From Maura
Nolan, “Lydgate’s Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005):
59-92 (87-89)
…indeed, one
might even say that meditations on Fortune form a kind of ‘‘vernacular
philosophy’’ in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Fortune becomes a
poetic question not simply because the idea provides aristocrats with a secular
notion through which they can justify their own mode of living (while poetry
about Fortune provides them with affirmation), as Larry Scanlon has argued, but
also because thinking about Fortune poses the problem of poetic function.
What, in a world governed by Fortune, is poetry for? Does it lament? ‘‘Grucche’’? Instruct by moralizing? Give pleasure? Each of these
possibilities proposes a different relationship of the aesthetic to history, of
poetry to Fortune (which we might in some sense say is another way of
describing the mass of unprocessed data that constitutes ‘‘history’’ in its
rawest guise). If, for example, poetry is meant to moralize, then at root it is
a way of acting in the world—a way of imposing order, on, and in,
history. Even if the message of that moralization is simply that one should
embrace virtue and let Fortune work as she will, the implication of didactic
poetry is that writing is fundamentally efficacious, with tangible results.
** ** ** ** **
‘‘Pleynyng’’
or ‘‘grucching’’ is a case in point. At one level, ‘‘pleynyng’’ fits the
moralizing model, in that it assists in the didactic mission of the text by
arousing pity. But in another way, complaint is the quintessential genre of
helplessness, a mode of discourse articulated by Fortune’s victims that is
useless as a way of imposing human will upon the world. ‘‘Pleynyng,’’ as
Boethius tells us, is what human beings do when afflicted with bad Fortune, and
it is a fruitless and foolish indulgence, a paradigmatic example of wasted
speech. Far better to model oneself on Griselda, the Boethian Stoic, than to ‘‘grucche’’
about the implacability of Fortune, which in this model is a principle of
irresistible historical causation that is utterly exterior to the human
subject. According to such logic, the aesthetic—of which ‘‘pleynyng’’ is a type—is
stripped of agency and meaning, made not only impotent but surplus to
requirements.
These two notions of Fortune (the idea of a remediable
negative force and an efficacious poetry versus the fearsome thought of
arbitrary contingency and the uselessness of speech) are …twin poles…
** ** ** ** **
This vision
of ‘‘pleynyng’’ obtrudes as a third term between Griselda’s contempus mundi and
Custance’s belief in efficacious prayer—and it is a vision, in the end, of the
aesthetic, of a pointless, functionless mode of discourse with no purpose
external to itself. Contra Boethius, in a world ruled by arbitrary Fortune, ‘‘pleynyng’’
saves us from both silence and moralism, from the despair of impotence and the
impossible fantasy of agency. …
Fortune, in
this reading, constitutes a flexible way of imagining the world in which either
contingency or causality, chance or sin, may be operating at any given moment;
it is a ‘‘vernacular philosophy’’ with its own discursive mode: ‘‘pleynyng.’’
And it is precisely because ‘‘pleynyng’’ lacks purpose (‘‘Why pleynestow?’’
asks Fortune) that it becomes…a
model for the aesthetic.