
      (1785–1810)

This speech echoes and develops the Knight's own speech beginning "O Cupide, out of alle charitee!" (1623ff), reproducing the tone of its ironic praise of love and giving voice for the first time in the world of the characters to an assessment of Palamon and Arcite's behavior that reflects the Knight's own feelings about it. Theseus's criticism of courtly loving singles out the themes of love and lordship and the lack

[16] See, for example, Huppé, Reading of the Canterbury Tales, 66–67; Haller, "Epic Tradition," 82; Fifield, "The Knight's Tale," 101–2; Van, "Theseus and the 'Right Way,'" passim.

of social payoff, of a link between service and reward, which the Knight earlier commented on. Conventional loving of Palamon and Arcite's sort creates a situation in which an outside observer, judging from a feudal perspective, has to say that love is a bad lord.

What happens in the poem after the women plead for mercy is that Theseus becomes a spokesman for the Knight and brings his concerns into the story directly and explicitly almost for the first time.^[17] He is used to reflect more accurately the tacit elements of the world of the tale that the Knight has been trying to bring out. To begin with, though Theseus does experience a feeling of "pitee" based on his ability to understand Palamon and Arcite, it is not the only reason he does what he does. When the Knight says that Theseus "spak thise same wordes al on highte" (1784, emphasis added), he reflects an awareness of the difference between thoughts spoken "softe" to oneself and a public speech, and the speech itself is among other things a political action. If Palamon and Arcite seem inattentive to the question of Thebes (and we may reflect that it has been lucky for Theseus that this is so), the duke himself is not. His characterization of the situation shows hisawareness of political possibilities that have not been realized in the tale thus far but whose continuing threat he recognizes in the act of fore-stalling it.

Lo heere this Arcite and this Palamoun,
That quitly weren out of my prisoun,
And myghte han lived in Thebes roially,
And witen I am hir mortal enemy,
And that hir deth lith in my myghte also.
      (1791–95)

And ye shul bothe anon unto me swere
That nevere mo ye shal my contree dere,
Ne make werre upon me nyght ne day,
But been my freendes in all that ye may.
      (1821–24)

[17] There is a parallel here with the partial taking over of the voices of Palamon and Arcite at the end of Part I. We can actually watch the process taking place in the lines that lead up to the "god of love" speech. As Theseus's ire is mastered by his reason, his reflections are presented first in indirect discourse, "As thus: he thoghte wel that every man/Wol helpe hymself in love, if that he kan" (1767–68), where certain details sound like things the Knight agrees with and amplifies or explains to us: "And eek his herte hadde compassioun/Of wommen, for they wepen evere in oon' (1770–71, emphasisadded). As the description proceeds, it moves into directly quoted interior monologue, "And softe unto hymself he seyde, 'Fy'" (1773), and finally into the public discourse that reflects the Knight's own earlier comment.

No doubt Theseus sympathizes with the Thebans' love-stricken condition, but he also sees that that condition and his possession of Emelye give him a tactical advantage in a game the princes do not seem to know they are playing. Theseus is the first character in the tale to recognize and attempt to deal cogently with the lurking political dangers that have hitherto been displaced and that are all the more dangerous for that reason. He makes a project of a more viable relation between love and lordship, a state marriage that will cement a treaty, and in doing so reveals his implicit awareness of the inadequacy of his earlier handling of the Theban problem. The danger of conquest is that it breeds a hidden enemy, the smiler with the knife. The terrible father and the conquering epic hero are more powerful in myth than in life, where they may too easily become targets by the very splendor of their isolation. Theseus's actions here do not spring solely from an unsituated rage for order or a general respect for institutional forms. They are firmly motivated as well by a set of practical concerns that reflect the pressures of the political world.

This is not to say, however, that Theseus becomes any less forceful or dominating in his general style—only that he is being masterful about different things. The language in which he proposes the tournament is remarkable for its assertive tone:

And forthy I yow putte in this degree,
That ech of yow shal have his destynee
As hym is shape, and herkneth in what wyse;
Lo heere youre ende of that I shal devyse.
My wyl is this, for plat conclusion.
      (1841–45)

Thanne shal I yeve Emelya to wyve
To whom that Fortune yeveth so fair a grace.
The lystes shal I maken in this place.
       (1860–61)

This assertiveness too is a reflection of the Knight's sensibility and an index of his active impersonation. In taking explicit responsibility for evoking and channeling destiny and controlling the effects of For-

tune—for giving these extrahuman forces human meaning—Theseus becomes the spokesman for the Knight's demystifying assertion of human agency and the representative of a more realistic and active attitude toward the exercise of human power. Theseus becomes for the Knight a way of situating within the tale his own skeptical attitude toward the passivity that notions like Fortune and destiny can too easily encourage.

Beyond even this purpose, the Knight adopts the role of Theseus as a technique for instituting wholesale revisions in the world of the tale itself. As Theseus takes the situation in hand within the story, so does the Knight outside it. They both take responsibility for the making of meaning, and in fact Theseus is the instrument the Knight uses to do so: the duke's building of the lists and the temples of the gods in Part III is the occasion for the Knight's insertion in the tale of everything it has hitherto excluded or repressed. The opening of the third part of the tale, in keeping with the Knight's emerging emphasis on human agency, concentrates on the hero's activity "the dispence/Of Theseus, that gooth so bisily/To maken up the lystes roially" (1882–84). Theseus designed the lists, paid the workmen (1900), and caused the temples in the walls to be made (1903–5). All this "Hath Theseus doon wroght in noble wyse" (1913). The Knight's concern is to make clear the human origin of the lists and temples, to keep them from looking natural or inevitable as if they had fallen from the sky. This concern, rather than the philistinism that has sometimes been imputed to him, informs the Knight's interest in "dispense." His colloquial, even homely, emphasis on the "mete and wages" (1900) given the workmen and on the fact that the temple of Mars "coste largely of gold a fother" (1908, cf. 2087–92) is demystifying, aimed at keeping the realm of concrete human needs and skills—geometry, carving, "ars-metrike"—before us.

This perspective is enforced and sustained by the Knight's own manner of telling, both in the description of the temples and in Part III as a whole. One of the most notable stylistic features of this section of the poem is its relative stasis and lack of plot, its subordination of narrative and dialogue to description and set speeches. It patently takes time out from the story, interrupting it to concentrate on decorative detail. The effect of this technique is to draw attention away from the story as a succession of events and place it more on scenic factors, on the panorama of the world of the tale rather than its motion. At the same time, however, the technique as the Knight deploys it also calls

attention to his own activity as describer since he is conspicuously the one taking so much time out: "But yet hadde I foryeten to devyse/The noble kervyng . . ." (1914–15). The main movement of the tale in Part III, then, is in the motion of the narrator's voice and consciousness through the description: Part III is more clearly an event of speaking than a succession of external actions. As in the Wife of Bath's Prologue, Part III of the Knight's Tale shifts attention from histoire to récit, from the plot of the story to the plot of the storytelling (see above, chapter 3). In this telling the Knight displays his own choices as to what to describe and how to describe it: "Why sholde I noght as wel eek telle yow al/The portreiture that was upon the wal?" (1967–68). We are thus directed to the interaction of the voice with the scene described, to the point where individual voicing in the present of describing comes to override the visual "objectivity," the pastness, and the traditional iconographic meanings of the "matere."^[18] The Knight's analysis of the human use of institutions such as temples and gods is a product of his own active use of those same institutions. Whatever Theseus may have meant by the lists is subordinated to what the Knight makes them mean.

As we shall see, what the Knight makes the lists mean is an image of the forces he sees at work behind and beneath the surface of the tale, which have hitherto been occluded, and of his own ambivalence toward those forces. He focuses from the beginning on the symbolic possibilities of the lists. He stresses "That swich a noble theatre as it was/I dar wel seyen in this world ther nas" (1885–86) and that "swich a place/Was noon in erthe, as in so litel space" (1895–96). "Theatre" and "so litel space" direct us to the metonymic or microcosmic functions of the scene, whereas the hyperbolic uniqueness of the lists suggests their potentially exemplary qualities. It is as if the whole society of the poem, represented, significantly, by its technologists or "crafty men," comes together under Theseus's direction to build a symbolic image of its own most central concerns.^[19] The Knight's perspective stresses symbolization itself as a specifically human constructive activity undertaken in response to specific human needs and fears.

[18] For accounts of the iconographic traditions of the temples, see McCall, Chaucer Among the Gods, 1–17 (chap. 1) and 68–73 (discussion of the Knight's Tale ). Twycross, Medieval Anadyomene; Kolve, Imagery af Narrative, 113–122.

[19] Compare Page DuBois's clear and elegant summary of the functions of ekphrasis in epic. History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic, 1–8.

It seems to me no accident that the temples of the gods, as the Knight presents them, are largely images of the enemies of culture, images made by culture itself in an effort to contain and control those enemies. That is, the temples are not so much objective representations of divine or natural forces as they are institutions—structures made, consciously or nonconsciously, by human art, human desire, and human terror.

11—
Regarding Knighthood:
A Practical Critique of the "Masculine " Gaze

What has perhaps prevented this description from being properly appreciated is the fact that the allegory does not move and so may not seem to be real allegory. The heart of allegory is that the characters engage in action, for only by what they do can we get the story. . . . Here the figures merely stand, and the reader has to supply the action in his imagination. He must, from his own experience, bring Foolhardyness to life—and the poem gains great vividness when he does—send Messagerye on her errands, and imagine the effect of "Beaute withouten any atyr." If he does so he gets, not a novel, but a realistic Anatomy of Sexual Attraction, which is anything but cold and dull.
Dorothy Bethurum, "The Center of the Parlement of Foules"

Il faut se dire, bêtement, que si on ne peut assimiler—entre eux d'abord—les aphorismes sur la femme et le reste, c'est aussi que Nietzsche n'y voyait pas très clair ni d'un seul clin d'oeil, en un instant, et que tel aveuglement régulier, rythmé, avec lequel on n'en finira jamais, a lieu dans le texte. Nietzsche y est un peu perdu. Il y a de la perte, cela peut s'affirmer, dés qu'il y a hymen. Dans la toile du texte, Nietzsche est un peu perdu, comme une araignée inégale à ce que s'est produit a travers elle, je dis bien comme une araignée ou comme plusieurs araignées, celle de Nietzsche, celle de Mallarmé, celles de Freud et d'Abraham. Il était, il redoutait telle femme châtrée. Il était, il redoutait telle femme castratrice. Il était, il aimait telle femme affirmatrice. Tout cela à la fois, simultanément ou successivement, selon les lieux de son corps et les positions de son histoire, Il avait affaire en lui, à tant de femmes.
Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles

Desire Unmasked: The Temple of Venus

The opening of the description of the temple of Venus immediately raises an issue that will become central to the meaning and function of the three temples in the poem, the issue of the relation of visualization to description, of seeing to language: "First in the temple of Venus maystow se/Wroght on the wal, ful pitous to biholde,/The broken slepes" (I, 1918–20).^[1] The address to the audience in the present tense,

[1] Kolve has noted some of the problems, Imagery of Narrative, 121–22.

as if the temple were still there and available for our actual inspection, stresses its objectivity, its independence of language and the occasion of describing. "Maystow se" thus functions as a pointer to the generalized, perennial quality of the temple and its contents, which is to say its traditional character, and the form of the description, for the most part composed of relatively unanalyzed lists of conventional figures, tends to confirm this quality. We might think of such a posture as inviting imaginative visualization, as asking us to construe ekphrasis as an account of how the object appears; and to a degree, especially toward the end of the description in the account of the statue of the goddess, the passage does appeal to sight. Paradoxically, however, most of the description is not visually oriented. Instead we are given interpretation presented as if it were vision, allegorical and historical-exemplary figures—Narcissus, Solomon, Hercules, "Pleasaunce and Hope, Desir, Foolhardynesse" (1925)—who tell us what the temple means rather than what it looks like. The effect is thus somewhat reminiscent of Theseus's first sight of the Argive widows or Palamon's first sight of Emelye in that it embodies the culture-laden character of what passes for perception, the way a conventional interpretation or reading of eros is already inscribed and naturalized in the visual artifact. At this level if there is anything that unifies the description as a "visual" presentation, it is what Sartrean phenomenologists, and Lacanian psychoanalysts after them, call le regard, the gaze or look of the Other, which refers to the co-optation of the visual field by the social construction of desire and its imposition on the subject.^[2] The nonconscious cultural strategy that lies behind the ascription of this disjunctive, listlike series of juxtaposed elements to the visual field is the

[2] The fullest treatment of "the look" is Sartre's in Being and Nothingness, 340–400. Sartre gives a clear, brief account in "Faces, Preceded by Official Portraits," 157–63. Lacan's discussion is in Seminar XI (1964), reprinted as "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a. " Lacan assumes familiarity with Sartre (though since Sartre does not believe in the unconscious, Lacan is also critical) and the extensions of Sartre in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, and is, for this American reader at least, virtually incomprehensible without them. As in the case of castration and the phallus, the most useful accounts of the look have come out of the feminist appropriation of Lacan, particularly in the area of film theory. See Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," reprinted in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, 2:303–315, along with the bibliography supplied by Nichols on the development of the discussion. I would like to thank Yvonne Rainer for introducing me to this whole discussion and for the skeptical eye she has kept on my attempts to come to terms with it. Her own treatment of these themes, among others, is her film The Man Who Envied Women (1986), which is required viewing for anyone who is trying to think about them.

exploitation of the way sight is structured so as to foster méconnaissance, the belief of, among others, the infant in Lacan's mirror stage, that because something looks like a single object it is in fact a unified whole that belongs in its apparent togetherness.^[3] The image of the temple, and especially the statue of the goddess, thus purports to present in the mode of "ther maystou se," of simple thereness, the content of desire —or at least of male desire. At this level, I take it, the paintings on the wall of the temple represent the vicissitudes of love, and the statue represents its goal, a supposedly timeless image of woman as a beautiful object that draws desire toward it and presents itself as desire's fulfillment.

There is, however, another level at which the description may be taken, a perspective that rereads the cultural text of the temple more textually and, in particular, more contextually. This perspective is that of the narrating Knight, whose deployment of details shapes and qualifies the general presentation, in part by contextualizing the temple in terms of the previous narrative of the tale, and gives the description a critical and negative tone. Though the opening of the passage (1918–35) is superficially balanced in terms of both good and bad aspects of loving—Plesaunce and Hope as well as Bauderie and Force—it begins with a catalogue of the courtly lover's pains and never drifts far from them:

The broken slepes, and the sikes colde, 
The sacred teeris, and the waymentynge, 
The firy strokes of the desirynge 
That loves servantz in this lyf enduren. 
      (1920–23)

Of the flat allegorical personifications barely listed in this opening passage, only one, the last, is actually given a description and an iconography, and this makes her stand out: "Jalousye,/That wered of yelewe gooldes a gerland,/And a cokkow sittynge on hir hand" (1918–30). Jealousy's garland carries us back to the knights' first sight of Emelye in her garden (1054) and to Arcite in the grove (1507), both occasions of jealous wrangling between the cousins.^[4] Palamon and

[3] Lacan, "Mirror Stage." See the helpful discussion by Clément, Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, 84–91.

[4] Cooper, Structure of the Canterbury Tales, 95, has noted the connection between the two scenes, though not the tie to the Temple of Venus.

Arcite are the kind of lovers whose experience we see generalized on the wall of the temple, and the presentation here reduces that style of loving to a mask for the fundamental jealousy that informs it, the contentious and competitive struggle for the object of desire conceived as a possession, not a person. This struggle, masked in this way, is, we may recall, the consistent mode of Palamon and Arcite's love, which is presented primarily as worship of, and rivalry for, a lady who remains abstract and idealized, no realer to them than to us. It is the rivalry that absorbs them. Jealousy herself functions as a kind of symbolic compression and clarification of the object of desire in the male world of the tale; she sums up "the circumstaunces/Of love, which that I rekned and rekne shal" (1932–33) as a female figure who mocks the dream of possession with the symbol of cuckoldry she holds in her hand, pointing to the male fear and distrust of female independence that underlies the idealization.

In fact, the whole of the temple of Venus is unmasked and rendered conspicuous as a mystified version of love by the Knight's handling; his textual dynamism consistently undercuts the static and ideal image the temple was built by culture to present. Prospectively the form of the description is, as I suggested above, relatively disjunctive, listlike, a series of juxtaposed sections. Taken as the presentation of an independent object in the world, this form reflects the way the pleasures and pains of love seem to its "servants" to be enjoyed and endured passively, as if they were external phenomena imposed on lovers piecemeal and arbitrarily from without rather than obeying the inner logic of the will that constitutes them. The temple thus embodies and conceals—in Diane Manning's word, enshrines^[5] —the projection and passivity earlier exemplified in Palamon and Arcite. Within this form, however, a contextual reading constructs a rhizomatic network of connections between both the parts of the description itself and the previous action of the tale, and these connections outline the structure of jealousy and rivalry that, as the Knight sees it, is the truth of chivalric eros.

Thus, the account of the "mount of Citheroun" (1936–54) is formally distinct from what precedes it, another scene on the wall, and may seem at first reading to be a jumble of unrelated traditional elements drawn from the Roman de la Rose and a variety of other

[5] Manning, "Temple of Venus."

classical and Christian sources. It is, however, no accident that the Knight begins this phase of the description with "al the gardyn" (1939), a place that is traditionally guarded by Oiseuse, the carefree otium held to be necessary for the enjoyment of love's deduit, and a place that has been presented in these terms earlier in the poem as Emelye's proper scene. This is the ideal on which Palamon and Arcite have fixed their desire, to the exclusion, as we have seen, of other political and social necessities. In the temple of Venus the effects of desire spread out from the garden into history and society just as they have done in the tale, despite—or because of—the Thebans' failure to attend to them:

Nat was foryeten the porter, Ydelnesse,
Ne Narcisus the faire of yore agon,
Ne yet the folye of kyng Salomon,
Ne yet the grete strengthe of Ercules—
Th' enchauntementz of Medea and Circes—
Ne of Turnus, with the hardy fiers corage,
The riche Cresus, kaytyf in servage.
       (1940–46)

The pressure of the description here is unremittingly negative, stressing the various ways love unmans the masculine, the heroic, the guardians of public life, while turning women into "masculine" avengers who destroy their families and change men into beasts. Male suspicion of Venus and women as the destruction of society is close to the surface in this description, and the whole issue of love and lordship lurks in it only slightly displaced. The Knight's summary of this phase of the tableau catches what is important for him about it:

Thus may ye seen that wysdom ne richesse,
Beautee ne sleighte, strengthe ne hardynesse,
Ne may with Venus holde champartie,
For as hir list the world than may she gye.
Lo, alle thise folk so caught were in hir las,
Til they for wo ful ofte seyde "allas!"
Suffiseth heere ensamples oon or two,
And though I koude rekene a thousand mo.
      (1947–54)

Once again he brings out the essentially martial, masculine terms in which such an image of eros is conceived: "champartie," etymologically is a drawn battle or field of combat (cf. "love ne lordshipe,"

1625ff), where the struggle is for mastery—the strong survive, and the weak go down. Love is a matter of winning, and both the summary listing of the exempla (we are not encouraged by the presentation to reflect deeply on the stories behind the names) and the dismissive final couplet stress the totalizing character of this vision. The narrating Knight seems to be saying, All love stories boil down to this; I will not bore you with further instances.

The Knight's presentation thus produces a critique of the image of woman as goddess and of the self-deception inherent in the idyll (at once ideal, idol, and idle) of love as deduit, escape from strife:

The statue of Venus, glorious for to se,
Was naked, fletynge in the large see,
And fro the navele doun al covered was
With wawes grene, and brighte as any glas.
A citole in hir right hand hadde she,
And on hir heed, ful semely for to se,
A rose gerland, fressh and wel smellynge;
Above hir heed hir dowves flikerynge.
Biforn hire stood hir sone Cupido;
Upon his shuldres wynges hadde he two,
And blynd he was, as it is often seene;
A bowe he bar and arwes brighte and kene.
      (1955–66)

The most important image in this portrait is the garland, not because it is unusual or visually compelling but because of its contextualization in the tale: it is the one detail that connects the statue to other parts of the temple, that is, to the figure of Jealousy. This latter figure flickers just behind and beneath the surface glamor of the statue "fressh and wel smellynge." Her marigolds are the other side of Venus's roses, as the cuckoo's song is of the sound of the "citole." Jealousy is included but displaced as the essential meaning of the image of male desire to which the entire temple reduces. The slightly prurient veiling of the naked goddess from the navel down stresses how posed she is, with her doves and roses, to attract male attention and pursuit, and at the same time hints at how many other important aspects of eros and the feminine this image conceals, as Solomon, Turnus, and the others found to their cost. It is less Cupid's traditional blindness, the arbitrariness of desire as the "masculine" psyche conceives or fantasizes it, that the portrait chooses to emphasize than the "arwes bright and keene" that

conclude it—a martial image and one that picks up the sense conveyed elsewhere in the description of armed threat concealed behind sensuous sweetness. The Knight's portrayal of Venus reveals how selective, how self-deceiving, and ultimately how anxiously distrustful the "masculine" gaze at the female body, and by extension the desire to possess that body, can be.

Dark Imagining: The Temple of Mars and the Look as Aggression

In the description of the Temple of Venus it is a little difficult to tell where the Knight stands in relation to it. Though he seems clearly to identify the aggressive motives that are displaced by the conventional fantasy of deduit, it is also the case that his disenchanted reading of desire seems to spill over onto its object. The temple of Venus presents not desire as such but woman as the enemy, and this presentation is an index of the extent to which the disenchanted reading here remains a simple contrary or mirror of what it purports to criticize. The presentation of the temple simply reverses valences by identifying what is taken for the promise of peace as in fact the cause of strife. This position is, in its misogyny, as traditional and conventional as the more benign idealizing one, a fact that may help to explain why the temple of Venus remains the most opaque and the most literary of the three temples. The extent to which its sources and sensibility are products of the old books, relatively untransformed by the agency of the speaker, is pointed up by contrast with the other temples, especially the temple of Mars, where, without having to speculate on the boyhood of Chaucer's Knight, it is still possible to speak of the emergence of something in the tale that is closer to its narrator's experience.

The Knight's handling of the temple of Venus has at least the advantage of bringing out the predominance of aggressive motives in the pursuit of desire. The temple of Mars focuses on these motives, and on the violent masculinity that the first temple tries to repress, in a much more open way. It lends itself much more richly than the temple of Venus to a contextual reading that revises (in fact literally re-sees) earlier moments in the tale so as to bring out what was earlier concealed by the misleading glorifications of epic and romance convention or the rationalizations and self-deceptions of the characters. Theseus's

temple of Mars is a sort of temple en abîme: it has another temple of Mars painted on the wall inside it.^[6] This second temple is presented as if it were somehow also Theseus's temple: a careful reading establishes that when the northern light shines through the door (1987), the description must shift from the painting on the wall to the "real" building, but the uninterrupted flow of the voice obscures the change. In part this apparent confusion allows the Knight to imagine the temple in its proper and appropriate symbolic landscape as a transformation of previous symbolic places in the tale. The first such scene in the temple is a vision of the garden and the prison reinterpreted as the desolation of nature:

First on the wal was peynted a forest,
In which ther dwelleth neither man ne best,
With knotty, knarry, bareyne trees olde,
Of stubbes sharpe and hidouse to biholde,
In which ther ran a rumbel in a swough,
As though a storm sholde bresten every bough.
And dounward from an hille, under a bente,
Ther stood the temple of Mars armypotente,
Wroght al of burned steel, of which the entree
Was long and streit, and gastly for to see.
And therout came a rage and swich a veze
That it made al the gate for to rese.
The northren lyght in at the dores shoon,
For wyndowe on the wal ne was ther noon,
Thurgh which men myghten any light discerne.
The dore was al of adamant eterne,
Yclenched overthwart and endelong
With iren tough; and for to make it strong,
Every pyler, the temple to sustene,
Was tonne-greet, of iren brighte and shene.
       (1975–94)

This blasted forest is the third picture of a natural landscape in the poem. It is preceded by and linked with the garden and the grove (on which the temple stands) in a progression that moves from generation to destruction and from feminine to masculine. The original garden, as we have seen, is a version of the garden of deduit. It is a fantasy of order and control that attempts, like its original in the Roman de la

[6] See Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, 5:78–79.

Rose , to sublimate sexual and aggressive energies into the forms of courtship and "courtoisie," the idealization of woman and the exclusion of male power. The description of the grove in Part II already qualifies this image by letting some of the wildness and aggression suppressed in the garden back into nature, largely through its images of animal ferocity and the hunt, and by supplying a scene for more aggressive male competition. The forest in the temple shows generative nature overcome by the "armypotente" violence of Mars and reduced to a wasteland hostile to life "in which ther dwelleth neither man ne best." This is the proper setting for the temple of Mars, which, as William Frost noticed, is like a dungeon.^[7] It is in fact specifically reminiscent of Palamon and Arcite's prison "evene joynant to the gardyn wal" (1060) in Part I. Palamon and Arcite, as servants of Venus, believe that the garden controls the prison and that their fate beams in on them from the goddess beyond their bars. The temple of Mars revises this image and registers more accurately the direction of power: the wind of violence that devastates the wood comes from inside the gate of the temple, which is itself shaken by the force it strives to contain. That wind might be taken as a gloss on Palamon's original gaze, forcing its way "thurgh a wyndow, thikke of many a barre/Of iren greet and square as any sparre" to Emelye. The potential for conflict implicit in that gaze has by now broken its prison and taken over the tale. Theseus must strive to recontain it in the very lists within which the temple of Mars now stands.

The Knight's second recapitulation of an earlier scene, Theseus's conquest of Thebes, with the ruined town and "taas" of corpses, is similarly placed in a context that declares the character of battle more openly:

The careyne in the busk, with throte ycorve;
A thousand slayn, and nat of qualm ystorve;
The tiraunt, with the pray by force yraft;
The toun destroyed, ther was no thyng laft.
      (2013–16)

These lines specifically recall the opening of the tale, but they are also part of the larger scene of destruction on the temple wall and therefore

[7] Frost, "Interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale," 111.

function retrospectively to fill in the hints supplied by the "pilours" earlier, giving us the conquest of Thebes as the Knight knows it really was. The temple of Mars, he implies, is what the battlefield looks like, at Thebes and always: "Ther is no newe gyse that it nas old" (2115), as he later remarks. Further, he provides here the clearest direct characterization in the poem of what it is like to be Theseus and of the implications and consequences of heroic preeminence: "Saugh I Conquest, sittynge in greet honour,/With the sharpe swerd over his heed/Hangynge by a soutil twynes threed" (2028–30). The whole of the temple of Mars testifies to the Knight's awareness of the human potential for terrible, mad violence—"woodnesse," criminal insanity, "laughynge in his rage"—and to his determination to reveal it behind the chivalric veils it usually wears. Aggression is for him something deeply rooted in the psyche and the race—perhaps more deeply than eros itself since the temple of Venus suggests that love is only an excuse for strife or leads inevitably to it. The stability of nature and society hangs, like the life of Conquest, by a wire.

We have yet to deal, however, with the strangest feature of the telling, the speaker's shift from "ther maystow se," used in the temple of Venus to "ther saugh I," reiterated five times in thirty-three lines in the description of the temple of Mars. In the first place, this phrase associates the appearance of the temple and its details with the speaker's personal experience, as if he had seen them and were now describing from memory. Though this association may perhaps be appropriate to the more concrete, contextualized style of the account, it sorts oddly with the fiction of ancient Athens and the patently literary character of the description. Even odder is the fact that the distancing effect ordinarily imparted by the past tense is continually countered by the vividness of visualization that dominates the description. The painted scene on the walls of the temple comes alive as a landscape full not only of motion but also of sound, the shaking of doors and the rumbling of winds. As opposed to the static catalogues of allegorical names in the temple of Venus, the figures on the wall of the temple of Mars are seen, and seen in color: "The crueel Ire, reed as any gleede;/The pykepurs, and eke the pale Drede" (1997–98). They take on particular and individual life—or death: "The sleere of hymself yet saugh I ther—/His herte-blood hath bathed al his heer/The nayl ydryven in the shode anyght" (2005–7); or most vivid of all, "Yet saugh I brent

the shippes hoppesteres" (2017), where the precision and originality of the image—burning ships bobbing on the water like dancing girls— stresses the individuality of the remembering speaker over the general or exemplary character of the scene. Thus the refrain "ther saugh I," "yet saugh I," acts to remind us not only that the speaker has seen these things—"The colde deeth, with mouth gapying upright" (2008), "Woodnesse, laughynge in his rage" (2011)—but that he is seeing them again now as he speaks.

