Introduction

The Discourse of Man "by Nature a Political Animal" NOTE 1

In 1252, thirteen years before Dante was born, Florence stamped her lily on one face of a gold coin, the figure of John the Baptist on the other; the coin was the florin (It. fiorino: "little flower"). It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this event: it marked both a culmination and a beginning. The florin was the culmination of Florence's extraordinary commercial growth and vitality of the preceding two centuries. NOTE 2 It was the beginning of another century or so of commercial pre-eminence in Italy, Europe, and the Mediterranean generally. NOTE 3 Of 3.5 to 4.5 grams of fine gold, the florin at its height was the "dollar" of Europe. NOTE 4 To be sure, the Venetian ducat soon participated in this honor, too; but when Dante came of age, he entered the political life of a commune whose coin was of incontestable value, power, and prestige. Consequently, he also necessarily encountered the features and the behavior of money which had already compelled Aristotle to call it "nonsense" (lêros). NOTE 5

Dante was not alone in this encounter; many of his contemporaries were as disturbed as he by the irrationality and the mystery of money. Lauro Martines, in a recent study (1980:85), has described the situation well: "As attested by the performance of its poets, communal society was still struggling to absorb the moral consequences of money and credit mechanisms into its religious view of the world." Perhaps no better evidence of this struggle or of its vehemence comes down to us than the story of "il poverello," Francis of Assisi (Fleming 1977:73-109). His life is unimaginable outside the context of money and the triumph of a money economy. From his repudiation of his father's mercantile values to the anonymous treatise Sacrum commercium Sancti Francisci cum domina paupertate, the events and the consequences of his words and deeds are inextricably involved with money. NOTE 6 Dante's own celebration of Francis (Par. 11.43-117) emphasizes this involvement also. In addition to the story of Francis, we have many lyrics of the Trecento which {7/8} lash out against money or try to discover some sort of rationality in it. NOTE 7 Moreover, the triumph of money led to a revision of the hierarchy of the seven deadly sins so that avarice came to share with pride the position of root or beginning of evil. NOTE 8 Finally, the writings of Italian merchants themselves, which proliferated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Bec 1967:49-247), attest to the dominance which money had assumed over the lives and thoughts of people.

In all ages, poets, like other people, need money, and they get it when and how they can. But Dante and Chaucer obviously thought about money even when they did not need it to put bread on the table. Because of the age in which they lived, they encountered all around them the independent life as image and image-maker which the coin also leads. They could see, even as clearly as we, how the coin once produced produces more of itself. They could see that to create debt is to create currency (though not necessarily wealth). They could see the coin generate credit: the image beget belief. Seeing all this, considering it, they were also necessarily considering issues poetic in structure and content. Money and poetry are both fictions, as we who live with paper money know only too well, and they are both strangely alike--so much so that the problem of the meaning of money is analogous to the problem of the meaning of language, especially poetic language. Because the one problem was for Dante, Chaucer, and their age both starkly visible and in the process of changing its structure and scope, the other was necessarily rendered visible in intense and variable lights. This relation, this analogy, and the concomitant problems, make up the subject of this book. To study them is to focus our attention on the power of language to mean, both because the analogy itself between language and money insists on the question of reference and because this is the power the fourteenth century's concern with the analogy found most problematic.

This book begins to deal with the analogy by mapping Dante's reaction to money in the Commedia. My method is cross- disciplinary and from time to time uses history, economics, sociology, philology, and literary criticism. Dante's reaction to money, the map makes clear, leads to the structure from which his poem comprehends imagery and the operation of poetic discourse. This map I next follow to Chaucer. Chaucer, I argue, is no mere quoter of virtuoso passages. Rather, he is a great interpreter of Dante. He is so, in part, because of his own efforts to come to grips through poetry with the power and the meaning of money. Oftentimes Chaucer's texts show a feel for the problem of the meaning of money similar to that encountered in the Com- {8/9} media; this is especially the case in Troilus and Criseyde (see chap. 5 n. 1 below), and if it is only indirectly the case in The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer is most his own if not on his own, still the context of money in the Commedia and the Troilus contributes greatly to understanding that extraordinary "fragment." Indeed, my book argues that the structure of The Canterbury Tales is economics and that Chaucer derived this structure in part from his understanding of the Commedia--understanding won from the process of "translating" Troilus and Criseyde.

This argument is neither as cold nor as abstract as it might at first appear to be. Both Dante and Chaucer are love poets. It is peculiarly the gift of such a poet that he understands that there is no taking in love without giving, no giving without taking. Love is (at least) an exchange. Hence the love poet's fascination with economics. Hence also the profound similarity between Dante and Chaucer.

