Abstract
This chapter reassesses the Miller’s naturalism. Many critics have praised the Miller for his representation of natural vitality, and readers have often preferred the Miller’s naturalism to the Knight’s gloomy artifice. Yet the Miller’s apparent love of nature is fragile, and his enemy the Reeve knows it. The feud between the Miller and the Reeve is a debate about metaphor. This chapter explains how medieval and classical understandings of figurative language inform Chaucer’s fabliaux. The Miller’s narrative derides metaphor (and simile) as delusions, but he indulges the fantasy that a proper male subject can abstain from these tropes. The Reeve, by contrast, presents metaphorical delusions as unavoidable consequences of human embeddedness in a more-than-human world whose most powerful agent is the sun.
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Notes
- 1.
But the Miller’s Alison, we should recall, never leaves Oxford. For Stanbury , Alison represents not nature as such, but “domesticated nature—in a sense , nature working for human use” (2004, 9).
- 2.
Parenthetical citations of Chaucer refer to fragment and line numbers in Chaucer (1987).
- 3.
Morrison has described the tendency of modern people to fantasize about “the bucolic Middle Ages of filth, dirt, and grotesque bodily enjoyment” (2008, 135). She concludes that “the medieval functions as our necessary evil. Without it, we would be filthy, barbaric, and perverse” (138). The critical gesture of celebrating the Bakhtinian Middle Ages may be as ideologically dubious as abjecting them.
- 4.
The notion that simile is just a modified version of metaphor goes back to Aristotle: “The simile also is a metaphor; for there is very little difference” (1982, 367 [1406b]); “the simile, as we have said, is a metaphor differing only by the addition of a word” (397 [1410b]). Aristotle’s Rhetoric was more widely known in the later Middle Ages than his Poetics (Ashworth 2007, 313–14).
- 5.
For Stanbury , the “analogies” of the effictio offer “a supplement that is held out as a form of desire; through the comparison we are invited to imagine surplus, promised more than the visual language can provide” (2004, 9).
- 6.
The Miller’s warning to husbands, which identifies wives with their genitals, entails the obscurity of wives: “in order to keep thinking of your wife as defined by her genitals … you have to try not to know too much about them or her” (Miller 2004, 70).
- 7.
In De planctu Naturae, Nature says her “operatio operationis est nota divinae” [workings are a mere trace of the workings of the divine] (Alan 2013, 78–79 [6.14]). Nature goes on to direct the narrator to Theology, since Nature cannot understand the rebirth that Theology makes possible: “ego Natura huius nativitatis naturam ignoro” [I, Nature, know not the nature of this nativity] (2013, 80–81 [6.15]). The polyptoton underscores her lack of self-sufficiency.
- 8.
I borrow the phrase from Paul de Man (1996, 34–50).
- 9.
On the Knight’s coy use of “queynte” in his description of Emelye’s rituals, see O’Brien (1998, 157–67).
- 10.
Parenthetical citations of the Vulgate refer to Edgar and Kinney (2010–13); accompanying English translations derive from the Douay-Rheims text in this edition.
- 11.
Bernard glosses Eve’s sin as curiosity (Bernard 1962, 182–85).
- 12.
The difference between metaphor and metonymy is not absolute. They occupy different points on an epistemological continuum. Believing in the ability of metaphors to give “us a new understanding of our experience,” Lakoff and Johnson nonetheless concede the price we must pay: metaphors, be they conventional or new, “provide coherent structure, highlighting some things and hiding others” (1980, 139; emphasis added). For specific examples of this hiding effect, see 1980, 149, 156–58. Lakoff and Johnson propose that “metaphors are basically devices for understanding and have little to do with objective reality, if there is such a thing” (184).
- 13.
Yet even the Iliad allows for aberrancy: its plot springs from Achilles’ refusal to fight, which may temporarily raise suspicions about his courage.
- 14.
Miller insists that although “ers” primarily suggests anus, “Alisoun’s genitals must be thought to be at issue when she puts her hole out the window … unless Alisoun has an extraordinarily hairy ass” (2004, 63). Hence, the perennial question: ass or genitals? Walker concludes that “it is surely likely that he gets a face full of both at once” (2002, 71–72). Bishop points out that “Alison’s sense of balance would have to be rather remarkable were she to hang only her anus, not her vagina, out the shot window” (2002, 240). But the use of the singular “hole” defies calculations of probability. Ignorance of the difference between female holes is a recurring topic in French fabliaux (Griffin 1999, 236).
- 15.
Patterson connects the Miller’s “ynogh” to the Peasant Rising of 1381 (1991, 258).
- 16.