Consider the couplet "Ther saugh I first the derke ymaginyng/Of Felonye, and al the compassyng" (1995–96). "Ymaginyng" here acts as a pivot between two meanings. In the first instance it means image making, or painting: Felony is one of the pictures on the wall. "Al the compassynge," however, changes the meaning of "ymaginying" to planning, something Felony does before he proceeds to carry out his designs—and something much harder to put in a picture. Such effects keep us aware that what we have before us in the Knight's language is not really a description of a scene but his own "derke ymaginyng" drawn in pan, as "saugh I" suggests, from his own memory and experience. The temple of Mars seems to function for the speaker as a pretext to remember and reexperience scenes of battle in somewhat the way that the duel between Palamon and Arcite conjures up the encounter of hunter and boar, whose location in "the regne of Trace" (1638) associates it, not accidentally, with the present "grisly place" (1971). The temple is a focus for this imagining and the affect that goes with it, a place where images of violence and the energy attached to them enact themselves and leave their traces.

In keeping with this sense of an uncanny, negative jouissance speaking in the place of the narrating subject at these moments, the logic that connects the Thracian hunter with the temples of Venus and Mars is psychoanalytic and can be glossed in Lacanian terms. The account of aggression that Lacan gives in "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" traces it to the complex of drives and feelings that are differentiated in the subject in and around the mirror stage: (1) The infant experiences itself primordially as a corps morcelé, a mass of conflicting drives and disjointed parts not clearly differentiated, if at all, from events and objects in the outside world, the mother and her parts (such as the breast) being the central and original instance, (2) At the time of the mirror stage the child forms a project: to become as whole and single

in feeling and reality as its reflection, or specular image, appears to be. Note that this specular integrity is attributed by the child to others and that in fact for the mirror stage to occur the child need only make the connection between its own body and those it sees around it—a real mirror is not necessary: "'I'm a man' . . . at most can mean no more than 'I'm like he whom I recognize to be a man, and so recognize myself as being such.' In the last resort, [such] formulas are to be understood in reference to the truth of 'I is an other'" ("Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," 23). (3) The very fact of positing the illusory specular unity, however, makes the subject aware of itself as fragmented, as alienated from its fantasy image of itself, and therefore as subjected to desire. What is crucial in the present context is that this fragmentation and self-alienation is accompanied by aggressive feelings insofar as the tension between the subject's ideal image of himself and his experience of himself (my use of the masculine subject pronoun here is deliberate, though I am not sure Lacan's is) "structures the subject as a rival with himself" ("Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," 22). (4) This fundamental and aggression-producing split is castration, though it does not initially settle on the marks of gender as its content, and as such it structures all subsequent social relations on the model of invidia, which Lacan, in a move that helps to connect what is going on here to the Pardoner, takes from Augustine:

St. Augustine foreshadowed psychoanalysis when he expressed [aggressivity] in the following exemplary image: 'Vidi ego et expertus sum zelantem parvulum: nondum loquebatur et intuebatur pallidus amaro aspectu conlactaneum suum' (I have seen with my own eyes and known very well an infant in the grip of jealousy: he could not yet speak, and already he observed his foster-brother, pale and with an envenomed stare). Thus, with the infans (pre-verbal) stage of early childhood, the situation of spectacular absorption is permanently tied: the child observed, the emotional reaction (pale), and this reactivation of images of primordial frustration (with an envenomed stare) that are the psychical and somatic co-ordinates of original aggressivity.
          ("Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," 20)

What Lacan adds to Augustine's bitter look is that the experience of looking itself seems literally to tear the looker to pieces, to enforce his awareness of himself as fragmented, in contrast to what he supposes is the state of his foster brother. As Lacan points out, invidia comes from

videre, a fact that allows him to connect the fundamental meaning of envy with the look:

In order to understand what invidia is in its function as gaze [regard ] it must not be confused with jealousy. What the small child, or whoever, envies is not at all necessarily what he might want. . . . Who can say that the child who looks at his younger brother still needs to be at the breast? Everyone knows that envy is usually aroused by the possession of goods which would be of no use to the person who is envious of them, and about the true nature of which he does not have the least idea.^[8]

In other words, the child envies the wholeness he misses in himself and mistakenly, specularly, ascribes to the Other. The function of the "goods" in the situation is as a fantasy object that is supposed to give the other his wholeness and might supply the subject's lack if he had it instead; jealousy is the méconnaissance of invidia. It is thus "the subject's internal conflictual tension . . . which determines the awakening of his desire for the object of the other's desire: here the primordial coming together (concours ) is precipitated into aggressive competitiveness (concurrence )" ("Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," 19). The object itself is fundamentally a function in a structure of desire rather than an actual thing, and therefore it is referred to—whatever it may happen to be in a given instance—as the objet petit a , where a stands for small-a autre as opposed to the generalized Other:

Such is true envy—the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself before the idea that the petit a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction, Befriedigung.
          (Lacan, "What Is a Picture," 116)

If we assume, as Lacan does, that one of the ways culture and history enter into this process is by constituting such objects, a set of institutional constructs offered as generic fulfillments of desire, so to speak, then it becomes apparent how the progression from the temple of Venus (the culturally instituted object of desire as focus of Jealousy/invidia ) to the temple of Mars reverses or undoes the itinerary from corps morcelé to objet petit a that Lacan posits as the development of

[8] Lacan, "What Is a Picture," 116. Sec Mitchell's discussion of the distinction between need and desire in Mitchell and Rose, feminine Sexuality, 5–6. I have given a more oedipal version of this dynamic in chapter 7, pp. 181–81.

the child.^[9] Given the fragmented, paratactic quality of the juxtaposed visual images and the vivid, violent content of what is seen in the description of the temple of Mars, we might speak here of a style morcelé , on the model of the Lacanian corps morcelé or fragmented body that is said to appear in dreams and fantasies "when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual"—that is, a regression to an image of the self as it feels itself to be in the moment when it undertakes the project of self-integration in the mirror stage. There is, at any rate, something both fantasmic and regressive about what threatens to break out of the temple of Mars. If the temple provides a necessary corrective to more benign and mystified views of the role of force in human life, it may also be felt that there is something hyperbolic and overdone about so concentratedly black a view of universal destruction precisely because of the subjective intensity with which it is experienced and portrayed. Especially toward the end of the description this black view seems to run away with the Knight:

Yet saugh I brent the shippes hoppesteres;
The hunte strangled with the wilde beres;
The sowe freten the child right in the cradel;
The cook yscalded, for al his longe ladel.
Noght was foryeten by the infortune of Mane.
The cartere overryden with his carte—
Under the wheel ful lowe he lay adoun.
       (2017–23)

As the Knight's description of the horrors of war builds to this climax, his visualization of horrors seems to become more compelling to him than the clear connection of those horrors to war, and his concern with the infortune of Mars is deflected into an account of

[9] The role of institutional constructs in mediating this process by supplying it with particular content is suggested in a passage of Lacan's that has an eerie relevance to the arena, the lists, and the temples in the Knight's Tale. Since I do not believe in archetypes, I am not sure what to make of the concurrence of imagery, except perhaps as testimony to the durability of certain institutional forms of subjectivity:

The formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium—its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the id in a quite startling way.
          ("Mirror Stage," 5)

infortune (or inFortune) generally, as the ambiguous line about the carter under the wheel hints. The temple of Mars encourages the Knight to a vision even darker than that of aggression. He loads it not merely with the effects of human violence but with everything that can go violently wrong with human life, those things for which men are responsible and those they do not control. Again we could speak of a regressive state in which the distinction between self and other, one's own body and the world, is temporarily lost. This tendency points to a temptation the Knight feels to a kind of apocalyptic despair at the violent ruin human life is exposed to, a temptation to allow his "derke ymaginying" to take over the temple and the world. The apocalyptic impulse to load all human misfortune into the here and now of the imagined scene can be seen in the examples of the deaths of Caesar, Nero, and Antony, "al be that thilke tyme they were unborn" (2033), and the despair can be felt in "Suffiseth oon ensample in stories olde;/I may nat rekene hem alle though I wolde" (2039–40). As opposed to the dismissive tone of the similar lines in the description of the temple of Venus (1953–54), this statement catches the speaker's continuing sense of the overwhelming, perennial presence of destruction and death: Any examples I can give, he seems to say, only scratch the surface; these things are everywhere and always happening.

There are, however, counterforces at work in the passage toward a cooler and more analytical view of the phenomena described, and these are in active tension with the dark imagining. The list continues: "Ther were also, of Martes divisioun,/The barbour, and the bocher, and the smyth,/That forgeth sharpe swerdes on his styth" (1024–26). Though these figures can be integrated with what precedes them, the fact that editors since Tyrwhitt have felt the need to explain both the presence of the artisans and the misfortunes that Robinson calls "scarcely of epic dignity" (in Chaucer, Works, 2d ed., 677), suggests that there is something peculiar going on in the passage. The craftsmen are no doubt to be explained as instances of professions appropriate to Martian temperaments "according as they shall be well or evill disposed," as Thomas Wright puts it (quoted in Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, 85), but this abstract astrological perspective is not one the previous account of the temple has prepared us for,^[10] especially since these

[10] A possible exception is "sovereyn mansioun" (1974), but it is recessive in context prospecrively: the meaning "astrological house" only emerges in retrospect from the end of the portrait.

trades evoke a more positive set of sublimations of the urge to mastery than the rest of the temple offers. We are dealing no doubt with what Wright called "the confusion . . . of the god of war with the planet to which his name was given, and the influence of which was supposed to produce all the disasters here mentioned" (ibid.). The point, however, is that this "confusion" is conspicuous. Not only are incompatible versions of Mars present side by side, indicating that at this point in his speaking the Knight is offering different notions in conflict with one another, but the Knight himself notices it as well. As the first editor to gloss the peculiarities of the description of the temple, the Knight points out that the presence of Caesar and the others is anachronistic: "Al be that thilke tyme they were unborn,/Yet was hir deth depeynted ther-biforn/By manasynge of Mars, right by figure" (2033–35). Having noted the difficulty, he proceeds to do something about it. "By figure" is ambiguous here; it may mean that the actual figures of the Roman heroes are painted on the wall, or that their deaths are represented only in some symbolic prefiguration. If the passage begins by seeming to prefer the first explanation ("Depeynted was the slaughtre of Julius" [2031]), it ends by opting for the second, figural one: "So was it shewed in that portreiture,/As is depeynted in the sterres above/Who shal be slayn or elles deed for love" (2036–38). The Knight corrects himself, rationalizing the description as he works through it. The mention of "the sterres above" gives a habitation more abstract and remote from the anthropomorphic projection of an antique god to those threatening extrahuman forces and locates them beyond and above what can be seen or painted.

What seems to happen in the latter portion of the description of the temple of Mars is that the Knight is briefly caught up in the regressive tendency I have outlined. His own imaginative visualization of the scene as the locus of all human ills begins to allow the god of war to encroach on territory that more properly belongs to Saturn. The effects of war, aggression, and destruction are what the Knight knows best of the features of human existence the temples embody.^[11] It is precisely his intimate knowledge of, and respect for, these effects that can tempt him to let them run away with the poem and take over the world. As

[11] As I hope I have shown, this observation owes nothing to speculation on the Knight's fifteen "mortal batailles" or the like; it is based in specific features of the text in this particular passage.

he becomes aware of this tendency, he checks it, in himself and in the description, and begins to discriminate more carefully between those aspects of Mars that are associated with the psyche—human aggression—and those that are allied, however obscurely, with some form of external necessity. This distinction generates the stretch between Mars as god of war and Mars as planet that the portrait of the temple encompasses.

As a result of this process, the description of the statue of Mars that ends the account of the temple is tensed between images of the god and what he symbolizes that remain not entirely compatible—not so much contradictory as simply different from one another, drawn from different universes of explanation:

The statue of Mars upon a carte stood
Armed, and looked grym as he were wood;
And over his heed ther shynen two figures
Of sterres, that been cleped in scriptures,
That oon Puella, that oother Rubeus—
This god of armes was arrayed thus.
A wolf ther stood biforn hym at his feet
With eyen rede and of a man he eet;
With soutil pencel was depeynted this storie
In redoutynge of Mars and of his glorie.
      (2041–50)

The figure of Mars himself is scarcely described here. Though the first two lines gesture toward offering the appearance of an object in space, they derive greater resonance from their verbal reference back to earlier features of the temple, "Woodness," and the unfortunate carter. Moreover, these two references are attached to different fields of association. The first, the cart, revives the context of Mars as Fortune, external necessity, whereas the second brings back the image of the laughing killer. The rest of the portrait splits between these two perspectives. Puella and Rubeus, considered as constellations and figures of geomancy, make what is meant by Mars more abstract and distant, a matter of planetary influences and other remote forces requiring interpretation. The wolf, by contrast, is an image of the bestial ferocity of the aggressive impulse as it is manifested in the psyche and in human relations, the animal hunger to devour others that is at the root of what we might call Mars in men. These two versions of Mars come from

different realms and coexist in the portrait without forming a synthesis. The account is divided between two fields that bracket the statue itself, the stars above and the wolf below, and this division might be taken as an index of the extent to which the notion of Mars as a single, visualizable individual with a personality gives way in the Knight's telling to a more abstract and allegorical idea of relatively impersonal and unvisualizable forces internal and external. The experience of subjectivity, the fragmentation of self that the Knight seems to skirt in his narration, eventuates here in the presentation of Mars as a split subject.

The final couplet of the description calls attention to the "storie" we have seen and heard as the product of human art. It puts the images back on the walls and so brings us back to Theseus's temple and a set of motives for its making—"in redoutyng of Mars and of his glorie"— that are at least ambiguously related to (and much simpler than) the Knight's own complex motives as these have shown themselves working in the body of the telling. The end of the portrait thus completes a movement of distancing and control; the overcoming of the outlaw affects the experience of describing let loose. Yet that experience has also left its mark precisely in our sense of the difference between Theseus's temple back in Athens and the old books, on the one hand, and what the Knight has made of the temple in the virtual now of describing, on the other. If, like those old artisans and scribes, he has built something to contain and control Mars, his representation seems more alert to the complexity and danger of what is depicted and to the extent to which the things called Mars may be summoned but not contained by making images of them. The Knight's presentation of the temple of Mars seems to call attention to the continuing mystery of what Spenser, who learned a great deal from these temples, would later call "powers . . . more than we men can fayne" (Epithalamion , 413–14)^[12] and to the way human classifications of the things that drive and destroy human life fail to explain them completely. As we shall see further, the Knight seems to ascribe much of this inadequacy to his pagan sources—Theseus's epic, classical culture—and this ascription suggests that in the act of making the traditional materials of the

[12] The Spenserian triple pun fain/feign/fane, to desire, make up, and enshrine, active here and elsewhere in his poetry, is a nice gloss on Chaucer's temples as well.

temple answer to and express his own contemporary experience, he has also become more aware of the limitations of the tradition, of the irreducible difference between Theseus's temple as an actual artifact situated at a particular historical moment and the symbolic meaning his own imagination has been using it to develop. Perhaps this awareness explains why the issues of anachronism and the pastness of the past become more active in the tale from this point on.

There is one final detail of the description of the statue that remains to be considered. The names Puella and Rubeus, "the girl" and "the (male) ruddy one", have the odd effect of placing both Venus and Mars as gendered figures, feminine and masculine, over the statue of Mars in a dominant position. I do not think this effect is an error whereby "Chaucer (or someone else) seems to have confused . . . Puer with Puella" (Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, 83), that is, to have confused a geomantic figure associated with Mars with one associated with Venus, because this line picks up and reinforces the equally anomalous "Who shal be slayn or elles deed for love" (2038) that occurs shortly before. In the context of the description of all three temples such details seem to me to point to yet another limitation of the temple of Mars. The temple of Venus, as we saw, represents a cultural méconnaissance of the sources of aggression as woman, a blaming of the object for the desire directed at it. As such, it proposes a misleading image of feminine dominance that the temple of Mars corrects by evoking an image of aggressive violence that is as resolutely male as the other was female—so much so, in fact, as to exclude real sexual relations (and the trouble gender is) entirely. There are no women at all in the temple of Mars—except Puella.^[13] Her presence, along with that of Rubeus, is indicated by a verb, shynen, whose present tense is at odds with the past tenses of the rest of the description of the statue, and this discrepancy suggests an impulse in the speaker to exempt this pair from the closure, the pushing back into the past, that otherwise dominates the telling. As the temple of Diana will show, the situation of women and the fact of gender difference are not eliminated by the masculine dominance asserted in the temple of Mars, and the two shining figures

[13] Mars's involvement with Venus, leading to his entrapment by Vulcan, mentioned by Statius in his account of the temple of Mars (Thebaid 7.61–63), is suppressed here and only reappears in Arcite's prayer at 2383–90.

above the god's statue keep that problematic difference in place and in play even here.

Venus Revised: The Temple of Diana and the Knight's Bisexuality

From the beginning of the description of the temple of Diana the Knight shows a certain inclination to haste, even impatience: "Now to the temple of Dyane the chaste,/As shortly as I kan, I wol me haste,/To telle yow al the descripsioun" (2051–53). This inclination may be due in part to a sense of his audience, of whom he is otherwise solicitous in such things as supplying glosses for potentially confusing classical names (2062–64), and the description is the shortest of the three. But if so, it seems to me important to note this greater awareness of the audience and its feelings for what it says about the movement and development of the speaker's consciousness through the description of the temples as a whole. Because the account of the temple of Mars is dominated by intense visual imagining, it projects a speaker who is, until near the end, caught up in the immediacy of his own describing and therefore relatively unaware of his listeners. The reemergence of audience awareness in the portraying of the temple of Diana is thus an index of a more self-conscious and critical attitude toward the description itself and of a speaker who is less self-involved and more concerned for others. The movement from the temple of Mars to that of Diana recapitulates the opening of the poem (see above, pp. 224–26) in its enactment of an emergent concern with the use of what is narrated, and this more active assertion of the speaker's control over the significance of what he tells is confirmed by other features of the temple of Diana as well.^[14] The Knight builds this temple and designs its goddess with an eye to not only the traditional image of Diana but also the other two temples in Theseus's arena, especially that of Venus, of which this temple is a critical revision. He makes this goddess something new, particularly with regard to the image of the feminine in the tale.

[14] No such place occurs in any of the sources of the tale, and certain of the figures in it, of whom the most interesting is Callisto, have been transferred from Boccaccio's temple of Venus. Clearly Chaucer had his own, critical, ideas about the proper placing and significance of what he found—or did not find—in his sources, and, as I argue in the text, so does the Knight.

Unlike in the other two temples, there is no landscape in the temple of Diana specific to the goddess. This absence is appropriate since the traditional idea of Diana with which the description begins is of a woman who has opted out of the socialized spaces of garden and fortress to pursue her own daungerous independence as virgin and huntress. The exemplary figures painted on the walls all move within the ambiance of this fairly narrowly conceived conventional figure, "Dyane the chaste" (2051), and her world "Of huntyng and of shame-fast chastitee" (2055). I take it that the image of Diana as virgin huntress is as much a culturally enforced masculine fantasy as is that of Venus earlier. Diana's power is fuelled by male guilt and fear: guilt at what the masculine world does to women, and fear of how they may feel about it. The three main figures on the wall, Callisto, Daphne, and Acteon, outline the structure of this set of feelings. Callisto is the most complexly beset by conflicting demands on her sexuality. First victimized by the male—she is raped by Jove—she attempts to hide her ensuing pregnancy from Diana so as to remain with the virgin band. When her condition is discovered, the goddess casts her out to the vengeance of Juno, who transforms her into a bear, to be hunted by her own son. Just as he is unwittingly about to kill her, the two are stellified by Jove.^[15] Daphne might be taken as a response to Callisto's victimization or perhaps better as a masculine projection of how women may feel about male sexuality if Callisto is an instance of its consequences. She is the maiden without defenses fleeing the aggressively pursuing male, and her transformation renders her flight permanent. Her escape from unwelcome male desire is metamorphosis, the forced renunciation of her humanity—she is "yturned til a tree" (2062), a fate more welcome to her than submission.^[16] Actaeon's story is a reflex of Daphne's and embodies male susicions of how women might well want to reciprocate, if they could, for being made into prey. The goddess is a woman who takes on the skills, weapons, and independence of the male and turns him, like Actaeon, into the hunted "For vengeaunce that he saugh Diane al naked" (2066). Of course this

[15] Ovid tells the story of Callisto in Met. 2.409–530. The tales of Daphne and Actaeon are at 1.453–567 and 3.138–252 respectively.

[16] Daphne is a proto-Diana figure even before Apollo chances on her. Hating the wedding torch as if it were a thing of evil, she asks her father Peneus to let her roam the woods always: "'da mihi perpetua, genitor carissime,' dixit/'virginitate frui!'" (Met . 2.486–87).

reactive, vengeful rejection of the male look, like Daphne's flight, entails choosing to give up sexuality, maintaining purity and independence at the cost of social existence and the generative possibilities of feminine nature and leaving the men to tear each other apart for nothing, like Actaeon's or Arcite's dogs (1177–78). But the Knight's presentation stresses rather the more active disadvantages for women of an image of chastity that is constructed by male fears and fantasies of female refusal. His portrayal of Callisto, in particular, leaves the actions of Jove and Juno in the background and concentrates on the anger of Diana as the principal cause of Callisto's fate, stressing how the goddess participates in the victimization of an aspect of her own "feminine" nature:

Ther saugh I how woful Calistopee,
Whan that Diane agreved was with here,
Was turned from a womman til a ere,
And after was she maad the loode-sterre.
Thus was it peynted; I kan sey yow no ferre.
Hir sone is eek a sterre, as men may see.
       (2056–61)

The question of the Knight's attitude toward these myths is raised, though not settled, by his treatment of them. He does not simply list the names without comment as he does in the temple of Venus; he fusses over these stories, giving us a slightly teasing selection of details as he visualizes the fate of Actaeon. Yet the ultimate effect of the presentation is one of disengagement. Though the phrase "ther saugh I" is more frequent in this description than in the temple of Mars, it has a different effect. The assertion of personal experience seems checked by the distancing effect of the past tense, coupled as it is with a series of comments to the audience that makes the Knight less the imaginer of these stories than a commentator on their depiction by the temple artists. "Thus was it peynted; I kan sey yow no ferre" is slightly critical and impatient, as if to say, Don't ask me what it means—that's how they did it. Stellification seems less a technique for identifying the cosmic forcesbehind human situations, as the stars were in the temple of Mars, and more a peculiar pagan notion. The Knight's gloss on Daphne's name, "I mene nat the goddesse Diane,/But Penneus doghter, which that highte Dane" (2063–64), similarly recognizes the recherché, overliterary quality of these antique stories for a modern

audience that may not share either his knowledge or his interest. This is the old books' version of chastity, and the Knight is critical of it as both bookish and outmoded. The effect is summed up in "Ther saugh I many another wonder storie,/The which me list nat drawen to memorie" (2073–74). The Knight sees some interest in these old tales but not enough to make them worth lingering over. "Dyane the chaste," though she perhaps makes him a little uneasy, does not really engage his imagination.

The reason, I think, is that this version of female independence is not only a reactive and masculine image, too completely a response in kind to the temple of Venus (Diana is, for one thing, too powerful, in much the way Venus is, to be an accurate representation of the real condition of women), but also too benign and above all too partial as a representation of what the Knight knows about woman's fate. As Lori Nelson points out, the traditional Diana represents "an impulse to retreat from the potentially painful world of social relations to the less complicated realm of nature and hunting"; as such, she awakens the Knight's "distaste for any flight from experience, masculine or feminine."^[17] This aversion leads him to move fairly quickly and perfunctorily through the world of chastity narrowly defined, indicating its archaic and limited character as he goes, in order to concentrate on a more realistic and problematic image of the feminine situation in the statue of Diana:

This goddesse on an hert ful hye seet,
With smale houndes al about hir feet,
And undernethe hir feet she hadde a moone—
Wexynge it was and sholde wanye soone.
In gaude grene hir statue clothed was,
With bowe in honde, and arwes in a cas.
Hir eyen caste she ful lowe adoun
Ther Pluto hath his derke regioun.
A womman travaillynge was hire biforn;
But for hir child so longe was unborn,
Ful pitously Lucyna gan she calle
And seyde, "Help, for thou mayst best of alle!"
Wel koude he peynten lifly that it wroghte;
With many a floryn he the hewes boghte.
      (2075–88)

[17] Nelson, "Temples in the Knight's Tale."

The traditional image of Diana with her accoutrements of the chase remains in place here, but it is revised and complicated by the details that allude to her other natures and functions. This is the triune goddess of "thre formes" that Emelye will later address. Luna's waxing and waning moon, on which the statue stands, evokes the natural, cyclic rhythms of fertility and connects her with the processes of generation. With her downcast eyes fixed "Ther Pluto hath his derke regioun," the goddess regards the dark or Hecate phase of her own identity as Proserpina, the bringer of spring and new life in the natural round of seasons. Finally, the travailing worshipper calls on her as Lucina, the goddess of generation's fruition, childbirth. As the temple presents it, chastity is only a phase in the development of feminine nature, one that must give way to other phases if that nature is to be fulfilled in the continuation of the race. (I pass over for the moment the consideration that it might seek other fulfillments as well or instead.) The description here confronts the initial image of Diana with the aspects of her own sexual being as a woman that, as virgin huntress, she is trying to avoid or suppress.

This vision is not, or not merely, an instance of smug patriarchal functionalism on the Knight's part. The forces introduced here are large-scale determinants of the feminine condition, obscurely linked to the rhythms and powers of the body, the seasons, and the heavens as well as to the masculine-dominated institutional structures that appropriate them. These forces are larger than individuals and, in a certain sense, independent of individuals. They are facts about herself that a woman has to contend with in her biological and social existence, and the Knight's appreciation of these facts and the problems they engender engages his sympathy. The suppliant woman in labor is a more sharply imagined and clarified version of Callisto, suffering the burdens of her femininity. This image of the brute misery of the human condition is as compelling as any in the temple of Mars, and it is rendered more poignant by the fact that the suppliant's cry goes unanswered.

I do not mean to imply that the Knight is some sort of feminist or supporter of the rights of women—quite the contrary—but he does see the burden and the victimization that gender categories and myths place on women, and the evocation of that burden and victimization is a considerable part of his critique of the stock images that perpetuate

the status quo. The poor, bare, forked animal that is the last we see of the temple of Diana is, ironically, a grim triumph of the Knight's demystifying enterprise of stripping away the veils of institutional and individual projection that male-dominated society uses to conceal from individuals the truth of their condition. The Knight's portrayal of the temple of Diana is a way of criticizing the masculine reductions of the temple of Venus by bringing forward everything that is concealed beneath the artificial nature of her glassy green waves—the organs of generation and the processes associated with them that desire and the illusion of possession participate in without controlling. We have come a long way from the initial image of Emelye imprisoned in her garden.