At the same time, however, it would not do to lose sight of the differences between Dante and Chaucer (and I try throughout this book to keep them in sight). Whereas the former begins in a blurred and fragmented vision of his own condition but ends in a whole vision of primal unity, the latter, in Troilus and Criseyde, begins in a pseudo-unity of vision but ends in a whole vision of human fragmentariness. Dante goes from the fallen world to the Other World of Paradise; Chaucer goes from an illusory paradise of fin'amors to the real world of ordinary mortals making do. Then, from and within that world, he goes on to explore, in The Canterbury Tales, that typical confusion of self-understanding and self-deception which makes ordinary mortals uncommonly interesting and lovable.

The analogy between language and money is of some modern interest, especially since Saussure and Derrida. Indeed, many might even call it "trendy." But it is also, I am arguing, seriously medieval, and it was present to Dante and Chaucer not only through "experience" but also through impeccable "authority"--that of Boethius, in his comment on Aristotle's De interpretatione. Boethius translated Peri Hermenias in A.D. 510 and wrote two commentaries on it subsequently, one in 511, and another two years later. In the second of these commentaries he argues that a word is formed in a manner similar to that by which a coin becomes current money. For this argument he assumes a structural relationship between language and money which, I believe, Dante and Chaucer also assume. Different as the two poets are (and I hope never to lose sight of those differences, I repeat), it is possible that they shared a knowledge of Boethius's argument--it was easily available to them if they wanted it (Isaac 1953:96-7)--and hence also a common understanding of {9/10} the resemblance between language and money, a resemblance often the cause of dangerous confusion. The phrase Boethius is discussing when he presents his argument is "those things which are in sound" (I print the Latin first and then follow with a translation which makes no pretense to elegance, since my desire is the optimum construction of Boethius's sense):

vox enim universale quiddam est, nomina vero et verba partes. pars autem omnis in toto est. verba ergo et nomina quoniam sunt intra vocem, recte dictum est ea quae sunt in voce, velut si diceret: quae intra vocem continentur intellectuum designativa sunt. sed hoc simile est ac si ita dixisset: vox certo modo sese habens significat intellectus. non enim (ut dictum est) nomen et verbum voces tantum sunt. sicut nummus quoque non solum aes inpressum quadam figura est, ut nummus vocetur, sed etiam ut alicuius rei sit pretium: eodem quoque modo verba et nomina non solum voces sunt, sed positae ad quandam intellectuum significationem. vox enim quae nihil designat, ut est garalus, licet eam grammatici figuram vocis intuentes nomen esse contendant, tamen eam nomen philosophia non putabit, nisi sit posita ut designare animi aliquam conceptionem eoque modo rerum aliquid possit. etenim nomen alicuius nomen esse necesse erit; sed si vox aliqua nihil designat, nullius nomen est; quare si nullius est, ne nomen quidem esse dicetur. atque ideo huiusmodi vox id est significativa non vox tantum, sed verbum vocatur aut nomen, quemadmodum nummus non aes, sed proprio nomine nummus, quo ab alio aere discrepet, nuncupatur. ergo haec Aristotelis sententia qua ait ea quae sunt in voce nihil aliud designat nisi eam vocem, quae non solum vox sit, sed quae cum vox sit habeat tamen aliquam proprietatem et aliquam quodammodo figuram positae significationis inpressam. NOTE 9

(For sound is a kind of universal; names and words, on the other hand, are parts. Every part, however, is in the whole. Words, therefore, and names, since they are within sound, rightly is it said, "those things which are in sound," as if he /Aristotle/ had said, "things which are contained within sound are designative of thoughts"; but this likening is as if he had spoken thus: "a sound having itself in a certain way signifies a thought." For, as it has been said, names and words are not sound merely. Thus just as a coin is copper impressed with a certain figure not only in order that it might be called a coin but also in order that it might be the price of some specific thing, so, in the same way, words and names, are not only sounds, but are imposed to a certain signification of thoughts. For a sound which designates nothing, such as "garalus," although grammarians looking at the shape /"figuram"/ of the sound, might contend that it is a name, nevertheless philosophy does not consider it to be a name, unless it may be imposed to designate some conception of the soul, and in that way is able to signify something real, since a name shall necessarily be the name of some thing. {10/11}

But if some sound designates nothing, it is the name of nothing; wherefore, if it is the name of nothing, neither is it said to be a name. And thus, in this way, a sound--that is, a significant sound--is not sound only, but is called a verb or a name, just as a coin is not called copper, but is called, by its proper name, a coin, by means of what distinguishes it from other copper. Therefore, this sentence of Aristotle by which he says "those things which are in sound" designates nothing other than a sound which is not sound only, but which, while it may be sound, has nevertheless a certain property and a certain, as it were, impressed figure of the imposed significance.)