The narrator’s simile implies madness. According to John Trevisa, “Lunatik & epilentik men..bene most I-greued whanne þe mone is newe”; see the Middle English Dictionary (hereafter abbreviated MED), s.v. “neue (adj.),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED29403. The Miller implies that metaphor, taken too seriously, is madness. But metaphors themselves cannot tell us how seriously to take them. The well-named Woods identifies the “contrapasso” of the Miller’s Tale as “‘woodness ,’ for in response to the storm of desire … each man is blinded by his own kind of irrationality, which banishes him from the desirable presence of Alysoun” (1994, 172). Nicholas threatens John that if he betrays him, “thou shalt be wood” (1.3507). At the end of the tale, Nicholas accuses the carpenter of being mad. The carpenter becomes his material, wood. The Knight’s Tale, as we have seen in Chap. 2, also plays with wood.
- 17.
Medieval writers, exploiting the figurative possibilities of animal imagery, sometimes disregard the real animals who originated the imagery. Yet “as living, moving beings not well inclined to the stasis required by epistemological systems, animals are at best imperfect allegories” (Cohen 2008, 52). Cohen accordingly takes a dim view of Alan of Lille’s idea that animals are pictures, books, or mirrors for humans (2003, 42). The idea was common. For Geoffrey of Vinsauf, “the world, humanized by metaphor, serves as a metaphor … in which man sees and recognizes himself” (Nims 1974, 223). Feinstein warns against “privileging the allegorical reading” of animals, which can cause the modern reader to make “assumptions … that few in the agrarian Middle Ages would likely have made” (1991, 99). Kolve finds the Miller resisting the negative animal associations favored by medieval moralists (1984, 175–77).
- 18.
Hostility to metaphor recurs in animal studies and ecocriticism, both of which are understandably sensitive to the ways human language seems to efface nonhuman referents. Rudd, for example, praises Pearl, in which “the actual, material, natural world is proving resistant to being overwritten by simile and metaphor” (2007, 181). An exuberant essay by Braidotti urges us, in a section titled “Against Metaphors,” “to move on, beyond the empire of the sign, toward a neoliteral relation to animals, anomalies, and inorganic others. The old metaphoric dimension has been overridden by a new mode of relation. Animals are no longer the signifying system that props up humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations. Nor are they the keepers of the gates between species . They have, rather, started to be approached literally, as entities framed by code systems of their own” (2009, 527–28). Proclaiming the defeat of metaphor, Braidotti nonetheless relies on metaphors: “props … keepers of the gates … approached … framed.” Subsequent statements aggravate the self-contradiction: “I am a she-wolf, a breeder that multiplies cells in all directions; I am an incubator and a carrier of vital and lethal viruses. I am Mother Earth, the generator of the future” (531). If the use of metaphor disrespects animals, Braidotti’s rhetoric does them no favors. It should be said that the relapse into metaphor is not entirely a function of the grandstanding demanded by the manifesto genre: literalism is a linguistic mode that is difficult for anyone to keep going. Metaphor is here to stay (if we are). Ecocritics would be better off developing metaphor’s possibilities than committing themselves to an unsustainable neoliteralism. For a nuanced response to Braidotti , see Stanbury (2011, 102). Estok is one ecocritic who has recognized metaphor’s tenacity (2011, 85–98). See also Harman’s enthusiastic appraisal of metaphor (2005, 101–24).
- 19.
- 20.
Drawing on Lacan’s notion of “extimité,” Aloni argues that “pryvetee” is not simply the opposite of “the public” but is “part of a structure in which inside and outside always turn into one another” (2006, 163). María Bullón-Fernández notes that the “Hitchcock-like appearance of Robyn the Miller in his own story emphasizes his habit of breaking down doors, a habit that is manifested more generally in the pattern of breaking boundaries” (2006, 141). The fabliau “Du Moigne” equates women’s bodies “with liminality, as they stand at thresholds between inside and outside” (Griffin 1999, 244).
- 21.
Aloni discusses a possible allusion to shit: “Chaucer’s choice to call the bedroom window a ‘shot-wyndowe’ indicates its metaphorical status as a threshold between the most private, the interior substance of the body, and the outside” (2006, 168). As an obscene story, the Miller’s Tale is something that should have remained outside: “medieval obscenity is cordoned off into certain genres (it appears in the fabliau but not in the romance) and spaces (on the margins of manuscripts and in the marginal spaces of medieval architecture like corbels and misericords)” (Sidhu 2014, 81).
- 22.
Though marriage does not require love, the competitors in the Miller’s Tale use the word “love” in emotionally charged moments (1.3278, 3702, 3705), and love is a word naming “the bizarre substitution of self for other, and of other for self” (de Man 1979, 169). Lakoff and Johnson cite love as an example of a concept “structured almost entirely metaphorically”; indeed, love “is typical of emotional concepts, which are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor ” (1980, 85; see also 110, 119–20).
