Epilogue

TWO TASKS remain: one, to review the argument of this book; two, to open out the implications of that argument for certain contemporary questions and dilemmas. In both these tasks, initially, Shakespeare will be very helpful. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare twice penetrates to the essence of Chaucer's vision in Troilus and Criseyde. 1The first time he catches the quandary of value in very precise language (2.2.51-60):

Hector. Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost
The keeping.
Troilus. What's aught but as 'tis valued?
Hector. But value dwells not in particular will:
It holds his estimate and dignity
As well wherein 'tis precious of itself
As in the prizer. 'Tis mad idolatry
To make the service greater than the god,
And the will dotes that is attributive
To what infectiously itself affects,
Without some image of th'affected merit. 2

Ulysses. A strange fellow here
Writes me that man, how dearly ever parted,
How much in having, or without or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,
Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection; {233/234}
As when his virtues, aiming upon others,
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first /giver/.
Achilles. This is not strange, Ulysses.
The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes; nor doth the eye itself,
That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed
Salutes each other with each other's form;
For speculation turns not to itself
Till it hath travell'd, and is /mirror'd/ there
Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all. 3

It comes as no surprise, of course, that Shakespeare understands Chaucer so well. Not only is he obviously a brilliant reader, but also Chaucer points Troilus's error clearly even as he is hardly chary of allusions to Narcissus, speculation, instrumentality, reflexivity, and exchange. But this is not all. Shakespeare also knows--as does Chaucer--that, if humans need each other in order to be, this need--which, we remember, Aristotle says is the origin of money--is also the origin of serious, often inhuman abuses. If Shakespeare's play is a "problem play," it is so partly because no character uses any other character well. Perhaps for a moment, there is some kindness, but its motive, upon investigation, proves tainted with expediency (Ulysses, of course, is the incarnation of expediency) or vitiated by self-deception--though Cressida claims, "`My love admits no qualifying dross'" (4.4.9), we know better, in part, because, like Shakespeare, we have read Chaucer. Where all human relationships are, at one level or another, exploitative-- Thersites observes, "`All the argument is a whore and a cuckold'" (2.3.68-69)--there can be no dramatic resolution in the proper sense. King Lear is not a "problem play"; it is a tragedy-- Lear loves Cordelia.

Shakespeare readily perceived in Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer's agon with mediation. He doubtless saw--as can we, from the perspective of this book's argument--that Chaucer's principal angst concerned his own mediation be- {234/235} tween text and audience. As such, Chaucer's angst is a narratorial, technical and partly secularized, though for all this none the less serious, version of Dante's concern with communicating the by definition incommunicable. Where Dante must be constantly sensitive to the narcissism of his instrumentality because he is mediating that which is transhuman and transimagery, Chaucer must be constantly sensitive to the narcissism of his instrumentality because he is mediating the irreducibly particular, circumstantially nuanced, nonsubstitutable personal position of another--the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Pardoner, and so on. Where Dante must not call God any thing in such a way as to suggest that that thing equals God, Chaucer must not represent his characters in such a way as to present them as merely his. Hence, just as Dante insists on himself so as the more faithfully to efface himself, so does Chaucer interpose himself between text and audience so as to force the audience to take the measure of him and thus the measure also of his characters, who thereby assume more truth and reality than they otherwise would possess. The matter can be put as follows, almost epigrammatically--and this is as close to a one line summary of my book as I can come: what for Dante is a problem of the expression of transcendence is for Chaucer a problem of the transcendence of expression.

Modern theory has taught us that "expression" is a shibboleth in the vocabulary of criticism. 4 "Expression" wants to espouse the notion that a centered, self-contained, individual, and inviolable subjectivity expresses itself in writing; "expression" is very much a shibboleth of Romantic esthetics and poetics. Chaucer, quite the contrary, does not "express" himself; he tries, just the opposite, to de-center himself and thus enter into others, the Other. Chaucer's desire is to let the Other and others have their say, for "al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine" (Rom. 15.4; Retraction I 1083). Jacques Lacan writes:

What I seek in speech is the response of the other. What constitutes me as subject is my question. In order to be recognized by the other, I utter what was only in view of what will be. In order to find him, I call him by a name that he must assume or refuse in order to reply to me. I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming (Trans. Sheridan 1977:86).