The anonymous sufferer at the end of this process also helps to explain how the temples came into being in the first place. That is, the woman crying out in her pain to an unhearing personification of her own being and situation is an image and embodiment of the desperate human need for gods. She is the only worshipper in the three temples, but she gives us something against which to measure them all because as suffering human being, if not as woman qua woman, she supplies what has been missing in them, an image of their creator. As the poem presents them, divinities like Venus, Mars, and Diana are generated to put something with a name and a nature that can be appealed to in the place of the mysterious forces of eros, aggression, and necessity that seem to take their own way without heed of human plans or human pain. The Knight understands this need and sympathizes with it, but it is part of his insight, embodied in the laboring woman and the other victims in the temples, that these defenses defend least when they are needed most. If the gods are thought of as the causes of what happens in human life, they distract attention from the real forces, especially those within human beings themselves, that they fail to control. His revision of the gods aims consistently at cutting through the merely local and historical, remaking them into images of what he takes to be a perennial human situation and returning what has been projected on the heavens to men and women.

But what of the fact that this victim is a woman?

I have been at some pains to show that the progression of the three temples as a whole, from male art to female necessity, is an enactment of the Knight's impulse to elicit and confront the psychic and institutional realities that he senses concealed behind the cultural repre-

sentations of tradition and the old books. As I have also tried to demonstrate, especially in my discussion of the temple of Mars, this demystifying enterprise is a matter not just of criticizing representations external to the speaker but also of encountering the impulses, images, fantasies, and feelings that the narration itself produces in— and as—the describing subject as part of the act of telling. In the Knight's account of the three temples, as in the Wife of Bath's account of her life or the Prioress's account of the death of the little clerk, one of the things that emerges is a portrayal of the encounter of the subject with unanticipated affect attached to what is narrated, registered in this tale as the shifting relations of "ymagining" between seeing and saying. The patterning of that encounter appears to be a progression from a description conducted in the mode of practical consciousness to an outbreak of repressed material into consciousness,^[18] followed by the control or containment of the outbreak in a mode much closer to discursive consciousness—or at any rate more self-conscious. Thus, to summarize, the account of the temple of Venus registers a critical attitude toward what is being described, but one that in many ways accepts unreflectively the responsibility of woman for male desire that the traditional image tacitly proposes, therefore perpetuating the male look that constitutes Venus. The description of the temple of Mars counters this projective tendency by evoking the masculine aggression that the temple of Venus displaces; but in doing so, it touches off a complex of excitations and anxieties in the speaker that seem momentarily to move beyond his control, as if, for whatever reasons, there were something deeply disturbing about so direct a confrontation with male violence. The description of the temple of Diana then returns to a more distanced and controlled mode of description as well as to the image of woman, this time in a way that restores to her her proper and private pain: it identifies what belongs to woman as defined by what she suffers, not what she "does." This revision is in line with other images of women previously in the tale, the Argive widows at its be-

[18] Just to be clear: neither the Knight nor Chaucer needs a theory of the unconscious to be aware of its effects, that is, of the unanticipated affect that accompanies certain thoughts. All that is necessary is an experience like that of speaking the encounter of the boar hunter at 1638–46, a passage that comes to seem more and more central to the fundamental experiences the tale is concerned with.

ginning and the court women who plead for mercy for Palamon and Arcite in the grove, insofar as both these groups are put in the position of having to respond to what men have done in their contending and having to speak for the private and familial emotions such contention largely excludes or ignores. The nameless suppliant in the temple of Diana is a representation of this position at its most private and helpless, the point where more general, feminine forced dependencies are inscribed in the female body.

A parallel between Theseus's encounter with the women in the grove (1742–84) and the Knight's movement from the temple of Mars to that of Diana will help to clarify the latter. In both cases a male actor is disengaged from the epic perspective of violent action through sympathetic engagement with a point of view the tale specifically posits as feminine. As the court ladies' intervention, "Have mercy, Lord, upon us wommen alle!" (1757), induces a reflective attitude in Theseus, the temple of Diana, whose suffering acolyte is an embodiment of that cry, seems deeply implicated in the Knight's ability to take a distance on the temples of Venus and Mars—to have, like Theseus, second thoughts. If this parallel is accurate, it suggests how the image of woman in the temple of Diana functions as a feminine identification for the Knight, an image of the gendered other that helps him to channel and control the disturbing affects generated by the temple of Mars. From this point of view the whole of the description of the temples in its unfolding can be taken as an expression of the Knight's bisexuality, the interplay of his masculine and feminine identifications across the text. It should be clear by now that this move is not a question of isolating some "feminine" essence that is somehow revealing itself or magically getting expressed in the subject; rather, it is a question of what the subject assigns to the "feminine," how he himself constructs gender. What is interesting about the Knight's construction of gender is that it rejects the traditional images of woman associated with courtship, the public expression of erotic desire, and courtly or romance convention, as masculine projections in favor of an image that associates the feminine with institutional and biological victimization and with private experience. The internalized character of this image as an identification is expressed as sympathy: the Knight has little sympathy with the image of woman as Venus, and little more for "Dyane of chastitee," but he has a lot with the women behind the goddesses, as we shall see even

more clearly when we come to Emelye's prayer. Though it seems improbable that these sympathies, identifications, and interactions are discursively planned, it makes as little sense to speak of them as unconscious. Rather, it is a matter of practical consciousness and practical choices, of knowing, if I may put it so, how to use a woman, knowing what she is good for.

12—
The Unhousing of the Gods:
Character, Habitus, and Necessity in Part III

Although the description of the temples in Part III provides a wedge for the entry of many of the Knight's central concerns into the Knight's Tale, the images of the gods are not wholly satisfactory for him as representations of those concerns, in part because those images are too concentrated and visual. The temples and statues, precisely because they are able to symbolize psychological and social forces compendiously, lend themselves too easily to the counterallegorical kind of visualization or imagining seen most strongly at work in the description of the temple of Mars. Even the account of the temple of Diana, with its more intellectual listing of aspects of the goddess that need to be decoded and its relative impatience with the traditional iconography of the virgin huntress, is still too compacted and scenic—indeed, too brief—to render the agency of psyche and society in human life with the particularity they exhibit in concrete conditions. These "defects" of the temples emerge most clearly in retrospect when seen in the context of the drift of Part III as a whole, which moves from the initially formidable temples of the gods to the individually realized prayers of newly differentiated and more complex characters. This move from ekphrasis to dramatization, visual to verbal, has the effect, among other things, of reducing the gods to antiquated comic appendages of the human situation by the end of Part III.^[1]

The account of the assembly of the warriors of Palamon and Arcite, centered on the portraits of Lygurge and Emetrius, forms an intermediate state between the temples and the prayers. In it certain aspects of the temples, particularly that of Mars, are brought down to earth. We may note in passing the effect on the atmosphere and feel of the story that the Knight's introduction of his own experience into the tale via

[1] The whole tale is characterized by this general movement; it is worth remembering that it ends with a long, complex speech.

the temple of Mars allows. He seems to find it much easier to put himself into the scene and imagine the preparations for the tournament as if it were to happen now:

For if ther fille tomorwe swich a cas,
Ye knowen wel that every lusty knyght
That loveth paramours and hath his myght,
Were it in Engelond or elleswhere,
They wolde, hir thankes, wilnen to be there—
To fighte for a lady, benedicitee!
It were a lusty sighte for to see.
        (I, 2110-16)

The Knight's listing of the armor and weapons of the combatants (2119–27), his "Ther maistow seen" at 2128, and the extended occupatio that lingers over "The mynstralcye, the service at the feeste" and other particulars of a full and distinctively modern chivalric world while pretending to dismiss them (2197–2206) testify to the concrete and contemporary reality with which his imagination invests the scene and to the attraction it holds for him.^[2] Within this context the descriptions of the two kings undoubtedly function to increase, with metonymic compactness, the richness and splendor of the world of the noble life, as Charles Muscatine saw:

Here the imagery is . . . conventional, framed in the flat to express the magnificence that befits nobility. I have noted that after all the description of these two kings they hardly figure in the narrative. The inference, however, is not that the portraits are a waste and an excrescence, "merely decorative," but that they perform a function that is not directly related to the action and is independent of the question of character. They contribute first to the poem's general texture, to the element of richness in the fabric of the noble life. More specifically, Chaucer solves the problem of describing the rival companies by describing their leaders; not Palamon and Arcite but their supporting kings. Their varicolored magnificence, like Theseus' banner, makes the whole field glitter up and down—black, white, yellow, red, green and gold. Their personal attributes—the trumpet voice of Emetrius, the great brawn of Lygurge, their looks, like lion and griffin—give both a martial quality that we are to attribute to the whole company.
(Chaucer and the French Tradition, 182.)

[2] Robinson, following Cook, notes that the passage is full of "medieval realism." See Chaucer, Works , 2d ed., 678, note to 1, 2095ff.

All true. Yet Muscatine's protostructuralist tendency to apply his perceptions too broadly, a tendency that limits his fundamental and pioneering study, leads him to neglect the bearing of the passage in context and give its more specific connections with what precedes it and its function at this particular point in the tale less weight than they deserve.

For one thing, the placing of these set pieces immediately after the temple descriptions allows the portraits of the two kings to resonate with the temples, especially that of Mars. Lygurge and Emetrius are something like the statues in the temples: they are described with the same technique of formal, static portraiture, and each is in a commanding position with fierce animals at his feet, reminiscent of Mars's wolf and perhaps Diana's hounds. The looks Muscatine mentions are something like that of Mars, "grym as he were wood" (2042). In addition, Emetrius is specifically described as "ridyng lyk the god of armes, Mars" (2159), and his sanguine humor and voice "as a trompe thonderynge" (2174) connect him to his planet and his profession. Although I am not convinced by Walter Clyde Curry's argument that Lygurge and Emetrius represent Martian and Saturnalian man, respectively, any more than I am by those scholars who have tried to find allusions to specific historical figures in the portraits, I can see what inspired both enterprises.^[3] The descriptions are portentous; they convey the feeling that they allude to and contain more than they specify. The description of Emetrius in particular has a specificity that creates a "reference effect"—we want to know the why of details like his "citryn" eyes, his golden ringlets, his humor, and his freckles—that invites equally iconographic or historical explanation without settling clearly on either.

The point would seem to be that these are real men who also embody and carry with them forces allied with those presented in the temples. Lygurge and Emetrius are semiallegorical in that they are a way of moving threats and powers like those of Mars off the temple walls and into characters, giving them a specific locus in the action of the tale. These are men like gods insofar as they dispose of and (barely) control destructive forces that they may unleash at any time.^[4] This

[3] Curry, Medieval Sciences , 130–37. The most thorough attempt at historical allegory remains Cook, Historical Background .

[4] I cannot, therefore, agree with Elizabeth Salter that "when we are told that 'The grete Emetrius, the kyng of hide . . . cam rydyng lyk the god of armes, Mars' (2156–, we are clearly meant to recall only one aspect of the martial god: misery, cruelty, death are obscured by magnificence" (Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale , 28). Salter does not specify who "means" us to forget the temple of Mars and under what conditions. As readers we are of course free to remind ourselves by going back to the more disturbing passage (and there are some worse ones yet to come). If the reference is, as seems likely, to the speaker of the poem, the question of intention is undecidable in the passage itself since what Salter takes as a cover-up could as easily be seen as a giveaway. I have chosen the latter option on the basis of the transitional character of the passage between the temples and the prayers, though I am willing to admit that the undecidability of the passage taken by itself can also easily be seen as a function of an ambivalent attitude on the part of the speaker. To take the Knight seriously as a speaker is to see that he is both disturbed and stirred by the manifestations of Mars.

resemblance is clearest in the workings of the pervasive animal imagery in the portraits. The two kings'"pets" function symbolically, as Muscatine also sees, to give us information about the men themselves—they are masters of the beasts they have tamed and muzzled and are akin to them. But this symbolic dimension gains added resonance as part of a larger chain of animal images stretching back at least to the grove and consistently focused on the animal ferocity that always lurks beneath chivalric display. Given this context, what stands out about these descriptions is how little the violence is concealed, how barely it is controlled, how close it is to the surface. Emetrius's griffin nature glares out plainly in his feral, glowing eyes from beneath the barbaric splendor of the wreath of gold "arm-greet" that crowns him. The effect in both portraits of a rich magnificence that only just covers the potential savagery beneath is summed up for me in the cloak Emetrius wears in lieu of "cote-armore": "With nayles yelewe and brighte as any gold,/He hadde a beres skyn, col-blak for old" (2141–42). Emetrius takes on the power of the bear totemically (one imagines that he killed it himself), and that power, like the bear's claws, is only thinly gilded with the rich fabric of the noble life. His alaunts do not go "with mosel faste ybounde" (2151) for trivial reasons.

Emetrius is superficially more civilized, less barbaric of physique and ornament, and somewhat more individualized than his companion. Yet the continuity of his portrait with that of Lygurge is sustained by the lion look, the trumpet voice, the tame eagle, and one final detail that is perhaps more disturbing in its implications than anything else in the passage. Muscatine's observation that Lygurge and Emetrius function metonymically for the assembled chivalry, that we are to attribute their martial quality to the whole company, is brilliantly right but not

pursued far enough. He seems not quite to see how specifically the language of the end of Emetrius's portrait points the metonymy:

An hundred lordes hadde he with hym there,
Al armed, save hir heddes, in al hir gere,
Ful richely in alle maner thynges.
For trusteth wel that dukes, erles, kynges
Were gadered in this noble compaignye,
For love and for encrees of chivalrye.
Aboute this kyng ther ran on every part
Ful many a tame leon and leopart .
          (2179–86, emphasis added)

The displacement of the last of Emetrius's symbolic animals to a position following the description of his knights has the effect of assimilating them to one another. The knights are figuratively (and not so figuratively) the predators, as Lygurge's hundred are muzzled hounds "as grete as any steer,/To hunten at the leoun or the deer" (2149–50). By the logic of metonymy the violence concentrated in the two kings is properly to be distributed to the companies they lead. What began as a painted symbolic landscape on the wall of the temple of Mars—the landscape of violence—is now an active potential presence in the story waiting to be unmuzzled. Though Lygurge and Emetrius may not figure much in the narrative directly and by name after all this description, they do so figure in the tournament, and the force their description here carries into the poem is a large determinant of the atmosphere of that battle and its edgy aftermath. The expansion of the metonymy and the potential effects of an encounter between two hundred such men are what Theseus must anticipate and try to control.

As I have already suggested, the prayers of Palamon, Arcite, and Emelye, taken together, complete what might be called the undoing or deconstruction of the gods, whereby they are replaced, in a special and complex sense, by the characters. I will begin the explication of this process by examining the complementary prayers of Palamon and Arcite, which are often noted, plausibly enough, as one place in the tale that offers a relatively unequivocal means of differentiating between the two protagonists because Palamon prays to Venus for Emelye whereas his cousin asks Mars for victory. For reasons that will emerge I do not find it easy to take a straightforward stand on the question of

whether the two heroes are significantly different from one another;^[5] but I think it is fair to say, to begin with Palamon, that this is the most individualized view of him the poem gives us,^[6] though the effect arises not so much from what he requests as from the way he requests it. There is perhaps something attractive and touching about his humility and his admission of helplessness before Venus, "I am so confus that I kan noght seye/But 'Mercy, lady bright'" (2230–31), as well as his renunciation of renown, vainglory, and "pris of armes" (2241). Yet Palamon's eye is still firmly on the main chance; he will forgo victory if he can be assured of its fruits, to "have fully possessioun/Of Emelye, and dye in thy servyse" (2242–43). Nor can we say, for all his disregard of arms and his sense that love is something that takes place in an enclave cut off from other concerns,^[7] that Palamon transcends the fundamental masculine sense of love as a zero-sum competition embodied in the temple of Venus. Give me my love, he says:

And if ye wol nat so, my lady sweete,
Thanne preye I thee, tomorwe with a spere
That Arcita me thurgh the herte ere.
Thanne rekke I noght, whan I have lost my lyf,
Though that Arcita wynne hire to his wyf.
This is th'effect and ende of my preyere:
Yif me my love, thow blisful lady deere.
        (2254–60)

Palamon's "I don't care" is a way of saying he cares so much that he would rather die than see Arcite win Emelye, and the fact that this sentiment concludes his prayer suggests how fully he remains involved in the idea of eros as a competition.^[8] Possession is a key notion here, "So that I have my lady in myne armes" (2247), and what differentiates Palamon from Arcite is primarily his conception of what it means to possess the object of desire.

[5] The most trenchant proponent of the view that they are not significantly different has been Donaldson in Chaucer's Poetry and again in The Swan at the Well . Lumiansky's full discussion. Of Sondry Folk , 39–49, is reasonably representative of the other side.

[6] The same is perhaps not true of Arcite's prayer since his dying speech has also to be considered.

[7] See the above discussion of love as deduit in the temple of Venus, 270–72.

[8] Compare Palamon's speech to Theseus in Part II, "But sle me first, for seinte charitee!/But sle my felawe eek as wel as me;/Or sle hym first" (1721–23).

In his prayer Palamon thinks of Venus in terms that the courtly tradition usually assigns to the beloved lady. He calls the goddess "lady myn," "lady bright," "my lady sweete," and "thow blisful lady deere" and asks her for mercy and pity from his position of helpless subservience. Further, he announces his intention to continue his courtly service to Venus until death, even (or especially) after he has gained his desire, and this intention produces an odd declaration:

As wisly as I shal for everemoore,
Emforth my myght, thy trewe servant be,
And holden werre alway with chastitee .
That make I myn avow, so ye me helpe!
          (2234–37,   emphasis added)

What can he mean? Though I do not suppose that Palamon consciously intends the slightly libertine or otherwise indecorous implications of his statement, there is a problem lurking in his language precisely in the context of "possessioun," of actual marriage to Emelye.^[9] At the very least the statement brings out how little Palamon is concerned with Emelye as a person, and our view of her in the following prayer at her most human and embattled cannot but heighten this

[9] Something of what Palamon has in mind may be indicated by a passage from the Teseida that is not represented in the Knight's Tale . At the very end of the poem, after Emelia and Palemone are married, Boccaccio reports:

Vero, è che per le offerte, che n'andaro
Poi la mattina a'templi, s'argomenta
Che Vener, anzi che'l di fosse chiaro,
Sette volte raccesa e tante spenta
Fosse nel fonte umoroso.
       (12.77)

It is true that because of the offerings sent to the temple in the morning, it was thought that Venus, before the day turned bright, had been seven times enkindled and as many times extinguished in the fountain of love.
          (Book of Theseus , trans. McCoy, 327, apparently reading "amoroso" for "umoroso")

If this passage does explain Palamon's meaning here, it hardly eases the problem of decorum: does he suppose his prayer is what Venus, his "blisful lady deere," wants to hear? Does he suppose it is what Emelye wants? One can see the advantages for a male lover of general projections of "feminine" character like Venus and Diana, as components of the institution of woman in society, when it comes to forcing erotic attention on an unwilling woman since they allow him to make assumptions about her nature that need not take her preferences fully seriously. It is more comfortable to have goddesses struggle over these things than persons.

impression. This lack of concern makes it harder to maintain, as critics sometimes do, that Palamon deserves to win Emelye for reasons of poetic justice because he wants her for herself.

It seems more accurate to say that what Palamon wants is both to possess Emelye and to sustain the image of woman as courtly goddess that he has associated with Venus from his first sight of the lady. He envisions success in his enterprise as a continuation of love service, of worship:

Youre vertu is so greet in hevene above
That if yow list, I shal wel have my love.
Thy temple wol I worshipe everemo,
And on thyn auter, where I ride or go,
I wol doon sacrifice and fires beete.
          (2249–53)

Palamon emerges in this prayer as an example of the sort of psyche that built the temple of Venus and structured its own nonconscious assumptions into the idea of the goddess, the institutions of courtship and marriage, and the succeeding generations of men who internalized that institutional framework as a "natural" way of organizing and understanding their own drives. Though Palamon is not aware of it, his strategy for dealing with desire is to sublimate it into worship, which is among other things a way of safeguarding the purity of the desire in the mode of courtly suffering, and keeping the difficulties of relationship with a real woman at a safe distance. Such a Venus is an ideal no real lady could fulfill or would want to fulfill, though she may be constrained to it. The venerian construction of woman is aware of this difficulty without attending to it, and the dichotomy in the speech between goddess and possession as well as the hint of the double standard in "holden werre alwey with chastitee" may not bode well for Emelye.^[10] Whether this uneasy possibility is so or not, Palamon stands

[10] I wonder similarly about the implications of Palamon's invocation of Venus "For thilke love thow haddest to Adoon" (2224). According to Ovid (Met . 9.519–52), Venus loves Adonis fearfully, in the conviction (accurate, as it turns out) that if he is allowed to engage in virile pursuits she will lose him. It appears that Palamon expects Venus to be moved by his humility but also that he expects her (and women) to try to restrain him in the exercise of masculine "vertu." There is a slight tinge of mauvaise foi in Palamon's prayer because of the sexual and martial restlessness that stirs in it beneath the professions of humility and service. Does it matter in this poem that Adonis was a boar hunter? Might it have been in Thrace?

forth here as a genuinely venerian personality, not in the sense of one dominated by a planet, a balance of humors, or a goddess but as an example of the use of the habitus or way of holding oneself toward the world that is embedded in practical consciousness. "Venus" is a set of preformed attitudes that are available for the character to deploy in expressing himself and articulating what he feels and wants to say without having to reinvent the whole of sexual relations and the structuring of desire for himself. More clearly and more complexly than previously in the poem, Palamon's goddess is the image of his own condition, his desires and tensions, drawn from the cultural stock and written on the sky.

The same is true of Arcite with respect to Mars. The interest in Arcite's prayer, as in Palamon's, lies in his characterization of his god as a key to his own personality. As with the travailing woman in the temple of Diana, listening to a devotee at prayer rather than looking at an image makes it easier to ask what such a god is for, what needs and desires in the worshiper the god answers to. His own prayer reveals Arcite as a martian personality whose habitus produces a different but allied set of habits of response from those of Palamon to the fundamental contingencies of desire and otherness. His stance is a kind of mirror image or Blakean contrary of Palamon's, indicating that there is a common system of assumptions behind them. Arcite's basic image of desire is as an offense , a word he continually returns to: "I am yong and unkonnynge, as thow woost,/And, as I trowe, with love offended moost/That evere was any lyves creature" (2393–95).^[11] The offense is constituted by the threat desire poses to the self-sufficiency and independence of heroic will—in Lacanian terms, to the illusory, hoped-for specular unity of the self. Arcite sees Mars as such a successful will from the beginning of the prayer—"And hast in every regne and every lond/Of armes al the brydel in thyn hond,/And hem fortunest as thee lyst devyse" (2375–77)—and he reminds the god of an experience of desire that tells much about Arcite's own sense of it:

Thanne preye I thee to rewe upon my pyne.
For thilke peyne, and thilke hoote fir

[11] He uses it, in fact, just before he sees Emelye for the first time in Part I, when he inquires of the stricken Palamon, "Why cridestow? Who hath thee doon offence?" (1083).

In which thow whilom brendest for desir,
Whan that thow usedest the beautee
Of faire, yonge, fresshe Venus free,
And haddest hire in armes at thy wille—
       (2382–87)

Not only is desire a torment and a burning fire, a kind of attack (the image is repeated at 2503–4); its object is something to be used, subjected to one's will almost like a prisoner of war, as the flicker of a pun on "armes" in the last line suggests.

Arcite does not confine himself to the satisfaction of desire; he reminds the god also of its consequences:

Although thee ones on a tyme mysfille,
Whan Vulcanus hadde caught thee in his las,
And foond thee liggynge by his wyf, alias!—
For thilke sorwe that was in thyn herte,
Have routhe as wel upon my peynes smerte.
       (2388–92)

The example seems an odd one, at least in the sense that one might suppose Mars would prefer not to be reminded of this experience, but Arcite urges it on the god to gain his sympathy and remind him of what it feels like to be at the mercy of desire. The assumption is that the feeling is so peremptory and lawless that it may be expected as a matter of course to break through the constraints of ordinary social arrangements—I am reminded of Arcite's earlier "A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed. / . . . /Al be she mayde, or wydwe, or elles wyf" (1169–71). The attempt to satisfy desire is therefore exposed to the constant threat of vengeful retaliation, or at least humiliation, and one must suppose that these threats (those of Theseus) weigh on Arcite as he speaks.

The whole passage is so classically oedipal that I am almost embarrassed to point it out; but there is more, and worse, to come. The idea that women have the power to arouse uncontrollable desire independently of what men may will is common to both venerian and martian consciousness, to both Palamon and Arcite. In the former case it leads to the deification of female power and the attempt to sublimate desire into worship. In the latter case, however, the idea leads to the definition of woman, reduced to the desire she causes, as an enemy—the dying Arcite will call Emelye "my sweete foo" (2780). The venerian

decision to worship a woman from afar is in part a response to the fear of Diana, that is, the fear that the woman may refuse closer contact. This fundamental fear and distrust of feminine independence, the inability to believe that a woman might want him for himself, comes out more explicitly and rather more disquietingly in the martian attitude:

For she that dooth me al this wo endure
Ne reccheth nevere wher I synke or fleete.
And wel I woot, er she me mercy heete,
I moot with strengthe wynne hire in the place.
       (2396–99)

Though Arcite is "only" talking here about winning the tournament, the last line quoted is sufficiently vague in reference that, coupled with the active and hostile role assigned to the lady ("dooth me al this wo endure") and the earlier image of Mars using the beauty of Venus, it allows us to wonder to what extent the idea of doing battle for Emelye is separated in Arcite's mind from doing battle with her for her favors. The rather raw image of relations between the sexes in the prayer as a whole allows the specter of rape to flicker behind the language of war here. I have already disparaged Palamon's concern for Emelye; I am not sure it is entirely a defense of Arcite to point out that his prayer for "victorye" may not in fact neglect the lady—it may include a request for victory over her.

I do not mean to imply that Arcite intends to rape Emelye, or even that, consciously or unconsciously, he wants to. What is involved in tracing out the rhizomatic connections of the language at work in these speeches is seeing how they register a set of quasi-institutionalized psychosocial structures and contradictions that invade and unsettle the most innocent and "personal" experiences. On the one hand, what speaks here is the general dynamic of the lack—the dynamic of invidia and the objet petit a , which moves from the temples into more complex and diffuse representation in the characters. It is worth remembering that in this dynamic possession of "The" woman is evidence of control over the offense of the lack, castration: she is what makes the denial of castration possible by "proving" that her possessor has the phallus she lacks. Insofar as this control is what they are really fighting over whether they know it or not, Palamon and Arcite may be said to instantiate the general dynamic. By this point in the poem, however, this sort of observation is of fairly limited range. Psychoanalytic theory

(as opposed, one expects and hopes, to psychoanalytic practice) provides a general framework within which certain aspects of human behavior can be understood, but it does tend merely to reproduce itself—and thereby invite the criticism that it makes every story the same story—at the level of individual and, historically, social differentiation. As I have tried to suggest, the prayers of Palamon and Arcite articulate the differing inflections of their uncertainty , their inability to resolve, for instance, the institutionalized contradictions between eros and aggression that make any act of love an act of war as well, and vice versa.^[12] Any analysand will attest that there comes a point, as here, when the way the primary structures of desire are inflected and deployed is of more consequence than the fact of their simple presence, and that deployment is a social as well as a personal matter.^[13]

Arcite's prayer makes particularly clear the specifically psychic functions of Mars as an idea and an institution. Arcite subordinates himself to the god as an ego ideal, an image of what he would most like to be. His final vow is illuminating in this regard:

And eek to this avow I wol me bynde:
My beerd, myn heer, that hongeth long adoun,
That nevere yet ne felte offensioun
Of rasour nor of shere, I wol thee yive,
And ben thy trewe servant whil I lyve.
Now, lord, have routhe upon my sorwes score;
Yif me [victorie]; I aske the namoore.
       (2414–20)

The recurrence of "offensioun" here points once again to the importance of the absolute integrity of the heroic individual. As in folk magic, where hair retains part of its owner's life, to refrain from cutting one's hair is to preserve the integrity and independence of one's body as an emblem of the inviolability of one's heroic being. To cut it is conceived as an offense because it involves submitting to a diminishment of wholeness and power, becoming morcelé , losing pieces of oneself. Arcite does not feel strong enough or confident enough to assert such absolute self-sufficiency for himself; he is diminished by

[12] For an excellent detailed analysis of extreme forms of this situation, see The-weleit, Male Fantasies , vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History .