If Boethius is Dante's and Chaucer's authority for an analogy between language and money at the level of formation, there are other authorities for the analogy at the level of work or function. Aristotle, for example, insists that "all goods to be exchanged . . . should be measurable by some standard coin or measure." NOTE 10 From this need, universally recognized, for a common measure, arises what in this book I will call the reductive power of money--the power of money to reduce anything and everything to itself. Although the Middle Ages did not know Averroes's On Plato's Republic, they would have understood his very typical (Aristotelian) teaching that money "is potentially all things valuable" (Lerner 1974:110). In fact, money means nothing because {11/12} it is worth everything. NOTE 11 Everything has its price, and when it is reduced to that price--that node of value in a skein of relativity--it sacrifices all it dense, tangible difference to the common denominator. Money is the more or less temporary disappearance of difference; it is the reduction of the random to quantifiable system. NOTE 12 Money is not precisely mute (we all know that money talks) but it appears silent--the supreme ventriloquist. Money can talk only through the mouths of dummies because its own character, giving the lie to the "sharp point" of that word (charakter) is flat; etched into the surface of the coin, the "character" is dead--the institutionalized physiognomy of the dominant power instantly interchangeable with the "character" of the new regime. Moreover, a field of corn, a porcelain vase, a pint of blood, and a prostitute's tricks can be rendered equal in value at $500 or $1,000 or 10 cents. Little wonder Aristotle called money "nonsense."

As money reduces everything to arbitrary exchange values, so language reduces experience to meaning. The universalizing or generalizing power of language is necessarily if also paradoxically reductive--we accord that poetry the highest respect which successfully counters this reductiveness (Wimsatt 1954:69-83)-- and as in the former system the coin displaces the distinct otherness of the object, so in the latter system the word can supplant reality by substituting itself for the thing to which it supposedly refers. We see this best in ethnic slurs and slogans-- the words "nigger" and "Jew" and "national security" are good examples. Reality disappears into such words even as it disappears into coins. Both, because they are so full, are empty signifiers: both fill with the selfishness of those who would possess and manipulate the world rather than share it (cf. Serres 1982:149, 168). If I choose words which are extremely prejudicial, I do so only to emphasize that all words can be prejudicially reductive even though and sometimes perhaps precisely because we are not always aware of as much. Only in the past thirty years has the word "nigger" been felt as prejudicially reductive by most people. And even now women are trying to counter the reductive power of "feminine" and "female." To use a word is always to commit an act of reduction--and so much the analogy with money helps us clearly see; it need not always be, however, to commit an act of prejudicial reduction. The use of a word can be free of the selfishness structural in coin. With coin I buy or spend my own; with language I share or translate my own. There is a difference, though it is often obscured. And the difference is the motive which Dante and Chaucer share: they seek to raise it from its obscurity. In the process they both from time to time emphasize the similarity between language and money, finding in it much that is positive and even creative. Dante, more frequent and consistent with this gesture, likens faith, for example, to "moneta" (Par. 24.84; and see p. 93 {12/13} below). Chaucer, typically more indirect and less insistent, discovers character, for example, from the ways in which people spend words (see CT WBP D 425: "`I ne owe hem nat a word that it nys quit'"; and Chap. 1 below). But both poets will more often focus on the difference between language and money since it is so frequently lost to sight and thought in the baneful confusion of language as money. Language would generate meaning but, confounded with the coin it so nearly resembles, it only reifies desire. To break language from a thing and to restore it to things is the goal and the achievement of Dante's and Chaucer's poetry, different as the two of them are.

In making such a claim, the reader will have already observed, I necessarily skirt some of the more formidable positions of postmodernist criticism; and I suppose I should say, at the outset, that the nostalgia for an idealist and idealizing signification which certain schools will detect in this book is real and intended. If difference is the ever unstable ground of presence and plenitude, still presence and plenitude are viable experiences of the human intellect, hardly delusions even if perhaps illusions (cf. Derrida 1976:44-73). If as this book supposes, Dante and Chaucer alike feared the initial inhuman rigor of idealist and idealizing signification, they also sought a poetry which would for that very reason relate the human and the ideal harmoniously.NOTE 14 To say that they relaxed into faith will perhaps strike some as an "easy out," but that, I will argue, is exactly what they did (and it was no easier for them to do than it is for me to argue that they did it). And their faith was predicated not on ecclesiastical pronouncement but on the common realization that, without faith, exchange--whether of love or of money--is simply not possible. We must believe to love (and we must love to believe).