Chaucer, then, like Dante, is a character in his own comedy. As such, he supposes and also proposes that truth is less verification of the adequacy of word to thing than it is searching and cooperating for fidelity among persons, peace among men. To be in the comedy is already an act of faith and a quest for peace. What is important is not getting it right but getting it true--best if you can do both, but, failing that, do the latter. I am not here just playing with the two meanings of "trouthe"--verity and fidelity. I want much more, to suggest that the two meanings guard and preserve a wisdom we would do well to consider, and perhaps assume, in our own time, our own world. Here I lay down the putative objectivity of the scholar (which is so often a mask for rampant subjectivity anyway) to take up the position of advocate for faith and peace in a technological world. Now I want to extend and to apply Dante's and Chaucer's profound understanding of vision, versions, and positions to our own attitudes toward and uses of the creatures of this world.

Medieval people were hardly innocent of technology; a description of the efficiency of a Cistercian abbey would dispel any illusion that they were. 6 Thus they faced the same perilous quandary as do we: whether by technology to dominate Nature to destruction or by technology to cooperate with Nature for the improvement of life and the preservation of the earth. It is hard not to believe that wood was meant for fires, hard not to believe that water was meant to run downhill and generate power, hard not to believe that wind was meant to billow in sails, hard not to believe that the atom was meant to be split. 7 So much is the property of each, and its property is in part a thing's meaning--its, so to speak, "meant-to-be" (cf. Boyde 1981:60-62). But the property and the meaning of a thing lie as much in the community which uses it as in the thing: the community may decide to burn this stand of timber; it may decide to build houses with it; it may decide to let it stand. The question {236/237} before the community is, To what is the stand of timber referred? This question clears a space for much more difficult questions. What is the ground of the referral? What are the community's motives? Does it seek dominance, mastery, and the product of these states, or the security of the predictable and the repeatable? Or does it seek cooperation, preservation, and familiarity--activities in essence insecure because considerate of the unknown? Is the community of Narcissus? Or is it of God?

So posed, the questions are scandalous and must give offense to many. But Dante and Chaucer raise them, and they must be faced. Indeed, if I write now in such a way as, in John Murray Cuddihy's terms, "to give offense" (1978:1-24), it is because I am writing not out of "civil religion" or a "religion of civility" but out of a specifically Christian apologetic which is not civil or mannerly in the American sense of "tolerate all." And I do so for the one very good reason that the argument which I have undertaken and the poems which occasioned it demand that I do so. Both Dante and Chaucer are Christian poets (which does not mean "ecclesiastical" poets), 8and they both render account of their stewardship of the things of this world--taking no offense, as far as I can see, at the embarrassing questions the man Jesus, called the Christ, again and again posed. And as the day of our reckoning approaches, whether with the unknowns of outer space or the melting of the polar ice, their accounts may be to our credit.

Supreme to my mind among Dante's many gifts is his capacity to let a thing or a person be what it is or who he or she is--if I may borrow Heidegger's term, to let essences essence (Wesen). 9 Thus, if a man chooses to falsify, as Master Adam does, then Dante will let his falsity be, in putrid and putrefying manifestation. Thus, a different case, if the sun rises in such a way as to offer itself, for a few moments when the clouds are in just the right position, to naked mortal sight, then Dante will let this vision of light be, in a crisply morning manifestation (Purg. 30.22-27). Perhaps his clearest statement that everyone and everything has an essence to essence occurs in the Paradiso (8. 142-48):

"E se 'l mondo là giù ponesse mente
al fondamento che natura pone,
seguendo lui, avria buona la gente.
Ma voi torcete a la relïgione
tal che fia nato a cignersi la spada,
e fate re di tal ch'è da sermone;
onde la traccia vostra è fuor di strada."

("And if the world there below would give heed to the foundation which {237/238} Nature lays, and followed it, it would have its people good. But you wrest to religion one born to gird on the sword, and you make a king of one that is fit for sermons; so that your track is off the road.")