[13] See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , 78–79, and the theoretical remarks of Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering , 49–50, and her argument throughout.

desire and beset by the uncertainties of the coming battle. But he can conceive a being who is that powerful, a being already institutionally in place as a cultural ideal, and he submits to it to make its power his own. He offers to offend himself in honor of Mars to forestall being offended in more consequential ways by others. Like Palamon, Arcite comes into focus in his prayer as a relatively specialized type, a specific form of consciousness that has been differentiated and defined by the progress of the tale out of the more general heroic-chivalric context of the early phases of the story. The Knight comes to use Palamon and Arcite to outline the fundamental components of chivalric romance—in the broadest terms love and war—in a way that both separates those components from one another and defines them more precisely, at the same time remaining aware of how they form an interdependent system. The basic masculine situation the tale develops is one in which, for example, simultaneous fear and desire of women and feelings of aggression and worship toward them are taken by the characters as constants, as what they all have to deal with. Within this basic situation there are various structures of practical consciousness or institutional routes that may be said to organize the fundamental contradictions (while perpetuating them) so that practical choices are possible for individuals within the system, and it is the range of these choices—the human uses of divinities—that the Knight's own practice in Part III reveals.

Because the process is a differentiating and developing one, it is not particularly helpful to try to read Palamon and Arcite in any detail in these martian and venerian terms back from the prayers as consistent and differentiable character structures in the earlier parts of the poem. The two cousins develop toward these positions from a more undifferentiated set of similar dispositions and tensions, and from one point of view their choices of gods must be seen precisely as choices they come to make, though not necessarily consciously, from the available stock that culture supplies for meeting the situation in which they find themselves.^[14] From another, and ultimately more relevant, point of view by

[14] This is one reason it is difficult to take a straightforward position on the issue of the difference or lack of it between the two knights. That question has various answers at various times; but even when they are relatively well-differentiated, as here, they are still presented as the same in important ways: they are masculine as opposed to feminine (as the tale develops that opposition), naive as opposed to disenchanted, and so on. Inone sense the question as formulated is pitched at the wrong level. Palamon and Arcite are not persons with consistent personalities throughout the story; they are characters in a story with affinities to other stories of the same kind (generic types) whose sameness or difference is a function of the interaction of those generic characteristics with the practical needs of this telling by this narrator. The real bearing of the question, in any event, is on the issue of ethical difference as it affects their desserts in the outcome of the tale, and that is an issue better left to later.

this stage in the tale Mars and Venus, especially as they are characterized in the prayers of Palamon and Arcite, are habitus , clusters of practices developed by the Knight as a way of differentiating and describing elements in the story that his sources in their unrevised form do not supply. This development is a function of his practical preference for concrete experience as the context in which he can let what he knows—practically—about love and war come out in the particular life of individuals. The general, the "structural," whether in the form of the pagan pantheon, Boethian philosophy, or the codes of chivalry, only takes on meaning for him as it is encountered in practice, and that is why he is always more interested in how conventions are used than in what they claim to be in themselves. The tale is, among other things, an unfolding record of his own encounter with his own tradition as embodied in the noble old story, and his consistent tendency is to make that story reflect and respond to his own experience. By this point in the tale the characters are patently doing the same thing: they respond to the problems they face by giving emphasis and credit to what they can use in their own traditions and culture; they make individualizing, practical choices that commit them not only to particular courses of action but also to particular personalities. They are thus instances of how personality itself—the subject—is institutionally constructed, not as an unconscious expression of institutional structure and power, but as the result of the active use of them.

Because the characters do become more like the narrator as the tale proceeds, they become realer to him: he takes them more seriously, their dilemmas take on more existential bite, and he sympathizes with them more. This change is nowhere more evident than with Emelye, both because, in contrast to Palamon and Arcite, her individuality is developed so much more fully than it was at the beginning of the tale and because she is so much more constrained in her choices and in what she can hope for from her goddess. The Knight brings out her

humanity more completely than that of either Palamon or Arcite perhaps because he himself is more ambivalent about what her situation entails. Though he is critical of the two cousins for their mystification of women and uses Theseus to say so directly, he is himself tempted by some of the attitudes he disparages. His ambivalence comes out most clearly in his description of the rites of Diana, which engage him more than those of Venus or Mars. He begins with the famous line that associates Emelye with natural cycles and subordinates her to them, as she was when she appeared as Venus in the garden: "Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye" (2273). The lines that follow record a curious struggle in the speaker's voice, a complex wavering of attention. His description of the rites has at first a certain summary tone reminiscent of the dispatch with which he handles Palamon's sacrifice to Venus a few lines earlier, "Al telle I noght as now his observaunces" (2264). He points to the archaic quality of Diana's ceremony as if to dismiss it: "The homes fulle of meeth, as was the gyse —/Ther lakked noght to doon hir sacrifice" (2279–80, emphasis added). As his narration proceeds, however, the Knight lingers self-consciously over the rites:

Smokynge the temple, ful of clothes faire,
This Emelye, with herte debonaire,
Hir body wessh with water of a welle.
But hou she dide hir ryte 1 dar nat telle,
But it be any thing in general;
And yet it were a game to heeren al.
To hym that meneth wel it were no charge;
But it is good a man been at his large.
Hir brighte heer was kembd, untressed al;
A coroune of a grene ook cerial
Upon hir heed was set ful fair and meete.
Two fyres on the auter gan she beete,
And dide hir thynges, as men may biholde
In Stace of Thebes and thise bookes olde.
       (2281–94)

The Knight seems to place himself momentarily and a little voyeuristically in Actaeon's position, peeping at Diana bathing as if about to reveal the secrets of the goddess and provoke her wrath. Taking a lesson from Actaeon he pulls back, yet his continued fascination is evident: I dare not tell; it would be fun to tell; it is better not to; well,

I'll tell just a little. The Knight's imagination seems drawn to participate in the male look that constitutes woman as a creature of sexual mystery and threat and thereby deprives her of individuality and independence. To see Emelye as the embodiment of feminine daunger, as Diana, is to lock her up again in the institutional constraints and mystifications that the Knight associates with the old books. It is amusing that his final dismissal of this perspective keeps his ambivalence in play by providing what amounts to a footnote telling us where to go if we really want to know the secret he dares not reveal, but his relegation of the rites to "Stace of Thebes and thise bookes olde" nonetheless represents an act of self-control.^[15] As in the description of the temple of Mars and elsewhere, we see the Knight working through and mastering his own attraction to a point of view he ultimately considers inappropriate and misleading.

The image of woman projected by the temple of Diana counters the worshipful empowering of the feminine enshrined in the image of Venus by providing an example of female suffering and helplessness. As I have suggested, this image is connected to other instances of the dependence of women in the tale, such as the Theban widows and the ladies of Theseus's court. It seems likely that these versions of woman do not altogether escape the masculine constructions of chivalric consciousness insofar as they partake of the stereotype that makes true knighthood a matter of the defense of helpless women. The Knight seems to share the feelings of Theseus along these lines, in the relatively benign form expressed when the latter allows the court women to persuade him not to kill Palamon and Arcite but to let them tourney for the hand of Emelye instead: "And eek his herte hadde compassioun/Of wommen, for they wepen evere in oon" (1770–71). Like Theseus, the Knight in the early parts of the tale feels protective of women, but he also patronizes them: he is willing to lump them together as "they" in ways that stress their generic lack of virile fortitudo. This sense of superior, protective distance allows the Knight to be as critical as he is of the more worshipful and fearful image of woman as goddess, whether Venus or Diana, that dominates the ro-

[15] The fact that, as Kittredge pointed out, the reader will not find a description of the rites in Statius, who of course has no temple of Diana, simply enforces the sense that the reference is to a genre—books of that sort—rather than a specific source, the literary as opposed to the actual.

mance sensibilities of Palamon and Arcite. If he can be tempted by those stereotypes, as his momentary hesitation over the rites of Diana suggests, he can also draw on his sense of the helplessness of women as a counter. As I have also suggested, the role of the suffering worshiper in the temple of Diana, in recalling the Knight from the disturbances generated by his imagining of Mars, shows that this image can also function as a way of mitigating and controlling the ferocity of masculine aggression. From this point of view Diana's votary need not be thought of as anything much more individualized than a reminder of "what we are fighting for," in the idealized and desexualized version that has served knights in shining armor from the Sir Galahad of the Arthurian vulgate cycle to the more hard-bitten and ironic but no less protective Philip Marlowes and Travis McGees of our own day, with whom the Knight at times has some affinity.

Emelye as she manifests herself in her prayer, however, is something else again, for if she is not Diana, she is not Callisto either: as the Knight presents her here, she is the most complex character in Pan III. Emelye knows she will probably have to be married despite her preferences, and this knowledge puts her in a position where it is difficult for her to identify completely and confidently with the aggressive daunger of Diana. Like the Knight, and like Callisto, she fears the goddess's harsh response to what may happen to her: "As keepe me fro thy vengeaunce and thyn ire,/That Attheon aboughte cruelly" (2302–3). The potential similarities of her situation to those of Callisto and the nameless worshiper in the temple of Diana give added resonance to her desire to remain chaste. Emelye is painfully aware not only of the independent pleasures she is about to lose but also of the new burdens she will have to take up:

I am, thow woost, yet of thy compaignye,
A mayde, and love huntynge and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to ben a wyf and be with childe.
Noght wol 1 knowe compaignye of man.
          (2307–11,   emphasis  added)

Confronted with the masculine world and her entry into it, Emelye is not aggressive in her rejection—unlike Diana, she can ill afford to be. Rather, she prays to be effaced from it:

And Palamon, that hath swich love to me,
And eek Arcite, that loveth me so soore,
This grace I preye thee withoute moore,
As sende love and pees bitwixe hem two,
And fro me turne awey hir hertes so
That al hire hoote love and hir desir,
And al hir bisy torment, and hir fir
Be queynt, or turned in another place.
       (2314–21)

Emelye's fantasy here is one of escape from the impersonality of her own sexuality, from the fact that a woman attracts masculine desire and has effects in the male world whether she wants to or not. Her wish is not to appear, to be effaced from the male look as if she had not been and had not produced the effects she never wanted or even knew about until too late. Once again, as with Palamon and Arcite, we are given an image of the concrete human needs and tensions out of which the gods are created, larger and simpler than life because untrammeled by the pressures that lead their worshipers to project them; but in Emelye's case Diana does not supply an institutional model and support, as Venus and Mars do for Palamon and Arcite. Emelye must somehow come to terms with a situation in which she, as the nominal cause and center of all the trouble, has little to say about its outcome. She has to hedge all her bets:

And if so be thou wolt nat do me grace,
Or if my destynee be shapen so
That I shal nedes have oon of hem two,
As sende me hym that moost desireth me.
      (2322–25)

Emelye is trying to find such possibilities as she can for personal fulfillment in circumstances that offer her no good choices, and because of her dilemma the troubled woman stands out—she is far more real and compelling than the goddess to whom she appeals. As with the worshiper in the temple of Diana, the poignancy of Emelye's condition is heightened because the goddess, who is in reality no more than a flattened and mythologized version of the place of woman in the system that disposes of her, cannot grant her prayer. The mumbo jumbo of sputtering fires and bloody firebrands that accompanies Diana's refusal to help forms a compact and enigmatic prefiguration of

a sorrow greater than Emelye can anticipate, the funeral pyre of Arcite that she will have to light near the end of the poem. It is as well an echo of the pyre lit at the behest of the Argive women at the poem's beginning; hence, in its participation in a larger structure of images, it reads as a figure of the fate of woman in a world where men kill one another competing for women who have not asked them to.

In place and in context, however, Diana's manifestations are no more than epic and narrative machinery that heightens by its flatness the humanity of the baffled and fearful woman whose last words in the poem, "What amounteth this, allas" (2362), leave her suspended and alienated as Palamon and Arcite are not. The Knight evokes in Emelye a character whose situation, in what might be called her forced disenchantment, is in some ways closest to his own. Venus and Diana are, the poem suggests, aspects of the institution of woman as the society of the tale constructs it. Precisely because neither of these institutional identities fits her while both constrain her, Emelye appears not as a woman defined and absorbed by mythic archetypes or "feminine nature" but as a person caught between competing role definitions and trying to find a place of her own and a set of practices she can use. As such, she is a figure of the Knight's understanding of the problems generated for a woman by her difference from the institutions that are supposed to define her, an index of his own disenchanted distance from the conventions that shape his tale and his world and of his selfconsciousness about that distance. What is most extraordinary of all about Emelye is the Knight's ability to imagine her, to put himself in the place of the other and try to think what it must be like for a woman to live in the world that men have made. She is testimony to the uses of impersonation.

One of the points I have been concerned to make in dealing with the presentation of the divine machinery in Pan III of the Knight's Tale is fairly well represented already in the critical literature and is economically expressed by Richard Neuse:

In the first place, therefore, the gods stand for things as they are, moira. The artists who have adorned the temple walls see no chasm between earthly reality and the divinities that rule over it. Second, the divine presences sum up certain ways of life to which men dedicate themselves.

In another sense, they have a psychological function: the god a person serves is his ruling passion. The gods are men's wills or appetites writ large.
          ("The Knight," 303)

A number of other commentators have also noted that the gods are "merely extensions of the human personalities,"^[16] but Neuse's formulation remains the most suggestive for me because it outlines compactly the three levels of causality that are discriminated in the Knight's presentation of the gods: in reverse order, individual psychology, institutions or the social construction of reality, and necessity, Neuse's moira. Widespread as these insights are, they have not had as much effect as they deserve on the interpretation of the tale—largely, I would argue, because they have not been connected with the issue of voicing or seen in terms of something the Knight does to the story, and does progressively. The order in which Neuse presents the three levels of meaning is in fact the order in which they are developed in the tale. It moves from a world in which whatever happens is presented in mystified form as external to the agents, as "the way things are," through a presentation of the institutional constructs that structure experience, to a world in which psychological vectors and human actions are paramount. If the Knight hesitates in the temple of Mars between the causal claims of psychology and external necessity, by the time he reaches the end of Part III he has chosen the former. Issues first raised and imported into the tale in the temples have, by the time the Knight gets to the prayers, found their way into the psychology of the characters, who emerge not only as complex individuals but also as venerian, dianan, and martian personalities, versions of those institutional aspects of the human psyche that produced the pagan gods. The direction of the Knight's interpretation of his "matere" is consistent; it allows us to assign priorities among the symbolic elements Neuse and others have isolated and say something definite about the relation of the gods in the poem to its characters. That the gods are merely extensions of the humans is something the poem uncovers. Far from being a means of importing into the story a level of true and objective

[16] Fletcher, "Role of Destiny," 48. See also Whittock, Reading of the Canterbury Tales , 66; Schmidt, "Tragedy of Arcite"; Kean, Making of English Poetry, 2:5; and Gaylord, "Role of Saturn," 179.

order external to humanity that is operative in the universe and only hidden from imperfect human knowledge—what we might call the Lady Philosophy reading of the poem—the gods are, or become, human creations, ways men and women try to make an order they cannot find outside them.

This is not to say, however, that the Knight entirely neglects the aspect of what I have called necessity in his presentation of the gods. That aspect, though kept relatively recessive, is also kept running in the poem, largely through astrological allusion. I have already discussed some of the ways the Knight shows his awareness, in the temples, of forces either entirely extrahuman, like "infortune," or within humans but not directly amenable to human will, forces like aggression or the biological rhythms of generation that may be dealt with in various personal and institutional ways but cannot be eschewed. In his account of the prayers of the three protagonists the Knight, while focusing on psychological and social factors, maintains this perspective in his framing of the scene. He reports that Palamon went to the temple of Venus "In hir houre" (2217); that Emelye made her sacrifice "The thridde houre inequal" (2271) after Palamon, that is, two hours later; and that Arcite made his "The nexte houre of Mars folwynge this" (2367), that is, three hours after Emelye. As several commentators have demonstrated, the tale aspires to scientific exactitude in matters of dates, hours, and astrological houses.^[17] This interest is sufficiently strong that the conflict of scientific timekeeping with the more "poetic" methods of the old books is occasionally noted by the Knight, as when he includes his own skeptical aside along with the information that Palamon rose with the lark, "Although it nere nat day by houres two,/Yet song the larke" (2211–12). The effect of these references to the planets that govern the hours of the day is to keep before us the medieval (modern for the Knight) revision of the pagan deities into the planets and therefore keep the pressure of larger cosmic forces at least marginally in play.

Yet it is misleading, I think, to maintain with Curry that "Chaucer" simply discarded the ancient mythological machinery, substituting

[17] Skeat, in Oxford Chaucer, 5:86, notes to I, 2217 and 2271; North, "Kalenderes Enlumyned Ben They," 151–51; and Robinson, in Riverside Chaucer, 837, notes to I, 2217 and 2271.

Boethian destiny and the planetary influences of medieval astrology.^[18] The Knight has a use for the older view of the gods as personalities as well as the newer one that takes them as impersonal influences, and therefore he gives us both side by side. I have already analyzed this effect in the description of the statue of Mars (see above, pp. 281—84); it is continued by the planetary allusions that frame the prayers and highlighted by the speech of Saturn that concludes Part III. The point of this procedure, in line with the analytical and differentiating thrust of the Knight's imagination in this part of the poem, is that it registers his sense of the distinction between the psychological and social components of the situation in the story (and in human life generally) and those that come from somewhere beyond, the distinction between human and nonhuman agency. By the end of Part III this distinction, previously concealed or confused by the mystifications of chivalric convention and the characters, has emerged more clearly in the dual treatment of the gods. On the one hand, they have, so to speak, descended into the characters and taken on their fullest life precisely as human personalities. The Knight knows and shows that a great deal of what is taken in literary tradition, chivalric consciousness, and ordinary life as the product of powers above is in fact humanly produced, and the gods are his major vehicle for registering this insight. On the other hand, as planets the gods also and independently become a way of calling attention to powers that, if they are not precisely above, are at any race beyond. They evoke the role of the entirely other in human life. I might point out here that this discrimination says little about the nature of necessity and in particular that it should not be taken to imply a benign Boethian or Dantean cosmos ruled by the sight above or a First Mover dispensing order in a fair chain of love. Though these are issues better left to a consideration of the last part of the poem, we have abundant evidence already of the Knight's dark imagining, his suspicion that whatever is running the cosmos does not concern itself with human needs.

Thus, by the end of Part III the Knight has reduced the gods to their origins, and one result of this process is that the antique and literary machinery of personifications is left rather stranded between the forces whose contradictions that machinery originally functioned to reconcile, forces the Knight has used the machinery itself to reevoke and

[18] Curry, Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences, 119ff.

separate. This means, among other things, that the machinery comes increasingly to be seen as only machinery, and archaic and outmoded machinery at that. The latter half of Pan III is full of touches that recognize and dismiss what is out of date in the story, from the unfamiliar and highfalutin titles like "Cytherea"—"I mene Venus, honurable and digne" (2216)—to "alle the rytes of his payen wyse" (2370) that we do not get to see Arcite perform. The fiction of the power of the gods is maintained throughout the narration of the prayers themselves in the portentous series of omens and answers that follow each prayer. Though these contain a number of comic touches, like the darkly muttered "Victorie!" of Mars, that suggest that the Knight does not take them seriously, the gods are generally allowed to speak with authority: "Among the goddes hye it is affermed,/And by eterne word writen and confermed,/Thou shall ben wedded unto oon of tho" (2349–51). Working against such assertions of the unalterability of divine purposes and the "eterne word" is a gradual buildup of mythological allusions to the affairs and quarrels of the gods: to Daphne, Actaeon, and Adonis; to Venus, Mars, and Vulcan. By the time Arcite reminds Mars of his adulterous affair with Venus and their humiliating capture by her husband, the characters may be said to be actively, though apparently unwittingly, embarrassing the gods by calling attention to their all-too-human inability to control their own passions and destinies.

This perspective, what we notice that the characters do not, is confirmed when we get backstage:

And right anon swich strif ther is bigonne,
For thilke grauntyng, in the hevene above,
Bitwixe Venus, the goddesse of love,
And Mars, the stierne god armypotente,
That Juppiter was bisy it to stente,
Til that the pale Saturnus the colde,
That knew so manye of aventures olde,
Foond in his olde experience an an
That he ful soone hath plesed every part.
As sooth is seyd, elde hath greet avantage;
In elde is bothe wysdom and usage;
Men may the olde atrenne, and noght atrede.
Saturne anon, to stynten strif and drede,
Al be it that it is agayn his kynde,
Of al this stryf he gan remedie fynde.
        (2438–52)

As Joseph Westlund noted, there is more disorder among the gods than there is among the humans, who at least have tried to establish an impartial institutional method for deciding the conflict.^[19] It appears that Venus and Mars have promised victory to their respective worshipers without bothering to consult one another or anyone else and that Diana does not tell Emelye who will win her because the goddess does not yet know. This confusion is a measure of how the Knight's presentation of the gods has developed from the formidable figures of the temples. Whereas there it was possible to see them as dominating and influencing human beings so as to make them what they are, here it is clear that the positions have been reversed: the actions and responses of the gods are dictated by what happens on earth, and Olympian society is a reflection of its earthly original—chaotic, political, and in need of guidance and authority.

Olympian society is also subject to various forms of manipulation, special interests, and backroom dealings, as the presentation of Saturn and his "remedie" reveals. The tone of the Knight's introduction is noticeably ironic, and the promise that Saturn will allay the strife "Al be it that it is agayn his kynde" is not reassuring. Though we do not yet discover what the solution is, Saturn gives a fair idea of where his sympathies lie, more on the side of his kin than with any abstract idea of justice. He addresses Venus as "My deere doghter" (2453) and tells her to dry her tears and not to worry about nasty old Mars:

Though Mars shal helpe his knyght, yet nathelees
Bitwixe yow ther moot be som tyme pees,
Al be ye noght of o compleccioun,
That causeth al day swich divisioun.
I am thyn aiel, redy at thy wille;
Weep now namoore; I wol thy lust fulfille.
        (2473–78)

This is really the only place in the tale where the Knight gives direct expression to a sense of the way things work in the world that is more dominant in the Man of Law, though it can be felt in the tacit political implications of such things as Theseus's original imprisonment of Palamon and Arcite, in the suggestion of an old-boy network operating to bring about the release of Arcite from "perpetual" imprisonment at the behest of Perothous, and, as we shall see, in a number of the events

[19] Westlund, "Impetus for Pilgrimage," 530.

of Part IV.^[20] This characterization of Saturn as behind-the-scenes operator evokes a fully disenchanted view of social and political life (it surely belongs in Terry Jones) as constituted simply by the interplay of conflicting wills: by deals, power struggles, and shifting collocations of individual and group interests. The experience that gives Saturn's eld its "greet avantage" scarcely seems like a garnering of higher truths; it seems to represent instead an understanding of the fundamental competitiveness of life in the world of this tale that makes diplomacy the continuation of war by other means.

Saturn is particularly grotesque here because of his grim self-characterization, sharply and rather jarringly juxtaposed to his words of grandfatherly comfort. His speech to Venus presents his double aspect as personification and planet so baldly as to render conspicuous the comic incompatibility of the two perspectives:

"My deere doghter Venus," quod Saturne,
"My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne,
Hath moore power than woot any man.
Myn is the drenchyng in the see so wan;
Myn is the prisoun in the derke cote;
Myn is the stranglyng and hangyng by the throte,
The murmure and the cherles rebellyng,
The groynyng, and the pryvee empoysonyng;
I do vengeance and pleyn correccioun,
Whil I dwelle in the signe of the leoun.
Myn is the ruyne of the hye halles,
The fallynge of the toures and of the walles
Upon the mynour or the carpenter.
I slow Sampsoun, shakynge the piler;
And myne be the maladyes colde,
The derke tresons, and the castes olde;
My lookyng is the fader of pestilence.
Now weep namoore; I shal doon diligence
That Palamon, that is thyn owene knyght,
Shal have his lady, as thou hast him night."
      (2453–72)

Saturn presents himself as the lord of disasters that appear to occur independently of any consistent principle or cause. He operates sometimes in the interests of justice, sometimes in the interests of disorder

[20] This view is perhaps also involved in certain aspects of Palamon and Arcite's Theban past; see above, chapter 10, nn. 7 and 8.

and rebellion; sometimes his effects are humanly mediated and motivated, sometimes (and here particularly I feel the traces of the Knight's dark imagining) they occur without reference to human concerns: the walls fall indifferently on the (military) miner and the carpenter, on those who are trying to build them up and those who want to bring them down. It is thus generally accurate to say that Saturn is a way of locating and giving a name to the Knight's intimations of chaos and dark meaninglessness as well as an image of mischance less schematic and simplified than Fortune and her wheel.^[21]

But the presentation of Saturn as a whole diminishes the impact and seriousness of this perspective at this point in the poem. The sinister implications of his activity are chastened, turned off by their ascription to a comic and melodramatically boastful old man plotting to please his granddaughter. This effect seems to me entirely in keeping with the Knight's use of the gods in Part III of the poem. He has used them to introduce what he sees as a set of perennial facts about the human situation. But the more successfully the gods do this, the more they call attention to their own limitations in their own time and their difference from what they have been used to convey. As we have seen, the pagan deities are used in the poem to evoke large-scale forces, psychic, social, and destinal, that cannot finally be fully anthropomorphized and located in a god or goddess. One might venture the generalization, for which I am indebted to Harry Berger, Jr., that for the Knight the reality of evil is felt in inverse proportion to the extent to which the evil is personified. This rule is particularly true of the kind of evil that the figure of Saturn alludes to. The forces in the psyche represented by Venus, Mars, and Diana are amenable to human control by some such process as the Knight has applied to them. If they are understood for what they are, not projected into the external world, there is some hope that people may be able to contain and direct them either through experienced self-knowledge and self-control, like Theseus in the grove, or through relatively rational institutions such as the tournament aspires to be.^[22] This is the burden of the first half of Part IV, up to the

[21] It is interesting that the characterization of mischance is thus shifted from a feminine figure to a masculine one. Whatever else this shift means, it is consonant with the general tendency in much of the tale to revise or replace traditional antifeminist images and identify the sources of violence and mishap with masculinity.

[22] Though this seems to me to be an accurate statement of the assumptions that operate behind the working of the poem, it also seems important to note that there issomething missing in the view of the world it implies. It is characteristic of the deep structure of the Knight's imagination to prefer a vision of life as essentially a matter of the confrontation of fate by heroic individuality. There is a certain equivocation or wavering in his portrayal of institutions between seeing them as constitutive of such confrontation itself and seeing them as necessary but supplementary epiphenomena of it, which successful heroism can master and transcend. I will return to this issue at the end of this reading of the Knight's Tale .

death of Arcite. The end of Part IV, and of the poem, concentrates on the human resources available for dealing with contingencies men did not make and cannot predict. In the Knight's view it is inappropriate to treat such forces as if they had a single directing source and will behind them because, as we shall see, such a view encourages the abrogation of human responsibility for the sustaining of human value and human meaning and pulls toward passivity and despair. As the Knight's presentation of Saturn suggests, a god is not a good way of talking about this kind of threat, which is better examined as it is actually encountered in human life in particular situations. The gods have served their purpose, and it is time to return to narrative:

Now wol I stynten of the goddes above,
Of Mars, and of Venus, goddesse of love,
And telle yow as pleynly as I kan
The grete effect, for which that I bygan.
      (2479–82,)

13—
Choosing Manhood:
The "Masculine" Imagination and the Institution of the Subject

The success of Part III of the Knight's Tale as a way of infusing the story with its narrator's own sensibility and experience—of making the past present and the romantic realistic—is measured in part by the vividness with which the Knight imagines and describes the scene of the tournament and its action in Part IV. Perhaps the most striking instance of this immediacy is "But herkneth me, and stynteth noyse a lite" (2674), a moment when the shouts of the Athenian crowd at Arcite's victory and the world of the pilgrimage where the Knight is telling the tale seem to merge most completely—though with the proviso that the world of the tale is the more real one for him since we do not imagine the pilgrims joining the shouting. The immediacy and fulness of the world of the tournament are the most notable things about it as Part IV opens. The present tense—"Ther maystow seen devisynge of harneys" (2496)—is used to describe a dense, technical list of arms, ornaments, and activities whose modernity in the Knight's world is well attested by commentators.^[1] Everywhere we look there are throngs of people, armorers and commoners as well as lords, "Heere thre, ther ten, holdynge hir questioun,/Dyvynynge of thise Thebane knyghtes two" (2514–15) in a way that will not be unfamiliar to modern enthusiasts of athletic events: "Somme seyde he looked grymme, and he wolde fighte;/'He hathe a sparth of twenty pound of wighte'" (2519–20).

