Meatfood

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I met with an independent study student today about Sir Gowther. Without much luck, we tried to track Gowther’s developing relations with dogs after the Pope demands he “eyt no meyt bot that thu revus of howndus mothe” (296). At an Emperor’s palace, he “droghe” a bone from a spaniel, “and gredely on hit he gnofe” (355-6), and, when the Emperor’s daughter places a loaf of bread in one dog’s mouth and flesh in another’s, Gowther “raft bothe owt with eyggur mode” (449). Subsequent encounters with dogs (512-16, 610-11, and 649) are vaguer about how Gowther eats.

To resist masochistic readings of Gowther and to lessen the humiliation of his penance: these were my desires, and they came to nothing. There’s just something irredeemably wretched and, well, bestial about the Pope’s alimentary injunction and Gowther’s obedient food-snatching. And there’s no development at all: Gowther and the dogs just don’t get along. But this, however, is the case only at the Emperor’s place. My student and I noticed that Gowther’s first encounter with dogs violates the Pope’s strictures: when he is outdoors, resting on a hill, Gowther receives his food as a gift.

He went owt of that ceté
Into anodur far cuntré,
Tho testamentys thus thei sey;
He seyt hym down undur a hyll,
A greyhownde broght hym meyt untyll
Or evon yche a dey.

Thre neythtys ther he ley:
Tho grwhownd ylke a dey
A whyte lofe he hym broghht;
On tho fort day come hym non,
Up he start and forthe con gon,
And lovyd God in his thoght. (Sir Gowther 307-18)

Far from a humiliation, this encounter is a moment of tenderness, an astonishing tenderness, really, for a narrative that otherwise swings wildly between sadism and piety, and more often that not, combines the two. In today’s conversation, I identified this encounter as a utopic moment. For a time, Gowther is trying to do nothing; he is out of doors, out of all civilized organization of space; and for three days, he suffers–or, better, enjoys–a dog’s charity. Only when he finally gets up and goes does he secure this charity to a proper, divine source. But before he substitutes a divine for a demonic telos, before he stands up, before he begins to make his way to a court where he meets dogs who, there, function only in a grotesque mimesis of animality, before all this, in that time on the hill, Gowther has found, with this dog, another way of being.

It’s a pity Gowther didn’t end at line 318, or even a few lines earlier.

(picture from here. I might have referenced the lovely Pippi too)

(originally posted here)

Maybe you know what to do with the Arthurian opening of the Wife of Bath’s tale. I don’t, not quite, but then again, I’ve only just started my path towards planting my flag on some portion of Chauceriana. I found one answer in Patricia Clare Ingham’s “Utopia, Conquest, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002) 34-46, but I’m sorry to say I found it more interesting than convincing. I’m sure the fault is my own. Ingham argues on behalf of the pastoral against its critics, who condemn it for its occlusions of material realities. In her hands, the pastoral and other utopian fantasies of the time before the proliferation of “halles, chambres, kichenes, boures / citees, burghes, castels, hye toures / Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes” (3.869-71) become a site of fantasy for the conquered and therefore a way to read past the conquering, dominant culture to otherwise lost voices. However, although a British Arthur is always a Welsh hero, although there’s Celtic myth and memory in the loathly lady, the sovereignty hag, or whatever you want to call her, and although “Britons” (3.858) could be Welsh, I just can’t hear the Welsh in the Wife’s Tale. Maybe I don’t have my ear pressed hard enough to the ground.

What I do sense are incubi, now exorcised by the friars, and the elf-queen, all of whom, inspired by Ingham, I read as a site of fantasy. As much as we love Gowther’s father, his fourteenth-century fame barely rates in comparison to the cultural dominance of the incubi of the Albina legend. In a story that was translated from Insular French into Middle English, Latin, and Welsh–and what follows is a summary of one version–a Greek princess and her twenty-nine sisters plot to murder kings whom their father, a more powerful king, wants them to marry. Betrayed by the youngest sister, the remaining sisters are sent into exile on a rudderless boat, which drifts to an island christened Albion, after the oldest sister, Albina. After living for a time on a vegetarian diet, the sisters rejuvenate themselves with wild game and grow lustful. Their lust attracts incubi, by whom the sisters engender gigantic children. The children then breed with their mothers, and everyone continues interbreeding. Thus the island fills up with giants, who fight with each other so viciously that by the time Brutus arrives, 270 years later, only 24 giants remain, including a giant named Gogmagog who tells Brutus their history.

For a tale dominated by Guinevere, the voices of wives, widows, and maidens, and by an magical crone, I want Albina and her sisters to be its first gynocentric model of rule. It’s a stretch, but I also want Albina and her sisters to be the “ladyes foure and twenty and yet mo” (3.992) that the rapist sees fleetingly “under a forest syde.” I want Albina and her children to be an alternate genealogy for the Wife, one that’s traced backed to a founding mother. After all, Albina lays claim to the island, bestows her name on it, and declares that these actions will memorialize the sisters forever in Albion. Her speech is a charter identifying the land with a noble and self-perpetuating lineage (think here of the women in the prologue, so many of whom–okay, two–are named Alys); nothing, barring of course the gender and gianthood of Albina and her children, is abnormal about eponymous identification with a land or claims that attempt to undercut other claims by declaring temporal priority. The sisters’ reproduction is also normative (or the normative in drag), because its outcome is a lineage, of sorts, one traceable directly to a founder and connected via that founder to a particular piece of land.