Supreme among Chaucer's gifts, to my mind, is his capacity to catch human beings in those moments, moments of relations with others, when they most obscure or conceal or mistake who they are; he knows the myriad ways in which men and women try to avoid or simply misunderstand their essences. Hence, obviously, he has a large share of Dante's gift, just as, of course, Dante has a large share of his. Neither in fact could be without the other; but one gift does dominate in each man. And as Dante strives to let essences essence, Chaucer ponders the innumerable ways essences do not quite manage to appear as the essences they are, the way essences tend to show forth somehow as slightly bent. In essence, the Wife of Bath is a loving, extraordinarily energetic woman of great appetite; in appearance, she is a scheming sexpot somewhat past her prime, a bit sad. Chaucer is every bit as much a poet of the ideal, of essences, as Dante is; only, he sees the ideal, the essence, in its fallen and erratic, its self-deceiving and self- forgetting, though incarnate and redeemable, version--he sees it in this world, not in Hell or Purgatory or Paradise.

Each poet, because of his peculiar gifts and combination of gifts, came to understand that appearance, the essencing of essences, is paramount in life on earth. Because Narcissus cannot let the Other be, he is damned, and the poet must repudiate him, especially the poet of essences. The poet of essences must love not only himself but also others and, finally, others more than himself. The poet of essences, who "uses this world as if he used it not" (1 Cor. 7.31), seeks not dominion, mastery, and security but cooperation, preservation, and familiarity. He seeks the context and the relations in which everything may appear as what it is and every person may appear as who he is, even if, ironically, he appears as who he is not (as does the Pardoner, for example). The poet of essences seeks the "as" which is the "is" of each {238/239} creature--the role or the character or the type in which that creature discovers who he is. And the poet of essences will not impose this "as" upon anyone's or anything's "is." Such imposition would be falsification and no less falsification for going by the name of--one of several possible names--technological accuracy. Getting it "right" is less important for the poet of essences than getting it "true." Getting it "right"-- quantifiable, verifiable, predictable, and certain--will almost without fail preclude that indeterminacy, incertitude, openness, and spontaneity which is the space of the "true," the space where persons discover who they are, discover what a thing is. The tree is not falsified as lumber as long as the community remembers what the tree is; but if they forget the truth of the tree, then the accuracy of the lumber is the merest functional technology. And persons can live without that, without necessarily getting it "right," though it is convenient, comfortable, and sometimes beneficial to have it "right"; but persons cannot live without truth--without fidelity, trust, and peace. Without the latter, essences cannot essence; with only the former, technicity merely functions. Where there is love, even death can be endured, as the very ground and enfranchisement of essencing--the end of one appearance of essence and the beginning of another. 11 Where there is only sterile, technical equipment, respirators and pumps, existence may be prolonged, but life and essence and appearance are dismayed, undone. The poet of essences knows that love--fidelity, trust, and peace--must precede technicity and its dominion if these are to have any meaning. For love lets the Other be, love rejoices in the being of the Other, and thus love can chasten the relentless desire of technicity to make the other be . . . whatever. The poet of essences, of what something is or of who someone is, must be a love poet. So Dante, so Chaucer.

To judge from the love poets Dante and Chaucer, the poet of essences must also be a poet of money, as were they. This is to say, he must be a poet of exchange. And this because, ultimately, no thing is what it is, no person is who he or she is, without reference to other things, to other persons. What the stand of timber is depends on what the stand of timber is referred to precisely in the sense of exchanged for. If the stand of timber is referred to personal comfort and exchanged for that, then it is firewood -- money having facilitated this reference-exchange by paying the laborers who cut down the trees. If the stand of timber is referred to natural beauty and exchanged for that, then it is a public or private forest or park--money having facilitated this reference-exchange by paying for the rights to preserve the stand and by paying for alternative building, heating, and writing materials. If a person is referred to indentured service and exchanged for that, then he is a slave--money having facilitated this reference-exchange by paying the slave trader his expenses of {239/240} transport and feeding (such as it was). If a person is referred to God and exchanged for Him, then he is a person, loved--money having facilitated this reference- exchange by paying for his sustenance, nurturance, and other material, hence also spiritual needs.

