Chaucer's Comic Providence

Front matter

by Janet Thormann with Aranye Fradenburg Joy

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Contents

Introduction - 9

1. The Interminable Happiness of the Symptom: The Merchant’s Tale « 21

2. The Magician, the Squire, the Knight, and His Wife: The Franklin’s Tale - 55

CHAPTER 1 The Interminable Happiness of the Symptom: The Merchant's Tale

The five tales on which this book focuses are linked by the common problematic of arranging and testing the heterosexual relation between men and women; they are commonly included in “the marriage group.” These tales dramatize various strategies to rationalize and compensate for the lack of a “natural” heterosexual relation. The tales’ marriages demonstrate what Lacan posits as the absence of relation between the sexes by showing that the accommodation of sexual division never quite works: men and women are at odds with one another; the difference between the sexes is asymmetrical and does not compose a unity.

Lacan formulates sexual division as a result of the logical demands of speech for the sexed subject “which finds itself in the position of inhabiting language.”* Slavoj Zizek insists that for Lacan, “sexual difference is not a discursive, symbolic construc-

1 See George Lyman Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” Modern Philology 9, no. 4 (1912): 435-67.

2 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore 1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 80. The formulation of sexual division is developed in the seminar of March 13, 1973, “A Love Letter [une letter d’4mour],” Chapter VII, 73-89.

tion; instead, it emerges at the very point where symbolization fails: we are sexed beings because symbolization always comes up against its own inherent impossibility. What is at stake here is not that ‘actual,’ ‘concrete,’ sexual beings cannot fully fit the symbolic construction of ‘man’ or ‘woman’: the point is, rather, that this symbolic construction itself supplements a certain fundamental deadlock.” Formulations of sexual difference try to account for a real “deadlock” that in fact resists any account. This means that sexual union is not possible: “Male and female are not two complementary parts of the Whole, they are two (failed) attempts to symbolize this Whole.”* The division marks different ways of relating to the enjoyment of the Other who lacks something (e.g., the mother, the object of desire, etc.). The subject can never determine what she is for the Other or what the Other wants of her; she can never fill the lack of the Other. Understood one way, gender identifications are attempts to take on recognizable, socially validated modes of being. Lacan’s formulation of sexual difference maps gender in terms of different modes of unconscious enjoyment that derive from different relations to the phallus, the signifier that installs signification as such, the operator of castration and of the enjoyment that castration limits. The child designated as male must accept limits to the use of his penis; he is the son, not the father, and while both have penises, the son accepts that he cannot use his in the same way his father does, i.e., with the mother. (The father is the person who has designated himself as the father by means of language, rather than by the “natural” emergence of the child from the body of the mother; the father is the man who symbolically accepts that he is the father). The son’s “reward” is accession to the phallus, the signifier rather than the fleshy little organ. Hence the logic of the male side of sexual difference is that of the universal and the exception. Subjects who take up the male position form a universal group whose every member is subject to the phallic function. The group logically posits an exception in the real Father, not submitted to the phallic function, the leader of Freud’s primal

3 Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2005), 160. 4 Ibid.

horde who monopolizes all the women, for example; or the psychotic father who wants to be the real thing rather than taking on the symbolic position of the father; or else the exception is fantasized as the Woman who can enjoy, instantiated in the fantasy of the transsexual.’ “All men are submitted to the phallic function, except one.” Desire for both men and women is determined in relation to an absent object that is its goal, but the male exception holds out the hope that castration can be escaped and complete enjoyment possessed.

On the female side of sexual difference, the logic is that of the necessary and the possible. It goes like this: “There is no woman who is not subject to the phallic function,” but “not all of woman is subject to the phallic function.” There is no exception in the form of the Woman, who does not exist, even if she is supposed in fantasy. Women do not form a group, and each is particular, but — and this is the most crucial point — something about a woman is impossible and escapes castration in an enjoyment that cannot be located or described. Each woman finds her singular way of becoming a woman, i.e., of accessing her enjoyment, in the absence of an exception that would provoke a forbidden excess. Each is the sole witness to her enjoyment; distrust of women is the result of an absence of sure, perceptual signs of feminine enjoyment. This, at least, is how things are “seen” (and not seen) from the standpoint of the phallus. Commenting on Lacan’s formulations, Joan Copjec argues that sexual difference “does not positively describe the subject. We could put it this way: male and female, like being, are not predicates, which means that rather than increasing our knowledge of the subject, they qualify the mode of the failure of our knowledge.”’ Lacan’s logic schematizes a meaningless Real but keeps calling for meaning, while challenges to norms that loosen gender designations and

5 See Catherine Millot, Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1990).

See Lacan, Seminar XX, 73-89.