This sense of the presence and familiarity of the scene to the speaker is, as I have suggested, the outcome of the process of telling the tale, the result of a good deal of practical labor on his part in dealing with a

[1] See Robinson's notes, in Chaucer, Works , id ed., 680, especially to lines 2491ff.

story that begins by seeming rather remote, literary, and unreal to him.^[2] What the Knight has done with the gods in the course of Part III is a paradigm of what he has done with the tale as a whole: his procedure throughout has been to revise it, that is, give it new meanings and a new life in the present while at the same time definitively outmoding and discarding its old meanings. This procedure is perhaps clearest with the gods, both because they are so much the focus of attention in the center of the poem and because there is little temptation to suppose that the narrator gives them any credence except as opportunities for revision and symbolization. The resources of classical myth, the temples and the gods, have been the Knight's vehicle for bringing the tale up to date in the sense that he has used them to introduce greater depth and complexity in line with his own experience into the world of the story; but they can only exercise this function when they cease to mean what he understands them to have meant for classical culture and become the symbols he has made of them. Even more than the statue of Mars, the figure of Saturn is a subject split between a set of disenchanted human motives and manipulations on the one hand and a set of inscrutable external forces on the other. The one thing he is not is a god, an autonomous, centered self directing events according to his own will and power. The treatment of the tournament participates in this modernizing movement in a way that makes particularly evident that it is modernizing. The Knight's sense of history, like the Wife of Bath's sense of her past, takes its direction backward from the now of speaking and experience: the image of the past is a function of the needs of the present, to the point where what is seen as archaic is essentially what is seen as not of use and not illuminating, like pagan rites.

[2] Like most other aspects of the tale, its attitude toward history and the idea of the historical is not susceptible of a single unchanging characterization such as might note that Theseus is a medieval ruler in a classical setting and conclude that the tale therefore shares in a general medieval insensitivity to anachronism and even, perhaps, a deficient notion of history. The relation of present to past is one of the problems the poem itself addresses and is therefore caught up in the process of the tale—it changes as the story develops. A much more sophisticated awareness of the complexity of "medieval" attitudes (the word medieval itself carries a theory-laden prejudgment: the middle of what?) to the pagan past has developed in Chaucer criticism of the 1980s, as exemplified in work like A. J. Minnis's Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (though relatively traditional in its theoretical assumptions) or, better still, in works whose approach is more firmly centered on the historicizing agency of Chaucer's text, such as John Fyler's Chaucer and Ovid and winthrop Wetherbee's Chaucer and the Poets .

The Knight's practice suggests, however, that among the needs of the present, for him, are the sense of authority and tradition that are invested in the idea of the past as a storehouse of exemplary chivalry and noble deeds; the one place in the tale that explicitly takes account of the problem of anachronism is, so to speak, a defense of the past. In Part III the Knight completes his list of the weapons borne by the warriors in Palamon's party—breastplate, "gypoun," Prussian shield, and the rest—with the remark "Ther is no newe gyse that it nas old" (2125). Framed by all that modern weaponry, the line feels like a response to a potential accusation of anachronism (I take it the Knight himself feels the description is a bit too contemporary). It seems clear that he wants to say that the past has influenced the present and have it appear so in his tale despite the pressure of his own constructive activity; but, interestingly, he answers the charge in effect with an assertion of the perennial character of the modern. The Knight's sense that the essential things about human life were in Theseus's time as they are now demands that the times of the old books be reconstructed from the point of view of the now, and that is how he has proceeded. When that procedure becomes too evident, he moves to reassert the authority and independence of the past as an origin, but without discursively formulating them, so as to be able to say that things have always been, in their essentials, as they are now . What ties the present and the past together for the Knight and gives the past its relevance is the "human nature" that emerges (that is, is constructed) as the common element in the two, in particular the chivalric-heroic masculine nature he ascribes in different versions to all the male characters in the tale. It is to the operations of this perennial character in a predominantly modern institutional setting that the first section of Part IV addresses itself.

Theseus is awakened by the bustle of the noble life, "mynstralcie and noyse that was maked" (2524), in this atmosphere of realistic immediacy and introduces his modification of the original plan of the tournament, changing it from an affair of "mortal bataille" to one of capture to avoid destruction of noble blood. It is worth noting the differences between this and earlier expressions of "the myghty dukes wille." Theseus is trying to impose his will not just on a pair of helpless captives but also on a society whose complexity is evident in the richness with which it is manifested here. As a result, he is presented—

and takes care to present himself—as far less absolute and arbitrary in his actions and decisions than he was at the beginning of the tale or even in the grove. Theseus's "vertu" shows itself here in the efficacy of his social engineering, the magnificence but also the care with which he controls and orchestrates the complex flow of events. When he becomes aware of the hubbub outside his palace, he does not respond at once, as he did before, but holds his chamber (2525) until the disorder has been organized, "Til that the Thebane knyghtes, bothe yliche/Honured, were into the paleys fet" (2526–27). Instead of speaking his will in his own voice, Theseus disposes himself symbolically above the assembled host "Arrayed right as he were a god in trone" (2529) and has his design proclaimed by a herald, who also takes on the responsibility for crowd control (2533–36). The herald's announcement of the rules of the contest is a good example of the continuous and unremitting attention to detail that characterizes the organization of the tournament:

No man therfore, up peyne of los of lyf,
No maner shot, ne polax, ne short knyf
Into the lystes sende or thider brynge;
Ne short swerd, for to stoke with poynt bitynge,
No man ne drawe, ne bere it by his syde.
Ne no man shal unto his felawe ryde
But o cours with a sharpe ygrounde spere;
Foyne, if hym list, on foote, hymself to were.
        (2543–50)

This announcement is, of course, more than just documentary realism. The new form of the tournament represents an attempt to forestall ultimate confrontation between Palamon and Arcite and their followers, an attempt to institutionalize mercy. The detailed enumeration of just which weapons and styles of combat are allowed and which are not, and the need for such precise rules, suggest the difficulty of the task. Given the fundamental contentiousness of chivalric consciousness, it is hard to enforce mercy because it is not a quality that comes naturally to the devotees of Mars, especially in the heat of battle. Theseus's aim is to allow the natural aggression of the combatants play, but as far as possible only in play: "God spede you! Gooth forth, and ley on faste!/With long swerd and with mace fighteth youre fille" (2558–59). Only through careful control of the conditions of mock

combat can men such as the Lygurge and Emetrius of Part III be kept from destroying one another.

Similarly, in his account of the procession from the palace to the lists the Knight celebrates the ordered magnificence of the display, with particular appreciation for the way the procession maintains both hierarchy among the spectators and balance between the two sides, even to the exact timing of their entry into the lists:

Whan set was Theseus ful riche and hye,
Ypolita the queene, and Emelye,
And othere ladys in degrees aboute.
Unto the seetes preesseth al the route.
And westward, thurgh the gates under Marte,
Arcite, and eek the hondred of his parte,
With baner reed is entred right anon;
And in that selve moment Palamon
Is under Venus, estward in the place,
With baner whyt and hardy chiere and face.
In al the world, to seken up and doun,
So evene, withouten variacioun,
Ther nere swiche compaignyes tweye.
          (2577–89)

Gone is the fortuitousness and improbability of the meeting in the grove precisely because the task of ensuring that the right people meet one another under the right circumstances is no longer entirely dependent on Fortune or destiny. What we are really asked to admire here are Theseus's powers of organization as he provides a framework for the resolution of the conflict between Palamon and Arcite that is more plausible, more magnificent, and more meaningful than what the sight above was apparently able to manage in Part II.

It need not lessen our appreciation of Theseus's achievement that some dark imagining shades its edges. The Knight notes and approves the hierarchy and explicit order of these preparations, but he also notes that they have a practical, as well as an aesthetic or symbolic, function—they make it easier to establish that the fight is fair:

For ther was noon so wys that koude seye
That any hadde of oother avauntage
Of worthynesse, ne of estaat, ne age,
So evene were they chosen, for to gesse.
And in two renges faire they hem dresse.

Whan that hir names rad were everichon,
That in hir nombre gyle were ther noon,
Tho were the gates shet.
      (2590–97)

The potential presence of guile is introduced not to question the pretensions of the tournament, as might have been the case earlier in the tale, but to show that Theseus's planning has anticipated and forestalled it. The duke's ordering of the event is as attentive to the lawlessness of guile and force as it is to more humane values of mercy and right. The success of the tournament as an institution, as a triumph of human making, is measured by its ability to respond to human needs and desires while containing and withstanding human failings.

The Knight's own rhythm of narration in this part of the tale oscillates between a free-ranging spontaneity of observation (often accompanied by a tone of excitement and a feeling of participation in the events described) and an attention to the ordering of the scene that has the effect both of enabling the spontaneity and containing it, keeping it in check. It seems that it is precisely because he and Theseus have organized the tournament so carefully that the Knight can give himself so fully to the combat when it comes. The fighting is described with remarkable vividness in the present tense in an almost cinematic style: the eye leaps disjointedly from scene to scene; the voice speaks in end-stopped lines of one image a line, unlike the measured and formal deployment of substantial blocks of narrative characteristic of the earlier part of the tale:

Ther shyveren shaftes upon sheeldes thikke;
He feeleth thurgh the herte-spoon the prikke.
Up spryngen speres twenty foot on highte;
Out goon the swerdes as the silver brighte;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He thurgh the thikkeste of the throng gan threste;
Ther stomblen steedes stronge and doun gooth al,
He rolleth under foot as dooth a bal.
      (2605–8; 2611–14)

These lines seem to reflect the Knight's experience not so much of war as of tourneying as a sport and record his recreative participation in the scene as he imagines it. This effect is strengthened for me by the way many of the lines allude to the specifically English vernacu-

lar tradition of alliterative heroic verse,^[3] as if the Knight were taking time out from his more classically oriented epic and its latinateromance style for a more homely, unpretentious, and innocent kind of entertainment.

I have not made much use of the terminology of jouissance in reference to the Knight's Tale so far, though it is fully relevant for a number of reasons. In the first place, I have felt the need to be careful about the associations of erotic pleasure the word carries, even though the technical Lacanian use of it does not always include them in any direct sense. The care seems necessary because the most important "lawless affects" whose agency is represented in the tale have more to do with aggression than with sexuality. The Knight, though certainly not untouched by heterosexual erotic feeling (as his various accounts of looking at women, whether mediated by the Thebans or conducted himself, attest), does not seem as affected either positively or negatively by it as by manifestations of violence, competition, and masculine striving. It is certainly clear that there are moments when the Knight gets caught up in his telling in a way that indicates the workings of unconscious energy. Such moments as the description of the Thracian boar hunters and the temple of Mars betray the operation of the Barthesian formula for jouissance, "I know that these are only words, but all the same  . . ." (Pleasure of the Text , 48), but they do not seem to have much to do with pleasure in the ordinary sense.

One reason for this lack of pleasure is no doubt the Knight's respect for the personal and social dangers that the exercise of aggression entails and his horror at the effects of violence. His negative view of aggression is both a cause and an effect of his sense of social responsibility, his care for and about the institutions that promote justice, peace, honor, and the other ornaments of the noble life his tale celebrates. It is not hard to see how this set of concerns fits in with those of the "masculine" imagination as I have characterized it previously. That imagination is, as I have said, made uneasy by manifestations of jouissance , whether erotic or aggressive, because of its general commitment to the law and the going institutional structure, and the Knight's subjectivity seems to manifest a fairly self-conscious form of

[3] Noted by Salter, Introduction to The Knight's Tale, 16–17.

this commitment. Thus, though it is obvious that the nodal moments of the tale are occasions of strong disturbance and ambivalence, it is mostly the negative side of the ambivalence and the effort of control that is dominant in them. The Knight's description of the tournament is one of the few places in the tale where he allows himself to take relatively unproblematic pleasure in strife and gives himself over to the exercise of his own delight in armed competition and the excitement of fighting. To see him do so is perhaps to realize more clearly that these feelings are always present in him and that it is his fear of the violence in himself as much as in others that drives his ambivalence and his strong sense of the need for control. In fact, the pleasure associated with aggression is usually displaced for the Knight into pleasure felt at the trappings, the institutional constructions and values that surround and channel aggression and thereby give it play. Though I have stressed the Knight's ironic and skeptical attitude toward the mystified forms of chivalric ideals generally expressed by Palamon and Arcite, in part because this ironic dimension of the tale has been somewhat undervalued in other readings, there can be no doubt about the fact of his love for these ideals themselves. He is fully aware of the homosocial bonding^[4] that comradeship in arms generates—surely he wishes that Palamon and Arcite were more like Theseus and Perothous—and of the value of institutions like the tournament as a way of bringing men together. It is impossible to miss the comradeship he himself feels and his enthusiasm:

[4] I take the term from Sedgwick, Between Men. As she points out, it allows us to acknowledge the component of desire in male-male relationships without having to say that they are somehow "really" homosexual. Her notion of homosocial desire creates a space "for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men's relations with other men" (1–2). The famous passage that is always quoted with respect to medieval chivalry in this regard is from Jean de Beuil's Le Jouvencel.

What a joyous thing is war, for many fine deeds are heard and seen in its course. . . . You love your comrade so much in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears rise to your eyes. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of our Creator. And then you prepare to go and live and die with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight is. Do you think that a man who does that fears death?
          (In Vale, War and Chivalry , 30)

For if ther fille tomorwe swich a cas,
Ye knowen wel that every lusty knyght
That loveth paramours and hath his myght,
Were it in Engelond or elleswhere,
They wolde, hir thankes, wilnen to be there—
To fighte for a lady, benedicitee!
It were a lusty sighte for to see.
       (2110–16)

In the tournament description, as I have suggested, it is the care taken to specify the limits of the combat in advance that allows the speaker to relax and give himself to the scene as fully as he does.

As the description proceeds, however, the Knight begins to draw back from his immediate enjoyment of the proceedings and focus again on their implications and potential consequences. The rhythm of the "masculine" imagination, with its need to contain jouissance and fill the gaps in the social body that its emergence threatens to reveal, reasserts itself. He singles out the principal contestants, Palamon and Arcite, and the imagery he applies to them points up that this is more than a rough game and reminds us of what is being simultaneously let loose and contained here. Arcite pursues Palamon, as cruel on the hunt as "tygre in the vale of Galgopheye,/Whan that hir whelp is stole whan it is lite" (2626–27), and Palamon desires to slay his cousin like a "fel leon" of Belmarye "That hunted is, or for his hunger wood" (2630–31). By now such animal images function not only as reminders of the fight in the grove but also resonate with what has been added to them of savagery and danger in the temple of Mars and the descriptions of Lygurge and Emetrius. The Knight seems to carry the description up to the point where the original scene in the grove is about to play itself out, and then to pull up short:

The jelous strokes on hir helmes byte;
Out renneth blood on bothe hir sydes rede.<sup>[5

]</sup> Som tyme an ende ther is of every dede.
For er the sonne unto the reste wente,
The stronge kyng Emetreus gan hente
This Palamon, as he faught with Arcite,
And made his swerd depe in his flessh to byte,
And by the force of twenty is he take

[5] Compare II, 1655–60.

Unyolden, and ydrawen to the stake.
And in the rescus of this Palamoun
The stronge kyng Lygurge is born adoun,
And kyng Emetreus, for al his strengthe,
Is born out of his sadel a swerdes lengthe,
So hitte him Palamoun er he were take.
But al for noght; he was broght to the stake.
His hardy herte myghte him helpe naught:
He moste abyde, whan that he was caught,
By force and eek by composicioun.
      (2634–51)

This replay of the earlier scene serves to remind us of the differences between the two scenes and the superiority of the tournament to the earlier duel as a way of handling the issues at stake in the strife between the Theban princes. Even if one of the cousins had succeeded in killing his rival in the grove, he would not have been significantly nearer to winning the lady since neither Theseus nor Emelye was aware of the situation. Here, however, Theseus can declare that "Arcite of Thebes shal have Emelie,/That by his fortune hath hire faire ywonne" (2658–59). Destruction of noble blood, the probable outcome of the fight in the grove, has been avoided by the efforts of the struggling knights who diffuse and defuse the animal violence of Palamon and Arcite within the orderly framework of the rules devised for the tournament by Theseus. The need for violent competition has been both satisfied and controlled "By force and eek by composicioun," a line that analyzes the components of Theseus's apparently successful institutional solution. In addition, it seems likely that the Theban question, with all its potential for further destruction of noble blood, is well on its way to being settled, at least for Athens, by the alliance of a prince of the Theban royal house with the sister-in-law of the Athenian duke. Theseus has been able to wrest a complex and satisfying human meaning from the blind forces of human conflict and chance encounter with which the tale began. He has controlled fortune by making a space in which all the possible dangerous chances have apparently been allotted safe meanings, and this fact gives point to his announcement of Arcite's victory as well as to the joy of the spectators: "Anon ther is a noyse of peple bigonne/For joye of this, so loude and heighe withalle/It semed that the lystes sholde falle" (2660–62).

But the last line of the passage describing this triumphant celebra-

tion is uneasily reminiscent of the temple of Mars, where the wind of violence shakes the very edifice built to contain and celebrate it (1975–94). It is as if something inherent in the tournament itself threatens the stability it is trying to achieve. The reasons for this uneasiness are not far to seek, and they have relatively little to do with the fortuitous disaster that is about to befall Arcite—that fall is a different problem and poses a different sort of threat to order. It should be remembered that in socializing the strife between Palamon and Arcite, Theseus has given up to others a large part of his original life-and-death power over the cousins. He has let that power out of his own hands for what the poem shows to be good reasons, but there remains something ambitious and risky about his having done so. The elaborate edifice of temples, tournaments, and philosophical speculation that the tale erects on the quarrel is a bit gratuitous—Theseus and the Knight clearly intend to do more than settle the affair of Palamon and Arcite in the quickest and simplest manner. The risks this ambition takes arise from the necessity of allowing others to have a hand in determining the solution, especially given the character of those others. The feral and competitive urge to mastery of the heroic character is for the Knight its fundamental nature, a psychological bedrock to which the tale returns again and again, and such a character is not easily dissuaded from bloody arguments, bloody occasions, and the judgment of blood. The animal imagery applied to Palamon and Arcite in the tournament and the fact that the symbolically weighted Lygurge and Emetrius are singled out by name as being borne down in the struggle to subdue Palamon and separate the cousins testify to the power of the impulse to destroy a rival in the Thebans, a power measured in part by the force needed to deflect it. It is true that Palamon and Arcite have stronger motives for killing than the other participants in the tournament, but it is also true that as long as they both remain alive, someone might feel that the outcome is not really and finally decisive.^[6]

Such a disappointed partisan of Palamon turns up immediately in the person of Venus, whose reaction qualifies and undercuts the Sup-

[6] The considerations seem to me to qualify Aers's criticism of Theseus's modification of the rules of the tournament to spare the shedding of noble blood:

This modification cannot be taken as a rejection of his former life, since he determines to continue with the tournament he has planned and the decision to settle the question of whom Emily should marry by sheer violence—rather than by consulting the oracles, drawing lots, detailed inquiry into the knights, or by letting Emily do what she wants and reject them both, preventing the violence altogether.
        (Creative Imagination , 180)

Given the violent world of the tale, which Aers himself describes admirably, the ineffectuality of any of these alternatives seems patent, calculated to increase strife rather than allay it.

posedly universal joy of the cheering people by reminding us of the presence of unresolved tensions in the outcome of the tournament and the potential presence in the audience of those who want their wills and may be moved to take further steps to get them:

What kan now faire Venus doon above?
What seith she now? What dooth this queene of love,
But wepeth so, for wantynge of hir wille,
Til that hir teeres in the lystes fille?
She seyde, "I am ashamed, doutelees."

Saturnus seyde, "Doghter, hoold thy pees!
Mars hath his wille, his kynght hath al his boone,
And, by myn heed, thow shalt been esed soone."
        (2663–70)

I do not think there can be any question here of taking the gods seriously as gods. In keeping with the overall tendency of the poem and the achievement of Part III, they come before us in all-too-human form as representatives of what the feelings of a segment of the real human audience of the tournament may be. Venus is concerned for her honor, as knights are, not about the place of love in a cosmic scheme. Once again the perspective taken on the gods is double since the comic detail of Venus's tears falling in the lists presumably means that it has begun to rain—no doubt the result of a planetary conjunction that a betterinformed scholar than I might dig out of the astrological information the poem supplies—and that the ground is becoming dangerously slippery. But this event belongs to a very different order of causes— which is why the line is jarring—one difficult to reconcile comfortably with the psychological and partisan involvement of Venus and Saturn as spectators and plotters.

In fact, the cause of Arcite's fall is rather perfunctorily handled here and is subordinated to a consideration of its effects. We are told that he takes off his helm "for to shewe his face" (2677) and rides around the

arena "Lokynge upward upon this Emelye" (2679), which inspired in Neuse the curiously moralistic reflection that Arcite should have looked where he was going ("The Knight," 309). The point is surely how natural and harmless these actions are, and yet how disproportionately deadly they can be in the wrong circumstances. The "furie infernal" (2684) who "causes" Arcite's horse to shy is a mere device, conspicuously a furia ex machina from the old books^[7] and the last appearance of the discredited divine machinery in the poem: the gods do not contribute as speakers and doers to the poem's resolution. What engages the Knight is the physical and emotional horror of what Arcite undergoes: the harshly realistic description of the damage inflicted by his own saddle-bow, his color "As blak . . . as any cole or crowe,/So was the blood yronnen in his face" (2692–93), the sudden transformation of his armor from a protection to a burden and a danger that must be cut off him (2696), and the final chilling detail that "he was yet in memorie and alyve,/And alwey criyinge after Emelye" (2698–99).

The Knight's harsh imagining of Arcite trapped in his suddenly and ruinously broken body, fully conscious and still desiring the lady he has just won and lost, is so intense and compelling that the sudden shift of perspective and tone in the lines that immediately follow is genuinely and deliberately shocking: "Due Theseus, with al his compaignye,/Is comen hoom to Atthens his citee,/With alle blisse and greet solempnitee" (2700–2702). No less surprising is the way the Knight leaves Arcite and his plight in suspension for fully forty lines to complete his account of Theseus's feasting of the other contestants and their final departure from Athens. The voice shifts its attention from a private misery to a public celebration in a way that puts a strain on the speaker and on us—as well as on the participants. The celebration is of course haunted by what has happened to Arcite, especially in the early part of the account of it where we see the participants trying to

[7] This fury is interesting. Her meaning is at least double. As a patent pagan invention and a piece of conspicuous plot machinery she is an index of the absurdity of what happens in the grim existentialist sense, a kind of tag for the senselessness of the occurrence, and her association with Saturn strengthens this aspect of her meaning. At the same time furies are traditionally spirits of blood revenge, allied with the lust of the kin to exact blood recompense for any slight or defeat. In this aspect the fury keeps alive the atmosphere of unsettled heroic contention in its more primitive forms that Venus also suggests and that continues to haunt the tournament in what follows. And of course she is a woman, whatever that means.

persuade themselves that Arcite will be healed (2705–6). But as he continues, the speaker concentrates more and more on the other knights voicing their relief that no one else is irreparably injured and trying to remedy their own hurts "for they wolde hir lymes have" (2714).

What is being asserted here is the necessity, and the difficulty, of attending to the ordering of public life in the face of individual misfortune. The difficulty is measured by the strain in the ordering of the narrative and the shock of the shift from Arcite's cries to bliss and "revel al the longe nyght" (2717). The necessity appears in the account of the purposes of Theseus's feasting:

For which this noble duc, as he wel kan,
Conforteth and honoureth every man,
And made revel al the longe nyght
Unto the straunge lordes, as was right.
Ne ther was holden no disconfitynge
But as a justes or a tourneiynge;
For soothly ther was no disconfiture.
For fallyng nys nat but an aventure,
Ne to be lad by force unto the stake
Unyolden, and with twenty knyghtes take,
O persone allone, withouten mo,
And haryed forth by arme, foot, and too,
And eke his steede dryven forth with staves
With footmen, bothe yemen and eek knaves—
It nas arretted hym no vileynye;
Ther may no man clepen it cowardye.
For which anon duc Theseus leet crye,
To stynten alle rancour and envye,
The gree as wel of o syde as of oother,
And eyther syde ylik as ootheres brother;
And yaf hem yiftes after hir degree,
And fully heeld a feeste dayes three,
And conveyed the kynges worthily
Out of his toun a journee largely.
And hoom wente every man the righte way.
Ther was namoore but "Fare wel, have good day!"
       (2715–40)

This passage gives the clearest expression in the poem thus far to the precariousness of what the tournament has achieved because the voice is so obviously haunted by the opposite of what it is trying to assert:

that the tournament is over and all has gone smoothly. The voicing of the passage is peculiar in that at "For fallyng nys nat but an aventure" it begins to shift from simple description to conspicuous, rhetorical assertion. The speaker seems to be trying to convince someone of a set of dubious propositions by piling up too much evidence. Since one of the dubious propositions is that Palamon's defeat was an "aventure," a chance occurrence of the same class as Arcite's fall, one can see how it might cause trouble whoever offers it. The problem is not, as it will be later, that the senselessness of Arcite's "aventure" renders human effort and achievement meaningless but that it is to be feared that the issues of winning and losing, the connection between victory and heroic worth, will not go away. Palamon lost and he did not die, and the specter of what a friendly tournament might turn into if someone were disposed to assert, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that his defeat is evidence of "vileynye" or "cowardye" is close to the surface. This danger is especially pressing because such an imputation could easily spill over from Palamon onto his unsuccessful defenders, who consequently must not be allowed to suppose that their failure is anything more than an "aventure."

Theseus's dismissal of the two hundred knights is the culmination of the theme I have been tracing, the fragility of human institutions—of society—in the face of specifically human resistance to sociability and order—to civilization. Throughout Part IV the Knight's description registers Theseus's constant vigilance to anticipate, contain, and assuage the contentious violence of heroic honor, the Mars in men. Once again Theseus forestalls occasions of "rancour and envye" by his powers of persuasion and by staging demonstrations of the equal honor of both sides: ceremonies of gift giving and feasting that proclaim "the gree as wel of o syde as of oother." There is something of a sigh of relief in the "Fare wel, have good day" that concludes his ceremonial conveyance of "the kynges"—Lygurge and Emetrius—a full day's ride out of town.

This final act of balancing the two sides might also be seen as the culmination of the balancing and equalizing of Palamon and Arcite that is so notable a feature of the poem from its beginning and over which so much critical ink has been spilled. As the question is usually posed and debated, the issue is whether, on the one hand, Palamon and Arcite are virtually indistinguishable and of equal merit so that the problem of their relative deserts is not relevant to the tale or, on the

other hand, one of them is morally superior and does or does not deserve what he gets. My own position on this question is that they are separate but equal, that is, that they are or become identifiably different personalities or dispositions within the larger economy of chivalric-heroic consciousness but that this differentiation has no ethical significance for the outcome of the tale. So much should be clear already from my analysis of their prayers in Part III, and I will add here, in anticipation of matters to come, that I think the whole question of ethical superiority or inferiority is a misleading approach to the tale because the Knight does not believe in poetic justice. What interests me more at the moment, however, is that like other things in the poem, the question of the equality of Palamon and Arcite becomes in Part IV an active issue Theseus must address. Whatever the truth of their merits and deserts, Theseus has an interest in making them look as equal as possible to ensure that the tournament will appear to be a fair contest and himself "[a] trewe juge, and no partie" (2657). His efforts to achieve this appearance are evident in the way he organizes the procession to the lists and the order of the tournament, and the Knight abets him in his own descriptions of the taking of Palamon (2641–51, 2723–30).