- 23.
As one of the most influential rhetorical handbooks advises, “translationem prudentem dicunt esse oportere, ut cum ratione in consimilem rem transeat, ne sine dilectu temere et cupide videatur in dissimilem transcurrisse” [They say that a metaphor ought to be restrained, so as to be a transition with good reason to a kindred thing, and not seem an indiscriminate, reckless, and precipitate leap to an unlike thing] (Caplan 1964, 344–45). Many critics have pointed out that the carpenter never shows the jealousy ascribed to him. The narrator’s simile, “lik a cokewold,” blames John for the psychological consequence of his lack of marital “simylitude,” but the simile lacks similitude with the tale. It turns out that despite the conventions of fabliaux, which routinely mock people like John, “men rarely married their ‘similitudes.’ Instead, it was customary for older men to marry women ten years or more their junior” (Lochrie 1994, 288).
- 24.
Here I adopt the terms of object-oriented ontology ; see, for example, Harman (2005).
- 25.
I owe this example to Robert Levine.
- 26.
Lakoff and Johnson dispute the idea that “metaphors are matters of language and not matters of thought or action”; they attribute this idea, perhaps with insufficient historical nuance, to “the classical and still most widely held theory of metaphor” (1980, 153). Aristotle—a classical rhetorician if there ever was one—famously designates metaphor as a cognitive gift, genius. To understand actions as metaphors is also to understand actions as non-verbal language.
- 27.
Wallace claims that by means of the cultour “the countryside, in the form of its most characteristic, down-to-earth implement, makes a searing critique on the rear end of an urban overreacher” (1997, 131). This critique unwittingly resonates with activist ecocriticism.
- 28.
See, for example , de Lorris and de Meun (1992, l.19681–84, 19705–30).
- 29.
Morey even finds a pun on cul—the location of Nicholas’s punishment (1995, 373). Chaucer’s “kultour” is undoubtedly le mot juste.
- 30.
The Chinese word 屁眼, “anus” (literally, “fart-eye”), indicates that Chaucer is not the only one to see a connection between an eye and an anus, though I can find no other Middle English examples of nether ye.
- 31.
Parenthetical citations of Piers Plowman refer to passus and line numbers in Langland (1995). A few lines earlier, Dame Study quotes Romans 12.3: “Non plus sapere quam oportet” (10.118). Emmerson argues that Langland’s dreamer does not heed this warning (1992, 95).
- 32.
Leicester unpacks the Freudian implications of the eye amid pubic hair (1994, 494).
- 33.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “blear”: “To dim (the eyes) with tears, rheum, or inflammation; to dim the vision of”; “to deceive, blind, ‘hoodwink,’ ‘throw dust in the eyes’”; OED Online, s.v. “blear, v.1,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/20065?rskey=o3TtDV&result=3&isAdvanced=false.
- 34.
This vegetal connection is appropriate to a man who lives in the shadows of trees (1.606–7).
- 35.
The Merchant’s Januarie also compares his “hoor” head to his “grene” limbs (4.1461–66), but Januarie lacks the Reeve’s awareness of his own “folie.”
- 36.
The Reeve’s satiric digression on “holy chirches blood” (1.3977–86) expresses disenchantment with, if not disrespect for, the Church’s sacramental tropes. Allman points out the “grotesque” quality of the Reeve’s Eucharistic allusions (2004, 393). Depicting metaphor as an inveterate error, the Reeve puts himself at odds with Christian redemption, which depends on the metaphor God was man. In Alan of Lille’s “Rithmus de Incarnatione Domini,” Rhetoric says that in the Incarnation “novus color in iunctura / nova fit translatio ” [a new metaphorical joining, a new translation comes to pass] (2013, 538–39 [lines 27–28]; quoted in Dinshaw 1989, 140).
- 37.
The Reeve’s “four gleedes” echo Ephesians 4.22–28 (Smith 1995, 102).
- 38.
Gace de la Buigne’s fourteenth-century Roman des deduis recounts Nature’s lust-provoking tendency, but at last, Nature is “seized by the throat by Vieillesse and yields to her,” and “on seeing Nature thus caught Venus flees” (White 2000, 152). White proposes that for Gace “the effective remedy against Nature’s influence lies not in the exercise of virtue, but in growing old” (2000, 152). The Reeve denies himself this remedy: in his prologue and tale, nature is a terminal condition.
- 39.
Patterson glimpses the singularity of the Reeve, who reveals that “the social identity asserted by the Miller is a fiction,” but Patterson’s sympathies are with the Miller (1991, 274).