7 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 212. Copjec’s reading of Lacan’s formulation of sexual division, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” 201-36, is unsurpassed. My emphasis.

performative roles* answer to imaginary differences. The division between men and women remains fundamental for many Lacanian psychoanalysts - Moustafa Safoun comments that “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” is the first response to a child’s birth — but a biological difference is not simply natural for the psychoanalytic subject who speaks.? It is always already captured by signification long before the subject’s entry into language.

Uncertainty about woman as the Other sex and about a woman’s desire issues in that eminently patriarchal question, “What do women want?” This is a question underlying The Shipman’s Tale: women want money, clothing, sex, and more, in an insatiable metonymy. The Wife of Bath’s response in her tale to the question of woman’s desire, that women want governance over men, is the mirror image of the patriarchal demand; it confirms the need for both patriarchal domination of women and the fear of their power that fuels that need. The Shipman’s Tale is true to desire in conceding that desire never grasps what it seeks, and the Wife of Bath personifies the persistence of desire. In both cases, the Woman is the symptom of man in the sense that she is constructed to serve men’s desire to speculate on what remains radically Other, in sex and love or in nature and the cosmos. An object of speculation in psychoanalysis as well, woman is nev-

8 The term is Judith Butler’s, theorized in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

9 See Moustafa Safouan, The Seminar of Moustafa Safoun, eds. Anna Shane and Janet Thormann (New York: Other Press, 2002), 19. Safoun elaborates: “At this moment [of birth], when you must say ‘this is a boy’ or ‘this is a girl’ as an attribute, the only marker used in all societies is the penis. This is almost compulsory for a gestaltic reason. This organ stands out as the immediate landmark to mark the difference. Why is this organ used as a signifier? You can’t say this is a male invention or position; it’s how things go in the universe” (20). That castration functions in the symbolic register and is not a biological condition defining an absence in women is further indicated by Safouan’s comment that a woman “has no direct relation to castration” (ibid.) and hence tends less to perversion, a structure dependent on an imaginary presence/absence dialectic. Safouan also notes that birth provides the unique occasion for the unavoidable use of the terms “boy” and “girl,” not as a subject but as an attribute.

ertheless an autonomous and singular subjectivity for Lacan. Arguably, she is so for the Chaucerian text as well.

In offering its own explanation of the absence of relation between the sexes, the Merchant’s performance and The Merchant’s Tale foreground the function of the symptom to explain the absence of relation between the sexes. As well, it gives an account of sexual difference by presenting an origin myth. Rather than providing a meaningful resolution for sexual division, however, the tale demonstrates that, in historical time, humans act out and reproduce the way things always are: difficult. The myth of origin proposes an imaginary solution to a real division by positing, as an ontological principle, that marriage is discord, a discordance caused by women’s deceptiveness, a version of the mystery of their enjoyment, their elsewhere-ness vis-a-vis the phallic function. The narrator thereby justifies his characteristic subjective stance and the symptomatic misogyny in the story he tells. Over and above his cynicism, however, the tale exposes misogyny as an attempt to account for sexual dissatisfaction, and for sexual dissatisfaction as an expression of the impasse of the heterosexual relation.

The Real of the Symptom

The Merchant introduces his self-presentation with a complaint, drawing on an experience of unhappiness in marriage intended to authorize the narrative that follows. But however sincere his suffering, it is articulated as a stereotype:

“Wepying and waylyng, care and oother sorwe I knowe ynogh, on even and a-morwe,”

Quod the Marchant, “and so doon other mo That wedded been

Ihave a wyf, the worste that may be;

For thogh the feend to hire ycoupled were,

She wolde hym overmacche, I dar wel swere. (LL. 1213-16, 1218-20)

Weeping and wailing, care and other sorrow I know well enough, in the evening and in the morning, Said the Merchant, and so do many others who are married

I have a wife, the worst that can be; For even if the fiend were coupled to her, She would out-match him, I dare well swear.