By contrast, but for the same reasons, once the tournament is over, Theseus also has an interest in being able to say that some decisive difference between the two cousins has been established. One might think that demonstrating a difference could be left to the contestants themselves, but in the passage I have been considering it emerges that the outcome cannot be allowed to reflect ethically on the characters of the two princes or their followers for reasons having to do with social stability. That is why Theseus proclaims that Arcite has won Emelye "by his fortune" when it is obvious that the efforts of his knights must have had something to do with it and that the decision is actually reached, as the Knight says, "By force and eek by composicioun." The Knight's cajoling and uneasy tone in urging the same position in the description of the aftermath of the tournament reflects his own appreciation of the importance of adopting it and at the same time his awareness of its flimsiness. As with the later First Mover speech, the poem has anticipated its critics by setting up a situation—and making an issue of it—in which it is simultaneously necessary to differentiate between Palamon and Arcite and to keep them equal. But the poem also shows, as the critics generally do not, that there are no good—that

is, objective—answers to the question and that its resolution, since it cannot be "solved," depends on directing attention to whichever of the contradictory aspects of the situation it is tactically desirable to stress at a given moment. We are thus directed not to the interpretation —the "actual" difference or equality between the knights—but to the interpreter , to the Knight and Theseus. We focus on the extent to which it is only the latter's vigilance, quickness, and resourcefulness, the sense of when and how to employ authority or diplomacy, that keeps the institutional framework and the social order that depends on it intact.

The Knight's account of the tournament is based on and develops his demystifying description and analysis of the lists earlier in the poem. His awareness of the importance of human agency in constituting and preserving the framework of society, most fully developed in Part III, carries over into Part IV in his revised view of the heroism of Theseus and the pressures with which it must deal. Precisely because justice and the institutions whereby it is dispensed are not supported and guaranteed by some external and objective cosmic order, Theseus must work hard to give his tournament the look of order and authority. Justice, like other human institutions, is for the Knight a human meaning, an agreement among men that is easily broken. Hence Theseus must continually stage and dramatize his impartiality so as to avoid the imputation of having a partisan interest in the outcome of the contest and thus becoming part of the struggle to establish a meaning rather than the arbiter of that struggle. He must array himself as a god enthroned because he has no real god behind him to guarantee his authority. The Knight makes this clear by the attention he pays to Theseus's facework, in particular his attention to what the labor of ordering costs the duke. The cost is measured not so much in the failure of Theseus's plan to settle the quarrel between Palamon and Arcite—though that is obviously a factor—as in the weight of responsibility for managing every detail of the conduct of the tournament and its aftermath, the flexibility, foresight, and imperturbability he must continually maintain whether he wants to or not. Like the Knight, Theseus may well want to attend to Arcite, but his public responsibilities dictate that he forgo his private grief until it is safe to indulge it.

This is obviously a different Theseus from the authoritarian, if benevolent, despot of the first half of the poem, and in fact a more heroic one. Because so much more is demanded of him than the straightforward Creon bashing of Part I, and because he has to exercise

self-control as well as the control of others in the interests of an order he must put before his own will, Theseus is a more serious and responsible figure and a more realistic and impressive image of the chivalric ideal. His actions in the first section of Part IV provide an example of what human responsibility for human order entails and of an achievement, limited as it is, that is more valuable to the Knight than conquest. The threats to human order that men themselves pose, and that therefore with sufficient skill and self-discipline men should be able to control, Theseus has controlled. What such a hero can do against contingencies no man can anticipate remains to be seen.

When at last the Knight does return to Arcite, his concentration on the facts of dying is merciless:

Swelleth the brest of Arcite, and the soore
Encreesseth at his herte moore and moore.
The clothered blood, for any lechecraft,
Corrupteth, and is in his bouk ylaft,
That neither veyne-blood, ne ventusynge,
Ne drynke of herbes may ben his helpynge.
The vertu expulsif, or animal,
Fro thilke vertu cleped natural
Ne may the venym voyden ne expelle.
The pipes of his longes gonne to swelle,
And every lacerte in his brest adoun
Is shent with venym and corrupcioun.
Him gayneth neither, for to gete his lif,
Vomyt upward, ne dounward laxatif.
Al is tobrosten thilke regioun;
Nature hath now no dominacioun.
And certeinly, ther Nature wol nat wirche,
Far wel phisik! go ber the man to chirche!
This al and som, that Arcita moot dye.
       (2743–61)

The technical and scientific language of anatomy and medicine contributes something to the unsentimental tone of the description, but insofar as such language might imply the consolations offered by a scientific understanding of terrible natural facts, it is overcome as surely as medicine itself by the failure of Arcite's vis naturalis . The ugliness of what is happening to Arcite's body keeps punching through the Latin terms, as when we are made to see just what is meant physically by "vertu expulsif": "Vomyt upward ne dounward laxatif." The colloquial English words that lace the description—"bouk,"

"shente"—and the almost flippant dismissal that concludes it contribute to the effect. There is something deliberately cold, "realistic," and held back here, something of the clinical detachment of Homer, whose works Chaucer presumably did not know. This kind of description is not a heroic convention in any tradition available to the poem. If the temple of Mars is any indication, it is something the Knight has seen: the reality of fatal injury stripped of chivalric glamorizing, stripped almost of any meaning beyond the process itself, the insignificant horror of a senseless accident.

The Knight withholds the imputation of significance from the facts of Arcite's dying in part to give that privilege to Arcite himself and let his hero be a hero under the most demanding circumstances. Arcite is allowed to feel and state the futility of his life in words that have always resonated for readers throughout the poem, and rightly so:

Naught may the woful spirit in myn herte
Declare o point of alle my sorwes smerte
To yow, my lady, that I love moost,
But I biquethe the servyce of my goost
To yow aboven every creature,
Syn that my lyf may no lenger dure.
Allas, the wo! Allas, the peynes stronge,
That I for yow have suffred, and so longe!
Allas, the deeth! Allas, myn Emelye!
Allas, departynge of oure compaignye!
Allas, myn hertes queene! Allas, my wyf,
Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf!
hat is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave
Allone, withouten any compaignye.
Fare wel, my sweete foo, myn Emelye!
       (2765–80)

The language of this speech is highly conventional, both as a philosophical complaint and as a love lament. It is reminiscent of the long Boethian complaints of Palamon and Arcite in Part I as well as of their more courtly set pieces scattered through the poem. Here of course such language is earned in a way it has not been previously, transformed and deepened by the context of its utterance. Baffled by a sorrow and bitterness he cannot speak, Arcite falls back on the conventions that have served his aspirations, his folly, and his self-deceptions. Both the continuing idealism and the pathetic emptiness of his situ-

ation resound in "I biquethe the servyce of my goost," a service the lady has even less chance of knowing and rewarding than she did "the peynes stronge,/That I for yow have suffred, and so longe!" Arcite's situation also, however, gives new point and bite to conventional courtly ways of characterizing women. With "endere of my lyf " and "my sweete foo" Arcite comes closer, in the circumstances, to blaming Emelye for his desire and its outcome than he has at any other time. On that score at least we cannot feel that he has learned much more about the world than the grim experiential truth behind the language he used so unthinkingly before, that human beings are "Allone, withouten any compaignye" and that there is nothing outside them that is constrained to answer to human aspirations and achievement.^[8]

But within the masculine ethic of the poem if nothing else will give meaning to a man's life, he can still, with the cooperation of other men and women—the human community—try to confer it himself. It is Arcite's heroism as the poem defines it that, radically limited as he is and in the face of the nothingness to which he goes, he chooses to try to make his death mean more than absurdity and despair. Drawing back from his bitterness, he gets ahold of himself for the rest of his brief life:

And softe taak me in youre armes tweye,
For love of God, and herkneth what I seye.

I have heer with my cosyn Palamon
Had strif and rancour many a day agon
For love of yow, and for my jalousye.
And Juppiter so wys my soule gye,
To speken of a servaunt proprely,
With alle circumstaunces trewely—
That is to seyen, trouthe, honour, kynghthede,
Wysdom, humblesse, estaat, and heigh kynrede,
Fredom, and al that longeth to that art—
So Juppiter have of my soule part,
As in this world right now ne knowe I non
So worthy to ben loved as Palamon,
That serveth yow, and wol doon al his lyf.
And if that evere ye shul ben a wyf,
Foryet nat Palamon, the gentil man.
       (2781–97)

[8] Salter, Introduction to The Knight's Tale , has an illuminating discussion of Arcite's death, 28–31.

Again little has changed in Arcite's fundamental understanding of the world. Emelye especially remains, as she has been throughout the poem, an objet petit a . She is still primarily a pretext for relations between Palamon and Arcite, the unconsulted medium first of their competition and now of their reconciliation, and the Knight is, as I shall argue shortly, not unaware of this. But it is nonetheless true that nothing becomes Arcite's life like his leaving of it. Constrained as he is, even naive as he is,^[9] Arcite gives up his claim to Emelye and his enmity with Palamon in the name of those values, "trouthe, honour, knyghthede" and the rest, that he asserts and affirms as more important than his quarrel and his death. By doing so, he gives his death meaning in terms of those values. Like Theseus, though more openly and more dramatically, Arcite sacrifices his desires, his projects, and even his death to the maintenance of a larger human community. He takes human responsibility for a human meaning by trying to affirm a continuity that will last beyond him.

That this perspective—one might as well call it existentialist since that is its closest modern equivalent^[10] —is the compelling one for the Knight, certainly more compelling at this point than some cosmic order or divine reward for human virtue, is firmly established by his account of Arcite's passing:

His spirit chaunged hous and wente ther,
As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher.
Therfore I stynte; I nam no divinistre;
Of soules fynde I nat in this registre,
Ne me ne list thilke opinions to telle
Of hem, though that they writen wher they dwelle.
Arcite is coold, ther Mars his soule gye!
Now wol I speken forth of Emelye.
      (2809–16, emphasis added)^[11]

[9] He is naive, for example, about Jupiter. As Salter points out, "It has not been possible for Arcite to learn the full lesson of divine malice" (Introduction to The Knight's Tale , 19).

[10] It seems probable that Arcite himself is not a classic existentialist hero because it seems probable that he believes in the transcendent value of his act. The probabilities shift when one considers him from the point of view of the tale as a whole and its narrator, as I go on to suggest in the text.

[11] In Chaucer and Menippean Satire F. Anne Payne notes this passage as an instance of the Knight's "faintly macabre Menippean humor" (251), part of a set of attitudes she characterizes more fully at 244–45.

This is the Knight's most important, because most direct, statement in the tale of the priorities I have tried to show him maintaining throughout it. He is resolute in cutting off all consideration of consolatory possibilities in higher realms. He knows quite well what philosophers and preachers have to say about these matters, but that is not where his interests lie. What is important about the passage is that it keeps us here, in the human world, where higher purposes, if any, remain inscrutable, no transcendent justice that makes human sense appears plainly, and the human survivors have to pick up the pieces. The Knight makes it clear that this is his own choice: he would not wish, he says, to tell of the fate of departed souls if it were in his sources, which he says it is not, though we know it is. If "Chaucer" does not follow Boccaccio—and Arcite's spirit—because he chose to use the rest of the passage from the Teseide on which this passage is based in that terrible moment when Troilus looks down to laugh at all our woe (Troilus and Criseyde 5.1814–27), the Knight insists that all such flights above the human situation are not his concern. Our woe and what we do about it without help from beyond is his concern. Here we are in the human world, and here we will remain to the end of the tale: the First Mover is something Theseus tells us about, not something we see. It is within this deliberately chosen framework of human actions and meanings that the Knight places his poignant image of Arcite's heroism, which, like Theseus's, is the more heroic for being enacted against such limited and limiting possibilities, for being something harder to do than win a tournament.

Of course, Arcite is lucky. He gets to make his single magnificent gesture and pass on, dying young and with his reputation intact, as Theseus notes in a curious passage in the First Mover speech (3047–56). The extreme exigency of his situation makes possible the purity of his chivalric idealism because he does not have to live on to deal with its consequences. Something of the naiveté of his response is measured by the fact that Emelye's marriage to Palamon is not within her choice, as he seems to expect it should be (2796–97), and does not take place until other, political considerations make it expedient. For the Knight, the doing of chivalry is ultimately something that does not and cannot rest in single gestures, and the real task for a maker and sustainer of order lies not in dying, however gloriously and generously, but in going on.

But this attitude does not mean that the more "mature" and respon-

sible perspective is easy for the Knight to maintain or that he is not moved by Arcite's tragedy and triumph—he is moved, perhaps too much. Palamon and Arcite function throughout the tale, and nowhere more than in its conclusion, as representatives or impersonations of the Knight's own enchantment with, and attraction to, a pure and mystified version of the chivalric ideal and its conventions. They are the innocent core of the more tough-minded and realistic attitude that comes to be embodied in Theseus. As I have shown, the Knight is genuinely ambivalent about this pure ideal: he loves and admires it as much as he appreciates its danger and its folly. The extent and depth of the Knight's identification with Arcite and what he represents is evident not only in his moving account of the young man's death but also in the way he frames it and reacts to it and in the effort he makes to control his own tendency to despair over it.

This latter tendency comes out most clearly in the speech of Egeus, which the Knight appropriates conspicuously as his own. The speech comes at the end of a passage (2817–36) that describes the grief of the survivors, particularly the weeping of women, which the Knight treats summarily and a little impatiently: "What helpeth it to tarien forth the day/To tellen how [Emelye] weep bothe eve and morwe?" (2820–21). The effect is that of a voice pushing aside inappropriate and useless responses to an occurrence that cannot be helped and must be dealt with more adequately and sternly than by womanish tears—there is something here of the tough, unsentimental tone used to describe Arcite's injuries. The initial effect of the end of this passage is perhaps that the more adequate way is to be found in Egeus:

No man myghte gladen Theseus,
Savynge his olde fader Egeus,
That knew this worldes transmutacioun,
As he hadde seyn it chaunge bothe up and doun,
Joye after wo, and wo after gladnesse,
And shewed hym ensamples and liknesse.
       (2837–42)

These lines promise a more distanced, philosophical, and consoling perspective, based on wide experience of "This worldes transmutacioun," that will put Arcite's death in place and in proportion. But the part of Egeus's speech the Knight gives us is shorn of its "ensamples" and of the "muchel moore" Theseus's father said to the people

"that they sholde hem reconforte" (2850–52). In the form we have it in, it is notoriously problematic,^[12] and it is difficult to see what gladdened Theseus:

"Right as ther dyed nevere man," quod he,
"That he ne lyvede in erthe in som degree,
Right so ther lyvede never man," he seyde,
"In al this world, that som tyme he ne deyde.
This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.
Deeth is an ende of every worldly score."
       (2843–49)

The Knight purports to edit Egeus's speech down to what he takes as its essential message, and that message is one of despair.^[13] The world and human life are a thoroughfare full of woe bounded only by the implacable recurrence of death, a perspective enforced by the tautological form of Egeus's aphorism and the speech as a whole. The image of human life as a pilgrimage loses its potential consoling power because the goal that would make good the labor of the journey becomes simply death itself, and in context the last line is close to counsel to suicide. What in its original form, as Egeus delivered it, might have been something more like the First Mover speech is handled by the Knight so as to bring out both the endless labor and the essential absurdity of human life and effort. If Egeus occupies the position of Saturn in a system of structural parallels between the gods and the characters that some criticism has seen in the tale,^[14] he does so in the revisionary mode of parts III and IV. That is, he is an instance of a saturnian mind, one that views and constitutes the world in this despairing way. As such, he is also a part of the Knight, a locus of the narrator's darkest imagining and a spokesman for the vision of an indifferent, casually malignant universe that presses on the tale from

[12] See, for example, Salter, Introduction to The Knight's Tale , 30, and Neuse, "The Knight," 504.

[13] In terms of the source, the speech of Egeus is a new addition: in Boccaccio (Teseide 9.9–12) what he says is briefly paraphrased, and the point is made that he cannot comfort Theseus and that no one pays him any heed. Thus in the Knight's Tale Egeus is given more weight as a character but in support of a more pessimistic vision.

[14] For example, Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 178ff; Neuse, "The Knight," 304 (with schematic diagram); and Kean, Making of English Poetry, 2:5. The notion has become a commonplace.

its beginning. This is what lurks behind the speeches of Palamon and Arcite in Part I and behind the anomalous features of the temples and the gods in Part III. This is what has finally found voice in the tale as a human statement—no grinning Saturn, merely an old man telling what he has seen—about the meaning of Arcite's death and the meaninglessness of human life.

Arcite and Egeus together outline a central tension in the consciousness of the Knight and form one set of poles within and between which his ambivalence moves. This is the characteristic ambivalence of what I have called the "masculine" imagination, Arcite (along with Palamon) gives a voice to the human hunger for transcendence, for permanent and stable meaning and value on which ideals and heroism can be based. Throughout the poem the Theban cousins embody this hunger in the mode of naive belief. As we have seen, the Knight's criticism of them consistently fastens on their projections of order, stability, and meaning onto gods and destinies. The Knight is disenchanted, in the neutral, Weberian sense, as the princes are not. His disenchantment is what allows him to see that the things Palamon and Arcite believe to be objective and independent entities—honor and "trouthe" as well as Venus and Mars—are in fact human institutions. Part of his distrust of such institutions is based on the way they encourage men and women to believe in them as metaphysical facts and thereby distract attention from human responsibility for keeping order in the self and in society.

But the Knight is not the Manciple, nor yet is he the Pardoner. He does not simply debunk the institutions he distrusts; he revises them, and that means, among other things, that he keeps them alive in the positive sense of active and intentional preservation. One reason for this conservative impulse that runs in tandem with the critical one is the Knight's respect for the forces of disorder in the psyche and the world that human institutions manage to organize and contain. The need for such forms becomes all the more urgent when they are seen as the only things standing between society and the violence of its members. But as the Knight sees it, the efficacy and stability of institutions like chivalry largely depends on their nonconscious, internalized, and mystified character, their apparent givenness, because eros, aggression, and necessity are for him incorrigible: he does not believe most people are strong enough or self-controlled enough to do without external stays against their own darker natures and against nothing-

ness. What they feel they owe to chivalry keeps Palamon and Arcite from turning into animals in the grove, keeps the participants in the tournament from letting it become any more like the landscape of the temple of Mars than it does, and allows Arcite the heroism of his death. The presentation of Egeus suggests that the group of those who cannot do without the illusion of transcendence at times includes the Knight himself.

Egeus's speech is one of the moments in the tale—the descriptions of the temple of Mars and of Arcite's funeral pyre are two others— when the Knight comes closest to the Pardoner in feeling the pull of the despairing form of "masculine" disenchantment, the conviction that the loss of transcendence makes the world and life in it worthless, and like the Pardoner, the Knight puts this despair in the voice of an old man.^[15] One reason Arcite can die as he does is that he does not know what Egeus knows, what he might have learned "In age, if that ye so longe abyde" (VI, 747). To keep going, the Knight needs those aspects of himself, the Palamon and Arcite in him, that are stirred and moved by "trouthe, honour, knyghthede,/Wysdom, humblesse, estaat, and heigh kynrede,/Fredom, and al that longeth to that art," just as he needs the more experienced and skeptical perspective of which Egeus is both a representative and a distortion. The Knight's generally more balanced and competent relation to his world is dependent in part on his ability to move comfortably between these aspects of himself, as compared to the Pardoner's self-destructive ambivalence toward the three rioters and the Old Man. The task facing the Knight at the end of the tale is the same as the task facing Theseus: one might even put it that his task is to be Theseus, that is, to find and sustain a balance between a too-innocent and mystified faith in the efficacy of human constructions and a despairing denial of all human value—between Palamon and Egeus.

Such, at least in outline, is the structure and deployment of the "masculine" imagination in the Knight and his tale and the relation of that imagination to the psychological and institutional pressures it keeps alive and has to deal with. There is still to be considered, how-

[15] The association of old men with this general perspective is obviously common in Chaucer. Pandarus is an example of it in some of his moods (Troilus and Criseyde 2.393–99), and the Reeve makes himself into a walking embodiment of it.

ever, the question of the "feminine" identifications I have previously traced, the bisexuality whose expression is most fully bound up in the Knight's attitudes toward Emelye. Let me begin with a problem in the castigation (as editors call it), the making chaste, of that unruly and lawless feminine body, the text.^[16] The relation of one couplet in the description of Arcite's triumphal ride around the arena, printed by Robinson as lines 2681–82, is problematic in multiple ways. It does not appear in the two "best" manuscripts, Ellesmere and Hengwrt, though it is in Corpus and other copies of the tale. Almost all modern editions print it, apparently in tacit agreement with Robinson that the lines "seem to be by Chaucer, though he may have intended to cancel them" (in Chaucer, Works, 2d ed., 681). I do not pretend to know what the real reasons for this textual situation are, but I can see why a question about the appropriateness of the couplet might arise since it brngs a peculiar and rather sour tone into the account of Arcite's triumph. The hero looks up at Emelye, "And she agayn hym cast a freendlich ye/(For wommen, as to speken in comune,/Thei folwen alle the favour of Fortune )" (2680–82, emphasis added). I think the couplet is genuine, though I can also see why Chaucer (or a scribe) might, to phrase it tendentiously, have been ambivalent about having it in the tale. I think it is genuine because it reintroduces into the tale a kind of disparagement of women that was already present in the description of Theseus's pity "Of wommen, for they wepen evere in oon" (1771) and that returns more densely in the description of the grief at Arcite's death:

What helpeth it to tarien forth the day
To tellen how she [Emelye] weep bothe eve and morwe?
For in swich cas wommen have swich sorwe,
Whan that hir housbondes ben from hem ago,
That for the moore part they sorwen so,
Or elles fallen in swich maladye
That at the laste certeinly they dye.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"Why woldestow be deed," thise wommen crye,
"And haddest gold ynough, and Emelye?"
      (2820–26; 2835–36)

[16] I am grateful to Stephanie Jed of the University of California, San Diego, for pointing out the use of the term in editing and its etymology, in a lecture on the Latin text on Lucretia of the Italian humanist Collucio Salutati delivered at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz, in 1985. Carolyn Dinshaw of the University of California, Berkeley, is completing a book on Chaucer that documents the pervasiveness of the image of the text as a female body in the Middle Ages.

The textually problematic couplet seems, obscurely, to be blaming Emelye for favoring Arcite and Fortune; the other two passages point to the weakness and lack of self-control of women's grief and to a kind of moral and philosophical crassness in their understanding of tragedies like this one. What they all have in common, perhaps, is the implication that women are not capable of a properly stoic fortitude in the face of the vagaries of Fortune, a properly masculine and heroic indifference to the course of external events. In all three instances, however, I also notice a tendency to move away from Emelye as an individual as quickly as possible and treat her as merely an instance of generic feminine characteristics that amounts, conspicuously, to a refusal to let her speak her feelings in her own voice.

Indeed, to begin to speculate on what Emelye's feelings might actually be in these two instances, given what we saw of her and heard her say in Part III, is to begin to understand the problem. Her friendly look at Arcite (which is in all texts of the tale) may represent a way of trying to come to terms with a difficult situation in which, for example, Emelye must begin to think of how to live with a man whom she will now have to marry and who may or may not be the one of the cousins who "moost desireth" her. If the problematic couplet is allowed to remain, it actually makes it more likely that we will notice Emelye's behavior and wonder about it because it singles her out in the scene in the very act of trying to reduce her to an instance of typical femininity. Similarly, though women may all weep both eve and morrow or pine away when their husbands are gone from them, Emelye was not, as far as we know, actually married to Arcite when he died.^[17] We do know that she did not want to be an occasion of strife, but we also know that she did not want to be married.^[18] Can her grief, which is surely real, be entirely unmixed with relief?

[17] Though Theseus does call Emelye Arcite's "wyf" in the First Mover speech, the Knight's Tale does not reproduce the deathbed marriage that takes place in the Teseide .

[18] Chaucer's changes from Boccaccio keep this issue much more alive in the Knight's Tale than it is in the Teseide , where Emelia is much more involved with eros, much more flirtatious and self-conscious from the beginning, and hence much more likely to be willing to love.

What the Knight seems to be trying to do in these passages is to convert Emelye into a feminine stereotype to avoid considering her personal situation too closely.^[19] What works against this conversion and makes the stereotyping feel uncomfortable is our memory (and his) of how intensely and sympathetically he imagined Emelye and her circumstances in Part III. I think the Knight himself feels uncomfortable and communicates his discomfort in the somewhat rushed and forced character of his speaking and its exaggerated machismo. At some level he knows he is doing her an injustice by suppressing her voice. Since that voice is also one of his, we are again dealing with a character who is also part of the Knight. As elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, the feminine here represents the claims of private experience over against public necessities. The Knight clearly understands the commodity status of women in chivalric society, and he has shown himself able to imagine sympathetically what that status costs women in general and Emelye in particular. She is thus a carrier for him of the intimation that those costs are too high and that the entire chivalric institutional structure may not be worth what it demands of individuals. But in Part IV what is at stake is the preservation and maintenance of public order, for which it is necessary that a fiction of Emelye's private identification with her public role be created and sustained. In the interests of that fiction Emelye's private feelings will have to be sacrificed, as will the Knight's sympathy with her. This is not a simple, unconsidered male chauvinism but a complex and considered one, a choice of priorities. The structures of social order in the Knight's world are also the structures of male domination, and when order, itself sufficiently fragile as he sees it, is threatened, its preservation is more important than the private feelings of women or the Knight himself. For him, injustice is inherent in the nature of the world and of society, and the question is always one of choosing which injustices must be redressed and which will simply have to be lived with.

The choices the Knight finally makes in the tale constitute the feminine according to the general institutional and psychological pat-

[19] Similarly, in the description of Arcite's funeral Emelye is made primarily a functionary in the ritual, an agent of custom "as was the gyse" (2941). The Knight says he will not discuss "how she swowned whan men made the fyr,/Ne what she spak, ne what was hir desir" (2943–44). This passing over of Emelye is again conspicuous and again a little nervous.

tern I have analyzed in Part II of this book as something that has to be repressed in the individual and suppressed in society to preserve the chivalric world and its institutions. The instance of the Knight's Tale is particularly useful in understanding this process because it so plainly demonstrates that the pattern is the result of practical choices on the part of individuals who both make use of institutions and actively keep them in existence as a result of that use.^[20] The Knight's gender identity is not something he makes up all by himself but something he chooses and keeps on choosing in the face of other possibilities, roles, and identifications. The consequences of that choice are as fully social as they are personal, involving the adoption of a set of procedures and attitudes for dealing with others as well as for conceiving and conducting the self. It is this duality that I have tried to express in the title of this part, "The Institution of the Subject," hoping to catch by it the way the subject in Chaucer is understood and presented both as something transpersonal, socially constructed, and institutional and as something that has to be continually instituted, kept in existence by its own activity.

[20] This double activity is what Giddens terms the duality of structure: "Structure as the medium and outcome of the conduct it recursively organizes; the structural properties of social systems do not exist outside of action but are chronically implicated in its production and reproduction" (Constitution of Society , 374). See also Central Problems , 77–81.