This faith, first and foremost, was faith in the ontological relation between word and thing. To illustrate just briefly here, with Chaucer. As often in his poetry, we find the ideal or the positive first appearing as its opposite. Hence, in The Shipman's Tale, where money and language obviously relate to each other as a thematic concern, NOTE 15 the words "cosyn" and "cosynage" repeatedly {13/14} appear in each character's discourse, only to assert the contrary, however, without fail, that neither of the three characters is really the other's "cosyn" in any meaningful sense.NOTE 16 Word and thing (vox et res) are obviously disjunct. This ontological problem receives, with typical Chaucerian wit, sexual and marital inflections in the poetry. When the Merchant's wife exclaims, in one of the more famous of Chaucer's lines, "`I am youre wyf; score it upon my taille'" (ShpT B2 416), the word "taille" exquisitely points the problem. Its equivocation--"tally" or "pudendum"? (Davis 1979:150)--insists on the disjunction between word and thing, on the difficulty inhering in any assumption of an a priori conjunction between word and thing innocent of intervening interpretation: we have to interpret or to decide to what thing the word refers, or whether, indeed, it refers to both things at once? the referent is absent.

But the word's equivocation in context is hardly all; the word's original meaning also points the problem. For the "taille" is a notched stick recording debt, or some other obligation, which is split lengthwise on the understanding that the two parts, because originally one, when rejoined, will unambiguously indicate the obligation (OED T:60). No more brilliant choice than this, for the situation or for the philosophical dilemma, could have been made. Both marital and verbal infidelity are implicated in "taille." Where is the other half of the Wife's "taille"? In whose keeping is the other part of her "taille"? Who puts notches in it and when? The answers to these questions, of course, are far less important than the questions themselves. For the questions insist on the disjunction, the split, the severance, the absence, which is a "taille" itself." The word refers to a thing, a thing like human being itself, not whole but broken and only with difficulty brought back into wholeness again. The word refers to a thing which is a symbol of the very crux of the tale, or the failure of the two pieces word and thing ("cosyn," for example) to conjoin. And yet the word "taille" does refer to a thing and the thing is a successful symbol --for us, Chaucer's readers. For us, Chaucer's readers, as he intended them to do, word and thing tally.

The faith which assumes that word and thing do--and, moreover, shall--tally is the subject of this book. It seeks a late medieval poetics of reference. I have no illusions about "completing" this task; for that many more years will be required and many more laborers. But I do hope to begin clearing the path with my concentration on the currency of the word.

Part One of the book explores the imagery of the coin in Dante's Commedia and particularly in the Paradiso. I am hardly the first to have studied this imagery, but I do think a great deal remains to be said about it. Dante positions it in a rich context of allusions to Narcissus, and his story in Ovid, and hence also to the thematics of metamorphosis; moreover, he links it directly to the {14/15} theology of the Image of God and the reformation of that Image; all this he further complicates with the dialectics of reading and the question of literary paternity, itself directly tied to the question of God's paternity of the individual soul. He reaches full complexity when he joins all these issues to the problem of vision and its limits. I will argue that his theory of vision is ultimately a poetics of reference and that he articulates both in terms of the coin.

Part Two proceeds to Troilus and Criseyde, where imagery of coinage and exchange, occurring principally in books 4 and 5, shows a direct relationship to similar imagery in the Commedia. Many other sources doubtless intervene (I note some of them), and the climate of philosophical opinion in which Chaucer received the Commedia differed greatly, we know, from that in which it was written; still, only the Commedia was rich enough to give Chaucer not only the imagery he needed but also the full poetic, philosophical, and theological context which would enable that imagery to communicate the complex and poignant fate of Troilus and Criseyde. The imagery attaches chiefly to Criseyde, and after an analysis of its relevance to her character and her role, I go on to argue that Chaucer uses the imagery as a strategy for the problem of authority--the problem of his poetic career. The strategy applies to Troilus and Pandarus both, but most importantly to the Narrator himself, whose role as translator, I suggest, is one of the principal concerns of the poem. Translation became for Chaucer, I think, the very crisis of authority which compelled him to seek, with Dante's help, a poetics of reference. And although he and Dante differ profoundly, I will argue that they resemble each other profoundly too. They each seek a way to tell the truth without prejudicial reduction of the complexity of experience. They each seek a personal position which is not in opposition to reality or an imposition on others.

The poetics of reference which Chaucer discovered in the Troilus he uses, Part Three argues, in The Canterbury Tales. After a brief analysis of Fragment A and particularly of the issue of "falsification" in that Fragment, this part proceeds to chapters on the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, and the Pardoner. Many other pilgrims and their tales could have been included, and I hope eventually to write on them too. For the purposes of this book, however, these three are most significant because the relationship between language and money in them is as obvious as it is in The Shipman's Tale and at least as problematical if not more so. Each of these three illustrates the narcissism involved in the instrumentality of language, and thus each provides a crucial example of Chaucer's complex play of positions for humanizing and containing narcissism. Each of them is a type of the poet Chaucer will not be. {15/16}

The conclusion is not only a summary but also a prediction of the kinds of studies which will recover an accurate sense of poetic discourse and its ontology in the late Middle Ages. These will be studies of politics in the widest and most fundamentally Aristotelian sense of the word--studies of how people relate to one another in the daily commerce of communication within a world public and private alike. {16}