In essence, I want to trapdoor Ingham; but mainly I want to watch the Wife trapdoor everyone else. I want to read the first line of the tale, “In th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour” (3.858) not as “In the old days, the time of King Arthur” but as “In the days Arthur would have considered old,” the time when in fact “this land fulfild of fairye” (3.859). After all, so far as I know (folklorists? Arthurian specialists?), in Arthur’s time the land was mainly full of knights, who sometimes encountered a scattered a fairy or two like Gromer Somer Joure or a faux fairy like Bertilak; for throngs of fairies, we need to go back to Albina’s day. Following Ingham, we might be able to recover Welsh resistance in this monstrous origin; but I think we can follow this back still further, to the Wife’s own desires. What that would get us I don’t know yet (please don’t say the presymbolic Maternal!).

Hell, I don’t know if I’m just recapitulating something that’s been said 100 times already.

But, correcting for the nobility, I can’t help but hear the Wife in this:

My fair sustres, ful weel ȝe knowiþ þat þe kyng oure fadir, vs hath reprouyd, schamed & dispised, for encheson to make vs obedient vn-to oure housbandes; but certes þat schal y neuere, whiles þat I lyve, seth þat I am come of a more hyere kynges blod þan my housband is.

And I’m not even sure I have to correct for the high kindred of Albina, since, after all, the Wife is so puffed up that “in all the parisshe wife ne was ther noon / that to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon; / and if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she / that she was out of alle charitee” (1.449-52). And, if I can sense Albina in the tale’s own prologue, maybe I can account for an episode that–maybe–doesn’t get the respect it deserves. What the next step would be, I don’t know yet.
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(conversations continue below, and much excellence to read that merits more conversation: the Carnivalesque; Publishing and Our Discontents; the Frenchness of English Jews; Mary Kate on monsters and resistances to knowledge; and, of course, Eileen’s mother of a post and its gigantic thread, “On the Virtues (and Loves) of Beautiful Singularities”: all great stuff)

(image scanned from the delightful English Popular Art of Margaret Lambert and Enid Marx.

I taught as much of the Reeve’s Tale as I could yesterday, but I must take it up again on Wednesday: for the extended discussion, I offer thanks, first, to the inspiration from the ill wind in Holly Crocker’s Comment in this thread, where she characterizes the Reeve’s Tale as “one of the ugliest pieces of literature in my scholarly ambit,” and secondly, to my students’ excellent questions: e.g., “there’s a warning to turn the page in the Miller’s Prologue. The Reeve’s Prologue has no such warning. But the Miller’s Tale is a lot less ugly than the Reeve’s Tale. What’s going on?”

Because I can’t wait for Wednesday, here’s some (minor!) material I couldn’t get to yesterday.

We all know that the Reeve’s Miller, Symkyn, aspires to be something more than a churl. Symkyn is in fact slightly better than Oswald himself at playing the clerk: after all, Oswald’s sermon on old age is as notable for its incoherence as for its biliousness, whereas for all Symkyn’s contempt for clerks, he’s the only one in the tale who evidences any knowledge of contemporary currents of academic philosophy (“Myn hous is streit, but ye han lerned art. / Ye konne by argumentes make a place / A myle brood of twenty foot of space” (see William F. Woods, “Symkyn’s Place in the Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004) 17-40). It’s like someone in my family–not academics, not readers, unless one counts the Bible and assorted devotional guides–one day snapping at me, “You’re the poststructuralist: you should know it’s impossible!”

But clerkdom is the least of his desires: you know Symkyn’s chief goal is to claim gentility, through his wealth, through his personal arsenal (which, as a figure of excess, is Robyn the Miller’s wart in blade form), and, like any good gentil, by erotic alliances: he married the Parson’s bastard daughter and hopes to marry poor Malyne, and himself through her, up past churldom.

Symkyn has problems, however, not least among them his name (in the following points I may have been anticipated: see #172). As a familiar form of Simon, it of course recalls simony (admittedly in a loose form): like his father-in-law, he is wasting the substance by which he should be nourishing the community. As morally dissolute as this is, it’s not so bad: after all, it’s through ‘simony’ that he hopes to transform his little place into an infinite realm (again, my thanks to the excellent Woods article cited above). But the name’s also a learned pun on two other counts.

First, it recalls the Latin simius or simia, ape, surely (barring the pig) the most churlish of animals, and the animal most suited for accusing churls of mere mimicry. In its uncanniness, mimicry of course has its powers of destabilization (e.g., Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Location of Culture Chapter 4), but whatever its powers, there’s no compliment meant. Here we have, for example, a charge of inauthenticity through the implicit comparison between Symkyn’s finery (“as eny pecok he was proud and gay”) with the Squire’s. And so forth.

Second, the Latin for snub-nose is simus (for this point, thanks to John M. Steadman, “Simkin’s Camus Nose: A Latin Pun in the Reeve’s Tale?,” Modern Language Notes 75.1 (1960): 4-8). Symkyn’s “camuse” nose (3934) and Malyne’s “kamuse” (3974) of course recall the wide “nosethirles” (557) of Robyn the Miller. But if Steadman’s correct–and why not?–we also have a pun. We should note that because the pun’s based on rather obscure Latin (where “obscure” = vocabulary I don’t know off-hand), it’s one that only the learned would recognize. Whatever tidbits of clerical learning he’s picked up, Symkyn himself would not be in on the joke. Only clerical readers–almost a pleonasm, and certainly a group that includes us–would know that he cannot escape his class, since his name and face are linked in an otherwise secret sign of his peasantness about which he would be totally ignorant. Whatever he is, he must be. It’s written on his face: anatomy is destiny!