14—
Doing Knighthood:
Heroic Disenchantment and the Subject of Chivalry

The language of the Sophoclean heroes surprises us by its Apollonian determinacy and lucidity. It seems to us that we can fathom their innermost being, and we are somewhat surprised that we have such a short way to go. However, once we abstract from the character of the hero as it rises to the surface and becomes visible (a character at bottom no more than a luminous shape projected onto a dark wall, that is to say, appearance through and through) and instead penetrate into the myth which is projected in these luminous reflections, we suddenly come up against a phenomenon which is the exact opposite of a familiar optical one. After an energetic attempt to focus on the sun, we have, by way of remedy almost, dark spots before our eyes when we turn away. Conversely, the luminous images of the Sophoclean heroes—those Apollonian masks—are the necessary productions of a deep look into the horror of nature; luminous spots, as it were, designed to cure an eye hurt by the ghastly night.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

We borel men been shrympes.
Harry Bailly, in The Monk's Prologue, (VII, 1955)

The Knight's description of Arcite's funeral is at first an image of noble and measured grief, fittingly expressed in forms of dignity and splendor. Theseus decides on the place to hold the ceremony in accord with its appropriateness to the young knight's career:

That in that selve grove, swoote and grene,
Ther as he hadde his amorouse desires,
His compleynte, and for love his hoote fires,
He wolde make a fyr in which the office
Funeral he myghte al accomplice.
    (2860–64)

The duke has Arcite laid on a bier spread with cloth-of-gold and arrayed "of the same suyte" (2873), crowned with laurel and sur-

rounded by his weapons. The dead hero is carried in a formal procession down streets draped in black, with nothing omitted that will make the service "The moore noble and riche in his degree" (2888). Throughout this section the Knight's voice concentrates on visual detail and the sequence of actions performed. There are no disruptions of tone or decorum, and no particular need arises to reflect on where the story is coming from: we are simply being told how Theseus went about the stages of the "sepulture" of Arcite.

About halfway through the description, however, a sharp break occurs—the extraordinary subverted occupatio in which the Knight tells in detail for forty-seven lines what he does not intend to describe:

But how the fyr was maked upon highte,
Ne eek the names that the trees highte,
As ook, firre, birch, aspe, alder, holm, popler,
Wylugh, elm, plane, assh, box, chasteyn, lynde, laurer,
Mapul, thorn, bech, hasel, ew, whippletree—
How they weren feld shal nat be toold for me;
Ne hou the goddes ronnen up and doun,
Disherited of hire habitacioun,
In which they woneden in reste and pees,
Nymphes, fawnes and amadrides.
        (2919–28)

One function occupatio always has in the tale is to call attention to the Knight as editor, the speaker over against the "matere," picking and choosing from the old books: it reminds us that the Knight is neither simply seeing nor simply making up what he narrates but citing it, a complex relation that partakes of both. Occupatio brings the speaker before us and breaks the transparency of the narration. This particular instance presents the speaker to us as a man in conflict not only with his source but with himself, obsessively continuing to describe something he also seems to feel he should not be spending so much time on. What is the nature of this conflict?

The lines just quoted are conspicuously literary, just the sort of list that is found in old poems—in Vergil, Ovid, Statius, Joseph of Exeter, Guillaume de Lorris, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, for example.^[1] The speaker presents himself as someone who is conscious of what he is telling as like a poem —a classical, mythological, patently fictional

[1] See my discussion of a similar list in the Parlement of Foules, "Harmony of Chaucer's Parlement, " 21–22.

poem at that. Insofar as we become aware of him making this comment, we also become aware of him being less convinced by the action and seeing it as something unreal, bookish, and distant from his own experience outside of poetry. Part of the effect of the long occupatio, which continually leads us with its "ne . . . ne . . ." structure to expect imminent closure and a new topic, is to create a tone of impatience with the details being listed, as if they were not worth attending to.

This impatience is indicative of more than just skepticism about the account of events the Knight finds in the old story; it is primarily a comment on the events themselves, that is, on the funeral ceremony as a way of coming to terms with the implications of Arcite's death. What becomes unreal to the Knight in the course of the description is the claim of all this ceremony to console, to express and then dispel grief so that all can be as it was before. As the occupatio proceeds, it becomes the focus of an Egeus-like despair in which all human attempts to ameliorate or conceal the intimations of meaninglessness bound up in Arcite's fate are seen as fakery and delusion, mere literary self-deception.

This effect is centered in the pyre itself, and especially in the fire, which is as strong a symbol for the Knight here as it is for the Wife of Bath, though with a different inflection. Where she comes to identify fire with psychic and sexual energy of the sort that can be drawn on to break down the barriers set up by repressive institutions, the Knight seems to use it as a focus for the worst fears of the "masculine" imagination and associates it with the kind of violence, whether human aggression or hostile necessity, that destroys order and meaning. There is something ambitious, symbolic, and larger than life about the pyre itself from the time it is first mentioned, when we are told that it "with his grene top the hevene raughte" (2915). The subsequent description of its making and consuming keeps this dimension alive and increases it. Though the list of trees is a literary commonplace, its length serves to justify the depopulation of the grove, which, at first confined to mythy woodland deities, ends in a manner both more realistic and more sinister:

Ne hou the beestes and the briddes alle
Fledden for fere, whan the wode was falle;
Ne how the ground agast was of the light,
That was nat wont to seen the sonne bright.
      (2929–32)

There is a momentary atmosphere of something genuinely ghastly here that echoes the landscape of the temple of Mars with its broken trees, "In which ther dwelleth neither man ne best" (1976). The hyperbolic destruction of the grove has interesting and disturbing implications for the symbolic topography of the poem. At the end of Part II Theseus says, "The lystes shal I maken in this place" (1862), a detail not found in Boccaccio, where the arena predates the quarrel between Palamon and Arcite. Chaucer's alteration thus makes the lists more of an ad hoc institution created for a specific occasion and thus stresses more pointedly the power and energy of human making. But in the description of the funeral the Knight makes the destruction of the grove sound so total that we may wonder whether the lists that Theseus built on its site go up in flames too.^[2] Certainly it seems appropriate to his mood here that he should leave the possibility hanging: more than wood is being burned in his mind.

The image of desolation uncovered in these lines is quickly—too quickly—covered again in those that follow. The Knight's description of the building of the pyre has an insistent, repetitious, and somewhat strained quality that derives from the movement of the voice. In the story the Greeks are merely covering the pyre, but in the telling the Knight makes it sound like someone is covering up:

Ne how the fyr was couched first with stree,
And thanne with drye stikkes cloven a thre,
And thanne with grene wode and spicerye,
And thanne with clooth of gold and with perrye,
And gerlandes, hangynge with ful many a flour;
The mirre, th'encens, with al so greet odour.
        (2933–38)

The Knight's telling embodies a feeling of discomfort, a rush to decorate the ruined grove out of existence and return to a more dignified and consoling image. But that image is once again too golden, flowery, and unconvincing. When the fire is lit, it threatens to devour the works of man, as the building of the pyre has already devoured the gods and nature:

[2] Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 130–31, has noted the spatial anomaly and gives a good account of its general symbolic bearing, though without either ascribing it to the Knight or explaining why it occurs where and when it does.

Ne what jeweles men in the fyre caste,
Whan that the fyr was greet and brente faste;
Ne how somme caste hir sheeld, and soome hire spere,
And of hire vestimentz, whiche that they were,
And coppes fulle of wyn, and milk, and blood,
Into the fyr, that brente as it were wood.
        (2945–50)

The funeral of Arcite does not work for the Knight. Though he experiences a temptation to be beguiled by its noble furnishings, he also finds them hollow. The long occupatio records his alternating attraction to, and contempt for, them, a process that feeds itself like the flames as it escalates throughout the description. The more extravagant the gesture made to honor Arcite, the emptier, thinner, and more fictional it looks and the more the need for a still grander gesture: the more the fire is fed, the more insanely it rages.

The description of the funeral makes it absolutely clear that the dark and bright images of chivalry and its institutions are related parts of a consistent system. Both are rooted in the same rage for order, the same desire that meaning be something objectively determined, stable, and permanent—here, that Arcite's personal and symbolic value can be established and properly celebrated. The perception that such a project must fail, that no ceremony can make up for the loss of Arcite and what he represents, leads to the perception of the rites as thin, fictional, and unconvincing and to the contempt for them that surfaces in the passage. But this contempt is itself a version of "masculine" disenchantment because it is a despairing form of the hunger for meaning. It is a form like the Pardoner's in that it constrains things that may have more diverse, independent, partial, and historical meanings into the single meaning of meaninglessness, while remaining nostalgic for what has been lost and ready to try to deceive itself into finding it again. Since the Knight in effect appropriates the funeral from the old books and makes it into an instance of the process just described, we can also see here again that he shares the tendencies he identifies in others and undergoes them. His attraction to a mystified world feeds his satirical cynicism, which in turn increases the attraction. His dark imaginings are reflexes of his bright ones, and vice versa.

Yet perhaps there is a way in which the funeral does work. If it does not convince the Knight of the real efficacy of symbolic gestures, it

does seem finally to remind him of the need for a kind of self-control the Pardoner is unable to achieve. There is in principle no end or limit to the hunger for finality that informs the description of the funeral and creates its increasingly wide oscillation between images of nobility and images of destruction. What needs to be changed is not the ceremony itself, by tinkering with its detail and symbolism, but the attitude taken toward it. Arcite's funeral is, after all, not the total embodiment of heroic worth it aspires to be any more than Arcite himself was; nor is his death in fact the destruction of nature and society, even symbolically. That is too much to demand of a single event and too much to load on one man's life. Arcite's death and burning do represent an instance of both the impressiveness and the fragility of human making and doing, but not one that can or should be expected to resolve the tension. Like any mourner, the Knight has to accept that the meaning a man's life and death will bear is partial, provisional, and temporary and must ultimately be left unresolved.^[3]

Something like such an attitude seems finally to come for the Knight out of the experience of working through once again in the description of the funeral his attraction to, and need for, final and consoling meanings. Toward the end of the description he begins to push the scene away from him to distance and place it:

And how that lad was homward Emelye;
Ne how Arcite is brent to asshen colde;
Ne how that lyche-wake was yholde
Al thilke nyght; ne how the Grekes pleye
The wake-pleyes; ne kepe I nat to seye
Who wrastleth best naked with oille enoynt,
Ne who that baar hym best, in no disjoynt.
I wol nat tellen eek how that they goon
Hoom til Atthenes, whan the pley is doon;
But shortly to the point thanne wol I wende
And maken of my longe tale an ende.
      (2956–66)

As this passage proceeds, the occupatio begins to function as a real exclusion of matter given at length in the old books as the Knight disengages from the description and from the Greeks with their an-

[3] See Crampton, Condition of Creatures, 91.

tique rites.^[4] His final vision of the proceedings seems to identify not just the funeral games but the whole ceremony—and his description of it—as a form of "pley." This word gets at the staged, theatrical quality of the performance as well as its lack of seriousness. It identifies what has just occurred as a kind of recreation, a pause from more serious responsibilities, for which the Knight's reference to "my longe tale" seems to apologize. Identifying the funeral description as play locates it as something less consequential and heavily symbolic, from which the Knight now turns back to "the point" (2965) and to his duties to his audience.

The sense of someone collecting himself, turning away from a merely personal concern and toward concern for others, then picking up the threads of the tale again, carries over into what follows:

 By processe and by lengthe of certeyn yeres,
Al stynted is the moornynge and the teres
Of Grekes, by oon general assent.
Thanne semed me ther was a parlement
At Atthenes, upon certein pointz and caas;
Among the whiche pointz yspoken was,
To have with certein contrees alliaunce,
And have fully of Thebans obeisaunce.
For which this noble Theseus anon
Leet senden after gentil Palamon,
Unwist of hym what was the cause and why,
But in his blake clothes, sorwefully
He cam at his comandement in hye.
Tho sente Theseus for Emelye.
      (2967–80)

"Lengthe of certeyn yeres" distances Arcite's death and the funeral, pushing them back into the past and away from the speaker. "Thanne semed me" is curious—it hovers between trying to remember what was in the source and making an interpretation of something in the source that may not have been so clearly a "parlement" as what is presented here—the Knight's habitual attempt to imagine what the occasion must really have been like. The past tense is even odder because it seems to refer to an impression formed on some previous

[4] The sense of antiquity, of outmoded customs and pagan deities—nymphs, fauns, hamadryads, and the like—is of course part of what registers the effect of unreality throughout the passage. Here it seems to function as a way of letting go of the scene, putting it back in the past where it belongs.

occasion of hearing or reading the tale, not to this telling, and therefore constitutes the story as something independent of the speaker's feelings about it. The effect is of someone talking half to himself—"Now let me see . . ."—gathering himself in preparation for what is to come and returning from his own dark imaginings to the objectivity of the events of the tale, like Theseus's moment of silence and sigh before beginning the final speech. The next lines place the whole affair of Palamon, Arcite, and Emelye in a sharply reduced and practical context, only one among a number of affairs of state of varying importance to be settled in the press of other business, and not so urgent that it needed to be settled earlier. This political context is extremely important for what follows, not only because it does cut the story down to size, so to speak, but also because it reminds us of the unsettled Theban question as a vital strand in the tale that remains unknotted. Theseus is now going to attend to a project he has been working on in one way or another for ten years, a problem that needs to be addressed yet again after the failure of the tournament and the death of Arcite. This setting of the scene is also important because it makes the political motivation of the First Mover speech explicit and unequivocal.^[5] It matters to the Knight that we see the speech as an attempt to answer the set of specific, practical circumstances it is situated in, not just a general philosophical reflection taking Arcite's death as an example about the meaning of life. The temptation to that sort of general reflection and hungry symbolizing is what the Knight has contained and controlled in himself and the story in the course of his telling of the funeral; the First Mover speech may supply a guide to the meaning of the story, but it will be of a different sort.

Since the studies by William Frost and Charles Muscatine that initiated modern criticism of the Knight's Tale a critical consensus has developed that the First Mover speech is problematic.^[6] Elizabeth Salter's trenchant and well-documented contention that the difficulty with the speech "does not lie in reconciling the death of Arcite with a divinely ordered plan, but in reconciling the noble statement of this plan with the ugly manifestation of divine motives and activities which

[5] See Aers, Creative Imagination, 188, who notes that this emphasis is not present in Boccaccio.

[6] Frost, "Interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale" (1949); Muscatine, "Form, Texture, and Meaning" (1950); idem, Chaucer and the French Tradition (1957), 175–90.

Chaucer has allowed his poem to give" (Introduction to The Knight's Tale, 31) has been sufficiently, and deservedly, influential that even those critics who wish to affirm that the speech is a serious statement of a doctrine that informs the tale as a whole feel that they have to address the apparent discrepancy. As with the tale, criticism of the speech tends to divide between happy-enders, who assert that the conclusion of the story redeems the world it presents, and disbelievers, who assert that it does not—between what might be called a Palamonian view of the tale and an Egean one.

The former group of critics usually attends to the more-or-less abstract message or argument of the speech, its vouloir dire rather than its diction, and looks for ways to make good the action of the tale in the doctrine. They respond to that aspect of the speech and the tale that Neuse has sensitively characterized as the "invitation to judge this world [of the tale] by a standard that lies outside it and within the world of the pilgrims at whose head the Knight appears" ("The Knight," 312). These critics are by no means unaware of the feeling of discrepancy demonstrated by Salter between the speech's presentation of healing doctrine and the earlier events of the story, but they do assume that the apparent discrepancy was originally made good by a lost historical context of belief that conditioned the expectations and understanding of the audience and filled in the gap that a historically uninformed modern reading encounters. In this view the critic need not distinguish the voices of God, medieval culture, Chaucer, the Knight, and Theseus because, as Geoffrey puts it in another context, "hir sentence is al oon" (VII, 952).

It would be more reassuring if the same were true of the critics themselves, especially if they could agree on the justification of the doctrine that solves and saves the poem. Where earlier readers in this tradition, like Frost, were content to explicate the Boethian Neoplatonism for which there is at least some warrant in the language of the speech, commentators since Salter have divided over whether, for example, medieval belief in the sanctity of kingship (it is true because the just ruler Theseus says it is) or in the symbolic and spiritual significance of marriage (it is all right because they get married in the end) justifies the ways of gods to men.^[7] The "solution" of the poem

[7] The significance of Theseus as a type of the just ruler is stressed by Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 260–63. The importance of the traditional symbolic meaning ofmarriage is most fully developed by Kean, Making of English Poetry, 2:1–59; see also Ruggiers, "Some Philosophical Aspects," and Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, 105–111. Ian Robinson, generally admirably skeptical in a tough-minded Salterian mode about the tale, is inexplicably drawn by the value of heroic reputation, the idea that it makes a crucial difference that Arcite's name will live in fame, Chaucer and the English Tradition, 139–40. Other proponents of the happy-ending view of the tale whose work I have found useful include Halverson, "Aspects of Order," who weaves the most complex web of interconnected orders, and Cameron, "The Heroine in the Knight's Tale. "

thus comes to reside in systematic constructs that are not, strictly speaking, in the poem itself, however likely it may be that they affected medieval habits of reading.

The multiplication of critical voices is in some ways even more apparent among critics who feel that the internal context of the poem—the fact of the discrepancy—overrides the historical and ideological force of external contexts (and probably did so, at least for some readers, in the fourteenth century). Such readers are perforce committed to some form of ironic reading of the tale since what they have to explain is why, if the speech does not fulfill the function it seems plainly designed to have of explaining the unhappy events of the story, it is in the tale at all. I am obviously more in agreement with this school than with the other, and I have silently appropriated many of their insights in what follows; but what really interests me about this criticism is the tone of Egean disenchantment that frequently creeps into it. These critics often seem upset at the subversion of attractive ideals implied by the inadequacy of the speech and end by blaming it—either on a Theseus whom we are to differentiate from "Chaucer" and perhaps the Knight or on a failure of "Chaucer's" art, a confusion the poet himself was unable to resolve. Thus we have Neuse's characterization of the speech as "the tyrant's plea, 'To maken vertue of necessitee'" and Theseus's watchword as "politics as usual" ("The Knight," 305); Aers's Marxist outrage at the "opportunistic eclecticism" with which Theseus masks his class interests in the speech, a set of values that "were not Chaucer's although they do represent major tendencies in western civilization" (Creative Imagination , 192); and Terry Jones's misanthropic and Monty Python-like enthusiasm for the way his "Chaucer" uses the speech and the tale to unmask the institution of chivalry in the fourteenth century for the corrupt and contemptible mess it really was (Chaucer's Knight ). We have also Salter herself (why are so many critics of this persuasion English?) trying to

exonerate her "Chaucer" by praising his sympathy with "a situation in which innocent creatures confront the wilful use of absolute power," despite the fact that the sympathy "disturb[s] the overall balance of his work" (Introduction to The Knight's Tale, 36). Finally, there is Alfred David's presentation of a Chaucer victimized by the conflict between his "nostalgic wish for an order that might have been once upon a time" and the "reflexes of [his] native skepticism" (Strumpet Muse, 88), who saved the flawed work this conflict produced by assigning it to—or blaming it on—the Knight after it had been written.^[8] In an ironic reading of the speech and the tale we have to settle for the conclusion that either the poet or the world is in some way unpleasantly awry, and the critics make plain their distaste for this conclusion.

I shall return to the matter of disenchantment shortly, but the prior question seems to be one I have been asking all along: who is talking here, and to what effect? The critical disagreement over the speech seems like a setup for the application of Leicester's razor (see above, pp. 5–6) since what both groups of critics neglect is the speech's voicing, especially the way that voicing anticipates and enacts the very problem that concerns them. Like so many other Canterbury pilgrims—such as the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner—the Knight is a critic of his own tale, commenting on and questioning the traditional styles and values of a story he did not make up himself in the very act of passing it on, that is, of telling it. He is also the first critic to notice the discrepancy between the ideal order Theseus's speech proposes and the reality of the world of the tale. He shows that he has noticed by making the problem a problem in the speech itself and by making the tension that divides critics the central tension of the passage, a fact about it rather than a judgment of it.

On the one hand, it is clear that the speaker of the speech would like to maintain the larger principle of order that the first school of critics fastens on, which is no doubt what encourages them to do it. This speaker is arguing for the benign influence of the First Mover as transmitted through the fair chain of love: he wants to say that the universe has a hidden order and that Arcite did not die in vain. We

[8] With his usual acumen David correctly identifies the terms of the conflict but locates it outside the poem itself in "Chaucer"'s career. The argument of his book is that the poet moves from moral certainty to disenchantment as he ages. Suppose it could be shown that Chaucer's earliest works (supposing we knew which they were) were as disenchanted as his later ones?

might imagine this vouloir dire as the speaker's advance plan for the speech. At the same time, however, the way the speaker deploys his argument, voicing his program in the practice of actual delivery, points to his own awareness of the difficulties that preoccupy the second set of critics. These difficulties keep undermining the argument and the speaker's belief in it, bringing out his own disenchantment and even his despair at the specter of a world without discernable human meaning. The consistent movement of the speech as a whole and of each of its pans is from positive general statements to negative particular examples that bring out the subtext of "derke ymagynynge," and it is this movement and its repetitions that I want to concentrate on here.

Theseus's speech begins with a forthright statement of the perfection and order of the divine plan as it is constituted in the mind of the First Mover and carried out according to his will:

The Firste Moevere of the cause above,
Whan he first made the faire cheyne of love,
Greet was th'effect, and heigh was his entente.
Wel wiste he why, and what thereof he mente;
For with that faire cheyne of love he bond
The fyr, the eyr, the water, and the lond
In certeyn boundes, that they may nat flee.
       (2987–93)

The trouble with this account is that it locates a perfection in realms above that all too obviously does not obtain here on earth, and when the speaker turns to "this wrecched world adoun," he immediately betrays his consciousness of the fact:

"That same Prince and that Moevere," quod he,
"Hath stablissed in this wrecched world adoun
Certeyne dayes and duracioun
To all that is engendred in this place,
Over the whiche day they may nat pace,
Al mowe they yet tho dayes wel abregge.
Ther nedeth noght noon auctoritee t'allegge,
For it is preeved by experience,
But that me list declaren my sentence."
       (2994–3002)

The wretchedness of the world is far more compelling to the speaker than its order, even more so because of the contrast with the beauty

and serenity of the cause above, and that wretchedness appears to distract him from his message. It is perhaps an assurance of the ultimate orderliness of things that they cannot outlast their established duration, but the reflection that they may abridge it at the very least calls unwelcome attention to the ability of men to disrupt the divine plan by violence and at worst evokes suicidal feelings akin to Egeus's "Deeth is an ende of every wordly soore" (2849)—feelings that might arise from the contemplation of a world so wretched that one cannot bear to wait out one's allotted span. "Al mowe they yet tho dayes wel abregge" feels like a slip that lets out something unintended, and the following lines on authority, experience, and the speaker's desire to declare his sentence enforce this effect. The man who a few lines earlier appeared to be confidently enunciating doctrine is now explaining himself instead, and the slightly lame aside indicates his awareness that something has gone wrong and his attempt to cover it up. This lameness is especially evident because what he insists is obvious—that the Mover has established the durations of things—is not so in fact, and this recognition makes him seem overinsistent and unconvinced of his own assertion. The initial image of the relations between the First Mover and the world makes the former too perfect, the latter too wretched, and each too cut off from the other for either the speaker's comfort or the audience's consolation.

This failure leads the speaker to a new start, an attempt to recharacterize the relations between the one and the many in more careful, logical, and scientific language:

Thanne may men by this ordre wel discerne
That thilke Moevere stable is and eterne.
Wel may men knowe, but it be a fool,
That every part dirryveth from his hool,
For nature hath nat taken his bigynnyng
Of no partie or cantel of a thyng,
But of a thyng that parfit is and stable,
Descendyng so til it be corrumpable.
And therfore, of his wise purveiaunce,
He hath so wel biset his ordinaunce
That speces of thynges and progressiouns
Shullen enduren by successiouns,
And nat eterne, withouten any lye.
This maystow understonde and seen at ye.
      (3003–16)

This new account of the Neoplatonic ladder or great chain of being has the desired effect of establishing a connection between the terrestrial and supramundane spheres. It uses the logical principle of the derivation of the part from the whole to argue the hierarchical deployment of being in the universe and thus manages to include the limited existence of earthly things, the parts and cantles, in a larger order that is founded on something more perfect than its members.

But as soon as the argument descends from the overall perfection of the system to specific cases, trouble arises again:

Loo the ook, that hath so longe a norisshynge
From tyme that it first bigynneth to sprynge,
And hath so long a lif, as we may see,
Yet at the laste wasted is the tree.

Considereth eek how that the harde stoon
Under oure feet, on which we trede and goon,
Yet wasteth it as it lyth by the weye.
The brode ryver somtyme wexeth dreye;
The grete tounes se we wane and wende.
Thanne may ye se that all this thyng hath ende.
       (3017–26)

The problem here is that as the speaker describes them, the cantles become too concrete, too obtrusive, and too laden with value to occupy their subordinate place in the argument and in the whole comfortably. The speech began with the assertion that the limited duration of earthly things was obvious and did not need to be demonstrated. That being so, we would expect the argument to turn fairly quickly to a demonstration of the value earthly things do have and the contribution they make to the larger order despite their transitory life. Instead the speaker continues to make and remake the point that everything passes, creating a growing sense not of order but of waste and desolation, the landscape of the temple of Mars. The mighty oak, the solid stone, and the great town that men use wood and rock to build are all caught up in the speaker's vision of the entropic drift of the world, and especially of human values, toward decay and meaninglessness. When the speech turns to human affairs, this saturnian subtext is even more in evidence:

Of man and womman seen we wel also
That nedes, in oon of thise termes two—
This is to seyn, in youthe or elles age—

He moot be deed, the kyng as shal a page;
Som in his bed, som in the depe see,
Som in the large feeld, as men may see;
Ther helpeth noght; al goth that ilke weye.
Thanne may I seyn that al this thyng moot deye.
       (3027–34)

Besides the obvious tendency of the voice to continue to linger over the varieties of universal demise, "He moot be deed, the kyng as shal a page" denies the efficacy of the hierarchical principle that is supposed to guarantee order in the universe at large, at least to human society. The human realm is once again cut off, as it was at the beginning of the speech and as it has been throughout the tale, from the realm of orderly process the speech is trying to assert. The attempt to trace the descent of order by degrees is continually subverted by a more powerful counterimpulse to level everything in a common fate.^[9]

The next section of the speech returns from the many back to the one, anthropomorphizing the one more fully than before as Jupiter, a being less abstract, with motives and feelings perhaps more like ours. This return appears to be an attempt to give an image of the Mover as actively involved in human affairs and reassert the benevolent concern the speech has so far failed to demonstrate:

What maketh this but Juppiter, the kyng,
That is prince and cause of alle thyng,
Convertynge al unto his propre welle
From which it is dirryved, sooth to telle?
And heer-agayns no creature on lyve,
Of no degree, availleth for to stryve.
       (3035–40)

Paradoxically, the very desire to assert benevolence in Jupiter and return to a context of order and divine care for earthly things makes the bitter subtext stand out even more strongly. "What maketh this but Juppiter, the kyng" is too closely juxtaposed to "Thanne may I seyn that al this thyng moot deye" and its accompanying desolate vision to function effectively as an assertion of benign control. It is too easy to read it as an accusation, especially when we realize that the "propre

[9] Spearing, Knight's Tale, 77, has noted the connection of this passage to the speech of Egeus.

welle" to which Jupiter converts all can only, logically and syntactically, be death. Over and over, what emerges behind the reassuring image of Jupiter and the philosophical vocabulary of the argument is the dark imagining of a world too much like the one the speech is supposedly combating and of gods more like the ones we see in the tale: distant, inscrutable, capricious, cruel—our murderers.