This latter position, I hope, shocks my readers; it is meant to anyway. If Dante and Chaucer are poets of money as well as of love, this is mainly because, as Christian poets, they understand that human's relations with God and their relations with others under God are relations of exchange, of commerce. So much, we can pause here to note, explains the insistence with which the man Jesus, called the Christ, returns to commercial and monetary imagery in His discourse--He understands that one must pay for what one chooses, that it is the structure of life to have to lay down if one would take up. Hence, if one wants a person--and I choose this example to take full advantage of the double entendre in "want," namely, "need" and "desire"--one must pay the price of wanting: that is, one must pay the wanting as price; one must hand it over, lay it down, resign it, for only so will the wanting not threaten to replace the person. The wanting is paid to God, the Guarantor of the person, who then gives the person as and because He gives Himself in the person: He gives, because He is, that person's freedom to give himself or herself to the lover. The wanted, that is, the beloved, referred to God is thus exchanged for God, who becomes the beloved's love; God is the love with which the lover loved the beloved enough to refer him or her to God in the first place. So referred to and exchanged for God, the wanted, the beloved, knows himself or herself loved first and foremost for being himself or herself, and this knowledge, which is the love of God in the beloved and in the lover and in between them, is precisely the liberty to be, the free will of the beloved, to essence, to appear, to come forth. 12 If I pay my wanting to God, then I may have the person, the being, of my beloved, which I possess as if I possessed it not (1 Cor. 7.30). Unlike Narcissus, I must not die in my wanting, I must die to my wanting (cf. Rom. 6-8).

Thus we come to the curse on money, the negative feature of it which compels Dante's and Chaucer's separate but related interests. Money is the origin of artificial want ( = need and desire). If need ( = want and desire) is the origin of money (Aristotle's position), money, once it has come into existence to facilitate the exchanges which satisfy need, has no natural limit--as the modern world has learned: create debt and print more paper. 13 Money will increase forever. Increase forever, initially because human want knows no limit (other than the infinitely repeated and therefore "limitless limit" of need-surfeit-need-surfeit); increase forever eventually, however, because it becomes the artificial body of want itself. Money is the accumulation, the {240/241} store, the endless supply of want. 14 Money, unlike wealth, hypostatizes and thus gives an illusory presence to the want which it is meant to help satisfy; consequently, the more money a man has, the more want he has. Although it looks like wealth or power or prestige or influence, he holds in his hands corrosive want, for, holding it in his hands, he wants to spend it--probably to acquire more of the same, or more of the want. To have money is to want; the more money, the more want. The medieval analysis of avarice is exact: all the avaricious wants is more of what he already has--to have (own) want (money) is to want. The only limit on money and its tyrannous illusion is the unnatural limit of human will saying, "No, this is enough"; such a will-- a will not stricken with "cieca cupidigia"--must be precisely "libero, dritto e sano." 15

Money, my argument suggests, is preeminently the means which becomes an end. Money is accumulated want, without a referent, able to refer to anything or nothing, and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself. If humanity's chief glory is instrumentality -- the toolmaker -- then our chief temptation is to let instruments, the means, become an end. Humans risk this temptation most seriously, and it is most visible, in the instruments money and language, which in a number of ways already resemble each other. Hence Dante's and Chaucer's fascination with money and language and with money as language, language as money. Both poets, committed to community and communication, do not want to see the means to community and communication become ends in themselves; among other casualties were this to happen would be poetry, the sapience of man, the means which is supremely meaning and meaningful.

"Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine" (Rom. 15.4). So Chaucer in his Retraction (line 1083), a document which has troubled his readers almost from the very beginning. 16 The statement is peculiar: note its obvious, even obtrusive means-end structure--"al that is writen" is the means; "oure doctrine" is the end. The statement not only makes a sweeping claim but makes it in a very special, logical form. Chaucer claims, even though he goes on to "revoke" certain of his own works, that all that is written is a means to the end of our doctrine. Moreover, he adds, "and that is myn entente." I cannot, in this book, take that statement lightly. Even though Chaucer refers primarily to The Parson's Tale with the statement "al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine," it and the declaration of intent can hardly fail to reverberate further, as I do not doubt that Chaucer intended them to do. Note that he continues:

"Wherfore I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; and namely of my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns" (lines 1083-85; emphasis added).

Where, in fact, they belong if they remain means, which they are, and do not become ends. For if they remain means, then they will, by that very fact, be read for the end of doctrine: they will be searched for their meaning, not indulged solely for entertainment as ends in themselves. They will thus be approached as the sapience of man for communication in the community. They will be approached as poetry--poetry for present purposes includes fiction in prose--which possesses an intention to remember the intentions of humans in times past so that there might be a means and a meaning for humans in times to come. So approached, so used, they will figure as part of prudence, which includes memory as its first function (Yates 1966:35-36). And prudence it is, Dante and Chaucer would agree, which enables the sapience of man to chasten and to humanize the sciences of man--that essences might essence, appearances appear, being be.