- 40.
- 41.
Harwood points out many self-contradictions and concludes that “the Reeve’s ‘sermonyng’ is not even coherently non-Christian” (2001, 14). But since the Reeve admits his folly, the speech’s incoherence coheres.
- 42.
See also Allman (2004, 391–92). Wallace claims: “the Reeve’s Tale features the highest density of proverbs anywhere in Chaucer” (1997, 132). Allman sees the prevalence of proverbs as the Reeve’s self-flattering way of collapsing the distance between himself and clerks (2004, 399). I would argue that the proverbs serve to minimize epistemological differences and thereby contest the Miller’s confidence in his prudent superiority.
- 43.
According to Olson, “both Continental and English law prohibited Aleyn’s kind of resort to private justice” (1962, 11n19).
- 44.
Kolve’s explication of horse imagery is instructive (1984, 251). Feinstein argues that the students’ horse is most likely a gelding, a possibility that interpreters of horse imagery tend to overlook (1991, 104). See, for example, Patterson’s ecophobic reference to “the dangerous wildness of the stallion” (1991, 275).
- 45.
The analogy between milling and copulation makes possible erotic puns on flour (Delasanta 2002, 271).
- 46.
Breuer persuasively argues that Chaucer “forecloses any possibility except rape, despite his claim that Malyne was in harmony with Aleyne” (2008, 8).
- 47.
As Woods himself observes, in the fight between Aleyn and Symkyn, the pronoun references are as obscure “as in some passages of Spenser’s Faerie Queene” (1995, 157).
- 48.
According to Alan B. Cobban, “‘Soler’ is most certainly derived from solarium meaning an upper room or sun-chamber of a house” (1969, 17). Medieval scholars knew that moonlight was a reflection of sunlight . See, for example, De planctu Naturae 2.18 and 6.11 (Alan 2013, 38–39, 76–77). The hole admitting moonlight suggests “that the wall itself has shrunk, perhaps because of inferior construction, and has not been repaired” (Twomey and Stull 2016, 332). Symkyn cannot control the shifting permeability of his oikos.
- 49.
Aleyn probably does not escape unscathed: “in the floor, with nose and mouth tobroke, / They walwe as doon two pigges in a poke” (1.4277–78). Taylor argues that in the fight Symkyn “reshapes Aleyn’s visage into his own image” (2010, 483). It is fitting that Aleyn mistakenly calls Symkyn “John” (1.4262), since the cuckolded miller now resembles the Miller’s cuckolded carpenter.
- 50.
Yager connects the white “volupeer” to the philosophical tradition (going back to Aristotle and Plato) of “the white” (1994, 393–404).
- 51.
Williams, reading Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales as an ongoing debate about nature, finds that in the Reeve’s Tale “the sensual, physical world is translated into a commodity within a system of exchange” (2000, 50). Yet though natural light makes the exchange of commodities like milled grain possible, the light itself eludes commodification.
- 52.
Yet the detail does not come out of nowhere. Alison has a “white voluper” (1.3241).
- 53.
- 54.
Breeze places Strother, the hometown of Aleyn and John, in southern Scotland (2009, 22). Horobin demonstrates that the northern dialect Chaucer gives the students is not pedantically self-consistent (2001, 104). Elsewhere, Horobin argues that although Chaucer represents the students’ dialect in greater detail, the Reeve’s Norfolk dialect “should not be dismissed” (2002, 611).
- 55.
- 56.
The MED lists several examples of hethen as a plural form; s.v. “hēthen (adj. & noun),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED20662. If one thinks the dialect casts the students as rustic fools, then heythen, originally “from the countryside,” would augment this impression. One could also read “heythen” as a vocative addressed to Symkyn, a character difficult to read as an imitatio Christi.
- 57.
See MED, s.v. “henne (adv.),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED20404; s.v. “hennes (adv.),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED20409.
- 58.
See MED, s.v. “sāl (n.),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED38300; s.v. “sāl(e (n.(1)),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED38306; s.v. “sāle (n.(2)),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED38307.
- 59.
- 60.
Knox (2014) disputes the idea that Chaucer represents actual Norfolk dialect; the Reeve’s ik may be a literary convention that associates him with Langland’s Covetise. For the purposes of this chapter, the precise origin of the word is less important than the fact that it seems abnormal—that it is conspicuously different.
- 61.
See MED, s.v. “āpe (n.),” 2, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED1808.
- 62.
See Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s attempt to define the human in terms of the ability to think the pronoun I (2008, 92–95).
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Normandin, S. (2018). Nocturnal Ecologies: Metaphor in the Miller’s and the Reeve’s Tale. In: Chaucerian Ecopoetics. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90457-3_3
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