In terms of formal organization the next section of the speech, dealing with the more specific human situation of dying young, continues the logical plan of the argument: to move from the general assertion of cosmic order to a demonstration of its effects in particular instances and ultimately in the case before us. In terms of the deployment of the argument, however, this passage marks another new start, like line 3003 earlier. It denotes a shift of attention from the relative passivity of men as elements in the divine order, and the despair that view engenders, toward a more active stance, recommending that we not only accept but also affirm the actions of a higher will, necessity:

Thanne is it wysdom, as it thynketh me,
To maken vertu of necessitee,
And take it weel that we may nat eschue,
And namely that to us alle is due.
And whoso gruccheth ought, he dooth folye,
And rebel is to hym that al may gye.
And certeinly a man hath moost honour
To dyen in his excellence and flour,
Whan he is siker of his goode name;
Thanne hath he doon his freend, ne hym, no shame.
And gladder oghte his freend been of his deeth,
Whan with honour up yolden is his breeth,
Than whan his name apalled is for age,
For al forgeten is his vasselage.
Thanne is it best, as for a worthy fame,
To dyen whan that he is best of name.
        (3041–56)

The speech here attempts to exemplify the attitude it enjoins and make a virtue of necessity. The speaker offers what must be an interpretation of Arcite's death, though he does not yet use the young knight's name, pointing out ways in which that death can be seen to be for the best. His speech here is not just a logical demonstration that it is better to die young with one's fame unblemished, though that is its form, but also

an active urging that the hearers understand Arcite's death in this way. This purpose is clearest in "gladder oghte his freend been of his deeth" because it is so obviously directed to Palamon, a gesture that evokes the specific context in which the speech is being delivered more explicitly than has been the case so far. This gesture reminds us in a general way that the speaker has an agenda (not necessarily a hidden one) and a practical interest in seeing that certain people adopt the view he is suggesting.

But if the speaker wants others to put this virtuous construction on the particular necessity of Arcite's death, it quickly becomes apparent that he has trouble doing so himself. For the third time in the course of the speech the attempt to assert a benevolent order ruling human affairs evokes in the speaker himself a heightened awareness of everything in the situation that suggests the opposite:

The contrarie of al this is wilfulnesse.
Why grucchen we, why have we hevynesse,
That good Arcite, of chivalrie flour,
Departed is with duetee and honour
Out of this foule prisoun of this lyf?
Why grucchen heere his cosyn and his wyf
Of his welfare, that loved hem so weel?
Kan he hem thank? Nay, God woot, never a deel,
That both his soule and eek hemself offende,
And yet they mowe hir lustes nat amende.
       (3057–66)

The resurgence of the Egean attitude is most clearly signaled by "this foule prisoun of this lyf," coming hard upon the attempt to say that it is for the best that Arcite died as he did. Once again we hear the dark side of that assertion, the feeling that the world as it is is something Arcite is well out of. In addition, the tone of complaint ("grucchyng") at the decrees of the First Mover remains stubbornly present in the speech in the repetitions of the word itself. That the speaker has to urge his audience so insistently not to grumble suggests that he does not expect them to be persuaded and that he is not persuaded himself. He even admits that Arcite would not be persuaded if he were still alive. To assert that Arcite's cousin "loved him so weel" is itself touchy and can easily remind us of the strife we are being urged to put behind us. But to add that Palamon and Emelye "both his soule and eek himself offende" is to bring back everything that Arcite lost by dying young in

his excellence and flower because it is not clear that the speaker's vouloir dire, "They offend him by continuing to grieve and by not making themselves happy, as he would have wished," can easily escape the counterintimation, "They will offend him and his memory by their marrying, doing what he died trying to prevent." The phrase make a virtue of necessity usually implies standing up to difficult circumstances and taking them as an opportunity to display one's virtues. What the speaker's aside about Arcite brings out here is the extent to which he realizes that his praise and dismissal of the dead hero is a cosmetic papering over of Arcite's fate, an attempt after the fact to make necessity look like virtue.

There is no comfort in this speech for its speaker. The more he tries to assert the order and meaning of life, the more he has to struggle with his own conviction that it has no intrinsic order or meaning. Instead of comfort there is responsibility, the pressing need for human agents to supply the deficiencies of the gods and try to confer order where it is lacking. Notice how active the "I" is here:

What may I conclude of this longe serye,
But after wo I rede us to be merye
And thanken Juppiter of al his grace?
And er that we departen from this place
I rede that we make of sorwes two
O parfit joye, lastynge everemo.
And looketh now, wher moost sorwe is herinne,
Ther wol we first amenden and bigynne.
       (3067–74)

The most important single fact about the speech is that it continually labors, line by line and paragraph by paragraph, to put a positive and socially productive interpretation on the situation it addresses. It does so in the teeth of not only the difficulties of the objective situation but also the doubts of the speaker himself. The speech demonstrates yet again that if the last enemy is le néant, the first enemy and the most potent obstacle to overcoming the not-we is the self, with the dream of perfect order and the nightmare of despairing nothingness that it generates out of its own subjectivity. The first kind of order the speech demonstrates is the inner ordering of self-control, ceaselessly sustained against the twin temptations of the dream and the nightmare.

The second kind of order the First Mover speech strives for is the maintenance and furthering of human meaning, including the idea of

order itself. By the end of the speech it is clear that it is the speaker who sustains the First Mover rather than the other way around. It is apparent that for this speaker, in the human world as encountered and experienced there is no First Mover, no sight above, no externally given order in human affairs. But this lack only means that it is all the more important for human beings themselves—or at least men—to make and sustain order, and in this context the speech urges that we behave as if there were a First Mover and thereby try to bring about the order He symbolizes. The speech is an ongoing attempt to sustain the fabric of society and its institutions in the face of those threats, internal and external, to which it is subject. This effort extends to the preservation of the institutionalized ideal of order itself, embodied in Jupiter or the First Mover, as a model for men to emulate and a means to urge them to it. The speaker rehabilitates and keeps available an idea that has social value so as to put it to social use.

I have been careful in my reading of the First Mover speech to refer to the speaker rather than choosing between Theseus and the Knight because there are significant ways in which here, if ever, they are the same. It seems obvious that the Knight intends the First Mover speech as the tale's "message," his own attempt, for the benefit of his listeners, to come to terms with the philosophical and existential issues the tale raises. In addition, there is the equally obvious engagement of his voice and mind in the making of it, the here-and-now mental and emotional struggle the speech embodies. This identification of the Knight's voice with that of Theseus completes a long process begun at least as early as the scene in the grove. It is one of the triumphs of the tale because it is an index of how what Theseus does for the First Mover is a version of what the Knight does for Theseus, for the tale, and for chivalry itself. By the end of the tale Theseus is a more limited but also more realistic and serviceable agent of order than he was at its beginning. He must accept a situation in which he has less power and more responsibility for the power he does have and in which he has had to plan and improvise around setbacks and unforeseen eventualities, making use of whatever he can cobble together from the practical resources his situation and his culture provide. The First Mover in his speech is a conspicuously frail and patchy human construction whose principal value is that it can be used as part—and only part—of an attempt to bring about a little more political stability than there was before in the chancy and contentious world of competing heroic wills. "What may

I conclude of this longe serye" points not only to the length and difficulty of the speech itself but also beyond it to the rest of the story, to the continuing effort of conquest and battle as well as of politics and persuasion, thinking and speaking, that has been necessary to bring about some limited improvement in the order of human life. The speech is both an instance and a reminder of that long and ceaseless process, an embodiment not of order itself but of the labor of ordering.

If we look at Theseus in this way it becomes apparent that his efforts in the story are doubled by the Knight's protracted effort of thought and speech in the telling, the "longe serye" and long seriousness that is the tale itself, to produce precisely this image of Theseus and his world. What the prime mover is for Theseus, Theseus is, as the hero of the tale and the man who makes it all come out right, for the Knight. If the order Theseus espouses is to be convincing, it must not be too easily achieved and the Knight must keep the hero of his tale, like the First Mover, from becoming too remote and unreal, too consoling or not consoling enough. The Knight brings Theseus to the point where the two of them speak together out of a realistic and embattled human situation to express a major Chaucerian theme from the Knight's particular perspective: that though society is dependent on institutions, institutions are equally and crucially dependent on people to keep them alive and functioning effectively.^[10] What the Knight does to Theseus, and to the story, is force the mystified and treacherously overconsoling heroic images in the old books—in the chivalric tradition as it has been handed down to him—into confrontation with the real political and social conditions under which, the Knight knows, order and the noble life are carried on. He thereby makes those golden images responsible to and for the iron world in which they exist; he strives to make them useful both as warnings against overconfidence and encouragements to responsible aspiration.

The Knight belongs to a tradition of civilizers, and he is committed to that activity. But he is sharply aware that among the greatest dangers to civilization are the forms of civility themselves if they lull its guardians into ignoring their responsibility for maintaining them. That is why he is so hard on the story, especially in its early parts. He is also convinced, however, that these forms are, despite their frailty, all that stands between human beings and the chaos of, on the one hand, their

[10] See the remarks on structuration, chapter 13, note 20.

own inner drives and, on the other, an objectively meaningless world. Hence he ultimately preserves institutions, such as the gods, the tournament, and the funeral, by revising them. The most important of these institutions is the story itself, as an emblem of chivalry properly understood and an embodiment of order and the noble life. I remarked in the introduction that it did no harm to accept the proposition put forward by the Canterbury frame that the Knight's Tale is the tale the Knight tells, so long as we recognize that such a proposition implies nothing in advance about the knight who tells it. Now, as we approach the end of an analysis of that voice of the text, we can see how the fact that the speaker is a knight adds a certain urgency to the probing examination of what knighthood is. The speaker of the Knight's Tale does in fact identify himself with his estate, whose ideals are set forth in the Knight's portrait in the General Prologue. But one thing he knows about that estate is that it is not a preexisting entity but an institution and an activity. As such it needs to be explored, clarified, and above all enacted. The tale is not only an image of knighthood and the noble life but also an exemplary instance, consciously and deliberately presented, of the doing of knighthood. The telling itself is one version of what a knight does. It is, once again, a version of the institution of the subject, the active identification, in the mode of practical consciousness, of self and estate that constructs and maintains them as the subjectivity and the subject of chivalry.

If the knighthood enacted is a diminished thing, a matter of one slightly shaky political alliance that is more practical politics than splendor and is achieved only at considerable cost, that diminution is no doubt due in part to the often-cited belatedness, obsolescence, and decline of chivalry and its ideals in the fourteenth century. Indeed, as I suggested before, these conditions may well have produced not only in Chaucer but also in the Knight himself the disenchantment that enables the critique. But I think that is not how the Knight sees it. As I have shown, he conceives of the forces and dangers he evokes in the tale as both incorrigible and perennial, having constantly to be dealt with in every time and place, in Theseus's Athens as now. Yet he also sees (indeed experiences) that to concentrate too fixedly and exclusively on the perennial and incorrigible recurrence of human violence and senseless external necessity encourages a kind of despairing nihilism to which his existentialist humanism is as much prey as it is unalterably opposed. The real salvation of chivalry, if there is one, is

its commitment to the practical—to the particular, the immediate, what needs to be done to make and preserve order here and now in a marriage, an alliance, or the telling of a story. Limited successes are the best that can be hoped for and may well require the best a man has to give.

For this reason the end of the tale continues to focus on the labor of ordering. Theseus may hold up the First Mover as a model for human society to emulate, but he knows that he cannot count on Jupiter's help or even on Jupiter's persuasiveness. He has to keep working on the situation to ensure its outcome:

"Suster," quod he, "this is my fulle assent,
With al th'avys heere of my parlement,
That gentil Palamon, youre owene knyght,
That serveth yow with wille, herte, and myght,
And ever hath doon syn ye first hym knewe,
That ye shul of youre grace upon him rewe,
And taken hym for housbonde and for lord.
Lene me youre hond, for this is oure accord.
Lat se now of youre wommanly pitee.
He is a kynges brother sone, pardee;
And though he were a povre bacheler,
Syn he hath served yow so many a yeer,
And had for yow so greet adversitee,
It moste been considered, leeveth me;
For gentil mercy oghte to passen right."

Thanne seyde he thus to Palamon the knight:
"I trowe ther nedeth litel sermonynge
To make yow assente to this thyng.
Com neer, and taak youre lady by the hond."

Bitwixen hem was maad anon the bond
That highte matrimoigne or mariage,
By al the conseil and the baronage.
       (3075–96)

The speed and suddenness of the announcement after the slow puzzling through of the First Mover speech and the dispatch with which the ensuing state marriage is carried out make this speech something of a political tour de force, in which Palamon, whom we are specifically informed does not know why he has been summoned to Athens (2297), is hustled into making a decision and contracting an alliance he might otherwise want to consider more carefully. It is not clear, however, that Emelye is unaware of Theseus's plans. She presumably had some

information about the original decision of the Athenian parliament to "have fully of Thebans obeisaunce"; and though Theseus's "Lene me youre hond, for this is oure accord" virtually forces her compliance in this public situation, it can also be read as a reminder to her of something she has agreed to beforehand. Whether or not she knows, however, it is apparent that Theseus works actively here to bring about her assent. His tone to Emelye hovers between coercion and persuasion, between trying to talk her into womanly feelings of pity and mercy and reminding her of her responsibilities to the state; "He is a kynges brother sone, pardee" could be construed as both. Our last view of Theseus in the poem is of a man still alert to the disruptive potential of others, still anticipating and forestalling trouble. That he does so particularly with Emelye shows that he (and the Knight) remain aware that this solution to the situation has cost not only the life of Arcite but also the independence, and perhaps the happiness, of Emelye. The tensions of psychological ambivalence and institutional contradiction that have characterized the tale throughout remain alive, though suppressed, at its close. The need to keep attending to persuasion shows as well that the solution is sufficiently fragile that it needs to be shepherded along right up to the last moment: there is no guarantee that the marriage will work, either as a personal relationship or as a political alliance—and the two forms of success may well be connected.

Such things are only hints and undertones in the situation at the end of the poem, but their continuing possibility helps shape the concluding lines:

And thus with alle blisse and melodye
Hath Palamon ywedded Emelye.
And God, that al this wyde world hath wroght,
Sende hym his love that hath it deere aboght;
For now is Palamon in alle wele,
Lyvynge in blisse, in richesse, and in heele,
And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely,
And he hire serveth so gentilly,
That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene
Of jalousie or any oother teene.
Thus endeth Palamon and Emelye;
And God save al this faire compaignye! Amen.
       (3097–3108)

The third and fourth lines of this passage are sufficiently free in syntax to admit being read either as "God send the man who has paid dearly for it his love" or "God send Palamon the love of him who paid dearly for it," that is, the love of Christ. Even if the second reading is admitted, as an intimation of a yearning for some more complete fulfillment for the characters in Christian terms than the story has been able to provide them, the Knight's voicing of this hope remains conditional, relatively unfocused, and certainly not a possibility developed anywhere else in the tale: it remains a brief prayer. The impression the passage gives is of a rapid and perfunctory closing down of the story. It is a version of "They lived happily ever after," in which the Knight has little interest, and the contrast between this conventional flatness and our final view of Theseus suggests that the conclusion is not intended to provide any real closure for the poem. We are not really asked to believe that even these two characters (the statement is limited to them) never had any trouble again. Rather, we are asked to note that this story is over and that there is no need to tell more of it. Life and the labor of order go on as stories do not, and once the point has been made and the example given, the end of the story is no longer a conclusion; it is merely where the teller chooses to stop.

The closure of the Knight's Tale is, as Aers has pointed out, merely conventional, which is to say social.^[11] The tension the ending does not resolve is passed on beyond the boundaries of the tale itself, first of all to the disagreement between the assessment of the "gentils" and that of the Miller that the Miller's Prologue records. The Canterbury Tales is full of instances of what might be called conventional or social closure, in which the audience agrees, often tacitly, to act as if a resolution has taken place when in fact it has not. The end of the Pardoner's Tale is an obvious instance of this phenomenon, as is, in a different way, the end of the Wife of Bath's Tale, where such things as the social implications of the Wife's performance are deflected by the quarrel between the Friar and the Summoner and deferred to the Clerk's and Merchant's tales.

In the Knight's Tale, interestingly, the tension of its lack of closure has been passed on to subsequent readers, who have often seemed less to comprehend the tension than to be inscribed in it, to recapitulate

[11] See Aers, Creative Imagination, 194.

and undergo it. That is, the kinds of closure for the tale that the critical tradition has generally supplied have already been anticipated and criticized by the tale itself. My division of the critics into yea sayers and nay sayers, idealistic dreamers and despairing Egean misanthropes, is no doubt something of an exaggeration, and I will address this issue shortly. But it seems to me that there is enough truth to that division to make the problem and the reasons for it worth exploring. If an écrivain is a Writer in the exalted Romantic sense, and if Barthes has identified one who uses writing instrumentally, as in the making of a laundry list, as an écrivant,^[12] critics of the Knight's Tale often seem to find themselves unwittingly in the position of what might be called écrivisses, or p(r)awns of the text, writing from a place predetermined and always already undermined by it.

This situation seems to me to be evidence that the Knight is right about the inescapability of the hunger for closure and stable meaning in human makeup. The critics betray the same need for ethical solutions, the same sense that there ought to be some genuine connection between what men do and what happens to them, as the characters— and the same disenchanted discomfort at the possibility of meaninglessness. The desire of critics to provide a level of closure for the tale, if only to demonstrate that its "deficiencies" are somehow made good at another level by such things as the actual benevolence of a Christian providence unknown to pagan Theseus, is also allied to the nearly universal tendency to ignore the primacy of human agency in the tale, including the slighting of the Knight as narrator. It is a voice-oriented reading that uncovers how a tale famous for its portrayal of man as a plaything of forces beyond his control is in fact fascinated by specifically human power. The critics often seem as reluctant as the characters to acknowledge the role of human agents, and especially the Knight himself, in the constitution of the story and the world. But the Knight, though he experiences that same incorrigible hunger for closure and final meaning and the same ambivalence about the status of human action, is committed to trying to resist these tendencies. He strives instead to keep the open character of the world in view and put up with the discomfort such a stance entails, to remain clear-eyed in the face of human weakness and the threats of necessity, and not to be fooled or despair.

[12] Barthes, "Écrivains et écrivants."

Having so ringingly reduced my colleagues to a subordinate position in relation to the Knight (and of course myself), I find my own ambivalence reasserting itself in reflections like, Aren't they right after all? Doesn't the tale actively encourage responses like theirs? Isn't it something of a mousetrap that goes out of its way to disguise its real meaning and mislead its audience? Such questions point again, I think, to some genuine issues about the tale. The problem might be put as follows: the Knight's revisionary enterprise in the tale involves both the critique or deconstruction of chivalric institutions, insofar as these claim to have ontological status independent of human making, and at the same time the rehabilitation and maintenance of these institutions as structures useful and necessary for the preservation of order. As I have said, the Knight is not the Manciple or the Pardoner; he does not simply expose his society and its structures but also strives to preserve them. He does not propose institutional alternatives to gods, tournaments, or chivalry, the traditional cultural furnishings of his world. Though I do not necessarily condemn the Knight for not being revolutionary, I do notice that this conservatism has the effect of leaving in place a set of institutions whose structure encourages remystification, perhaps the most notable example being the First Mover. The Knight's reasons for this procedure are fully presented in the tale and parallel to a degree what I have called his "masculine" and "feminine" identifications: on the one hand the conviction that the truth about human life is too hard for most people to bear (a set of feelings that often get identified as womanish) and on the other hand the experienced awareness of the male heroic potential for terrible violence that chivalric institutions must continually strive to contain. That the Knight shares the impulses he fears adds a certain weight and seriousness to his view of the world. If there is something elitist in these convictions, and there is, they are at least based on an experienced assessment of human weakness, the Knight's own as well as others', and to say of the tale that it favors established institutions and public values over individual freedom and private fulfillment should also be to recognize that the tale and its speaker are the first to be ambivalent about these issues and the costs of the choices that create them.

But we need not accept the Knight's world, however solidly it is portrayed or deeply it is felt, as the world—the Miller, for one, does not—and a more distanced view of the tale's assumptions allows certain characteristics of the Knight's imagination as a social agent to

emerge. If the tale does not have two speakers, as theories of unimpersonated artistry suggest, it does project two audiences: those who, like the Knight, are strong enough to bear the truth and take responsibility for it and those who, as Aers puts it, will "feel relieved and consoled, latching on to the few brief assertions about the future of Palamon and Emily, feeling reassured at the role of official secular authority in the marital union, and abandoning the disturbing meditations stimulated by the complete work" (Creative Imagination, 14). The Knight's conviction that the former group is small and the latter large is attested by his use of the particular revisionist strategy I have described as well as by such things as the notable fact that there is finally only one "real" character in the tale: only Theseus is as penetrating, resourceful, and responsible as the Knight himself. However strong the grounds are in the Knight's experience for believing that most people cannot be trusted to control themselves and live with others without the carrot and stick of mystified institutions, and however uneasy he may feel about this belief, the fact of distrust remains, as does the elitism.

To look at the tale in this way is to become more aware of how it continues to participate in the dynamics of heroic society, and of course male domination, that it also analyzes. That is, heroic consciousness prereflectively constitutes the world as a chaos so as to give itself something to be heroic about and to order. Such a view involves a certain undervaluing of institutions and their permanence and power in the interests of heroic individualism; there is something aristocratic about it, appropriate to a class that is in control of the institutions in question.^[13] The Miller's Tale does not disagree with either the awareness of injustice or the stress on human agency in the Knight's Tale. Rather, it concentrates attention on what the Knight seems to leave out—both the richness and opportunity for human expression af-

[13] Given, as I have already remarked, that the institution most prominently featured here is the tale itself, with all its filiations to various generic and ideological processings of symbolic capital, an adjustment in the theoretical framework of a materialist analysis like Aers's suggests itself. Aers consistently treats the world of the poem as if it were the real world, a field in which substructure and superstructure are in conflict, where ideologies and material facts struggle. Both Chaucer and the Knight see it differently: for them, the romance and its associated conventions are already ideologically processed, and a tale is already a representation before ever it gets to a teller. It is the story that needs to be revalued as an item in the world, as the Knight does with his tale, and this revaluation is the process, in general, that Chaucer represents in the Canterbury Tales.

forded by complex and stable institutions, and their coercive power. The Miller's "quityng" of the Knight's Tale involves the full polarity of that word, whose various meanings coalesce around the notion of repaying a service or an injury. Thus, on the one hand, the "foyson" of institutional avenues for individual expression available in the world of the tale creates its cast of richly variegated characters with their multifarious projects and complex appeals to our sympathy and judgment. All the characters in the Knight's Tale are variously adequate or deficient versions of a single role, that of the hero.^[14] The characters in the Miller's Tale are a counterdemonstration of the range of roles available in modern society, especially as embodied in the Miller himself, who plays them all with gusto. From this perspective the Miller's message to the Knight is something like, You built better than you know and gave us all a world that has become "hende," no longer in need of constant vigilance and defense against elemental chaos. On the other hand, the Miller is extremely sensitive to society's power, as he shows, for example, in his resentment that the Knight is ensured, simply by virtue of being who he is, of a kind of hearing for his lengthy old romance that the Miller has to work much harder to get. In the tale itself this perspective is sustained in such things as the rush of prying eyes into the tale at its conclusion and the power of the class solidarity of clerks in defining the situation at the end. (See above, p. 11.) This aspect of the tale might be read as the Miller's reproach to the Knight: You and your kind have built prisons for the rest of us that are stronger than any of stone and iron and are in the form of the structure of society itself. The Miller's Tale locates in human institutions both the opportunities and the threats that the Knight's Tale places in the individual heroic psyche and the nonhuman world.^[15]

Because it both is and is not closed, because it ends but is not concluded, the Knight's Tale passes on to its various audiences the tensions it develops and embodies. As soon as we attempt to resolve

[14] This may perhaps suggest how character itself, which is derived, as Warren Ginsberg points out in The Cast of Character, from a word meaning to cut or engrave a mark, is not only a social construction inscribed in individuals but also an institution one of whose functions is to make other persons comprehensible. As such, it is of course subject to the manipulations of practical consciousness, and in the Knight's Tale the characters of the characters, so to speak, are things the teller negotiates with the story.

[15] The Knight's sensibility is thus in a certain sense antihistorical, according to the formula "Ther is no newe gyse that it nas old" (2125).

these tensions, we begin to compete with the text, in part because the text itself construes the assigning of meaning itself, in a Nietzschean way, as a matter of power and competing wills. This competition may take place either within the problematic the text proposes, in which case it is, as I have argued, dominated by the text, or outside it, in which case a new voice with its own aporias, like that of the Miller, is generated. Within the poem the meaning of a given tale is ongoing and shifting, redefined and continually reflected anew in the responses (or lack of them) of the other pilgrims. The same is of course true outside the poem in the community of interpreters, and my own characterization of that community has not escaped the grip of the tale. If I did not believe my interpretation to be superior to previous ones I would not be making it, and the fact that there is such a thing as academic machismo, or, to put it more benignly, that the world of literary criticism is an arena of civilized competition not unrelated to the Knight's world, is not necessarily altogether bad. Nonetheless, it is also true that my previous characterization of the critics as shrimps is an irresponsible caricature of my professional colleagues because it reduces them to a relatively arbitrary classification of what they maintain about the ending of the tale, one that impoverishes their various contributions to the institution we make and share—the ongoing discourse about the tale from which I have obviously learned a great deal and on which I depend. Further, I may not be able to get away with it when they read this. The reader will note that, like the Nun's Priest, I have apologized—"Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille"—and that, also like the Nun's Priest, I have not rewritten my earlier comments, and I have more choice than he because I am not even pretending to perform orally. Does it help (you or me) to say that I am only trying to "quite" the Knight?

Pointing to this action of the tale in worlds beyond it not only indicates its participation in the larger discourses of an ancient masculinity that is still with us and of a modern criticism that may question what it does not always escape. It is a way of pointing as well to the specificity of both the Knight's tale and his personality. It calls attention to a certain sort of "presence," that of a consistent and specific voice of the text that we are justified in calling the Knight's voice and whose consistency throughout the tale my own "longe serye" has tried to demonstrate. But this voice should still not be confused with an

external subject or "person," at least not in the sense of something that can be summed up once and for all and dismissed, especially since it is still at work in my own text and elsewhere. The Knight's subjectivity, like the Pardoner's and the Wife of Bath's, is constituted, as I have tried to show throughout, by a set of dialectical relations between antithetical terms, eros/aggression, psychological/social, "masculine"/"feminine," and so on, to which may now be added text/hors-texte . Thus from one point of view, for example, the characters are projections of the psychological makeup of the narrator and draw their life from his conscious and unconscious drives and investments of psychic energy. But insofar as the characters are also traditional, having a life in a story and a genre that is larger than the life of just this narrator, the same set of identifications can be viewed as a social construction: the individual self becomes a small society, the mediated reflection of the institutional structure that supports and constrains it. The "character" of Theseus (or of the Knight for that matter) can be seen as organized around a complex and unresolved ambivalence about his own aggressive impulses. But insofar as the institutionalized notion of masculinity and heroism central to the tale is so constructed as to generate both intense male bonding driven by feelings of loyalty and community in competitive endeavor, and at the same time encourage a competitive ferocity whose most glorious exemplar is the last man left alive on a field of corpses, what is legitimately viewed as an individual ambivalence at one level is just as accurately seen as an institutional contradiction at another.

In fact, to try to reify the Knight's Tale, and thereby the Knight, is to place oneself in the textual position that the text itself already undercuts, either as subordinate to the Knight or in competition with him. The question "What does the Knight mean?" does not, strictly speaking, have an answer, whether it is construed as a question about the speaker's intentions (does he wish to conceal or to reveal the nature of human institutions?) or as a question about the final significance of his character. The question always leads to an aporia, an undecidability, which can only be "resolved" by neglecting one or the other of the elements that make up the tension. What constitutes the specificity of the voice is that this particular set of tensions, rather than any others, cannot be decided. In so long and so detailed an interpretation based so much on questions of tone, I am certain to have sometimes gotten

the tone wrong. But I hope I have succeeded in delineating accurately the limits within which the choice of tone can (or cannot) be fixed. As I suggested with the Pardoner, irony, the problem of tone or of the voicing of a given sentence, is not so unlocatable as is sometimes supposed because one can always, in principle, locate what a statement is or is not being ironic about. The advantage of a voice-oriented reading is that it allows us to propose the range of possibilities from serious to ironic on a given topic as a set of tensions not in the statement as a proposition but in the speaker, the proposer, construed as the site where they occur. This set of specific tensions, as elucidated by interpretation, can be said to constitute for Chaucer the personality or set of psychosocial processes that produce, and are produced by, a given pilgrim in his or her tale. It is in the nature of those processes, of that subjectivity, that they render closure—of text, person, or reading—impossible.