“Wepying and waylyng,” with trochaic emphasis, resembles an alliterative formula; the antithesis of “on even and a-morwe’” is a literary chiasmus that produces a perpetual cycle of duration; hyperbolic comparison - the Merchant’s wife is “the worste that may be,” worse than “the feend” — serves self-pity and self-regard. The Merchant presents himself as a victim, in the form of the stock type of the henpecked husband, a timeless joke binding him to other men. The host picks up the baton, greeting the Merchant’s tale as a corroboration of his own formulaic convictions about women’s “sleightes and subtilitees” (“sleights of hand and subtleties,” |. 2421), and as further support of a shared identity in a class of “us sely men” (“we ignorant men,” 1. 2423). The Merchant claims an extensive knowledge based on a limited experience of two months: “I have ywedded bee / Thise monthes two” (Il. 1233-34), the stop on “two” further undercutting his exaggerated claim that no unmarried man “ne koude in no manere [in no way] / Tellen so muchel sorwe as I now heere / Koude tellen” (Il. 1237-38). Yet the stereotype is also reinforced by the implication that it might only take two months to experience the nightmare all married men experience. In contrast, the Miller is a more sophisticated version of the type, and his is a more reasonable solution to sexual difference. He will not allow himself to adopt a stance of innocence: “Yet nolde I (I would not), for the oxen in my plogh (plow), / Take upon me moore than ynogh” (The Millers Prologue, Il. 3159-60), choosing (“nolde I”) not to be a victim under the yoke of marriage.

The Miller refuses outright the fantasy of godlike seeing also satirized in The Merchant’ Tale, preferring to believe he is not a cuckold - “I wol bileve wel that I am noon” (The Miller’s Prologue, |. 3162) In contrast, the Merchant himself, so to speak, is a stereotype, as is affirmed by the overstatement of his suffering and the repetitions of his speech. His pose is traditionally funny. As a type character, he is stuck in an identification; the commonality of the identification is the basis for the type. In Alenka Zupančič’s theory of comedy,” the stock character is fixed in an ego ideal and held together by a trait — in the Merchant’s case, by his position as innocent long-suffering husband. His subjective position as an object and innocent victim of the Other’s malice, allows him to parade his misery in order to get sympathy, which establishes his fellowship with other unhappy husbands. The symptom (here in the form of complaint) gives consistency to his subjective structure, his denial of a willed participation in a chosen mode of handling the absence of sexual relation. But the structure of denial is repeated and made legible in his narrative: the debate between Januarie’s counselors, Justinus and Placibo, personifies the Merchant’s split ego, his simultaneous knowledge of limitation and demand for excessive enjoyment; the story of Januarie and May is intended to demonstrate the husband’s victimization by his wife, but also demonstrates the similarity of their desires and discontents.

The Merchant’s subjective position is thus revealed to be more than an ego trait, with which one might simply identify, for it betrays his desire, his unconscious decision to be the object of the Other’s malicious enjoyment. The Merchant’s self-characterization as aggrieved husband articulates his way of enjoying. Talking about his suffering in marriage is his symptom and his “sinthome.”" As a symptom, his suffering is what Lacan understands to be a signifier, a message written on the flesh that is sent by and to the Other. A formation of the unconscious, the symptom condenses a conflict between a desire for enjoyment and the prohibition of that desire, so that it “functions as a replacement for a repressed wish that cannot express itself directly,” in the words of Dany Nobus.* Whatever consistency the symptom attempts to impart to the subject’s ego, then, the symptom nec-

10 See Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

1u See below for discussion of the “sinthome.”

1 Dany Nobus, Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2000), 72.

essarily also registers a loss, a split, the impossibility of perfect enjoyment. In the form of a signifying metaphor, the symptom is a product of the oedipal transition that installs the symbolic law of the Father; the symptom condenses a subject’s memories and ciphers a history that has structured desire in a fantasy.” The signifying symptom is also what Lacan alternatively considered as the real sinthome, an organization of enjoyment lacking meaning but giving consistency to the subject’s being by knotting together the unconscious registers of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. The Merchant’s sinthome of pleasurable suffering, then, is his way of enjoying and “being” (in the form of being divided). The sinthome responds to the sexual division, to the asymmetry between men and women that is a consequence of different ways of relating to the phallus. It is, according to Patricia Gherovici, “what helps one tolerate the absence of the sexual relation .... There is a rapport, but the lack of the sexual relation is maintained.”™ The sinthome is not to be dissolved in interpretation but lived; Lacan’s example is the writing that kept James Joyce sane, and the writing of Jean Genet has also been described as installing a secure identity for a subject whose symptom was to be a thief.” The Merchant’s sinthome of enjoying and parading suffering as victimized object of the Other’s enjoyment signals a pain that can never remit, an itch he cannot not scratch, and his tale’s various articulations of marital woe indulge an attachment to the disharmony supporting g3 Chaucer’s characters are fictions, of course, existing within the discourse that produces them; they have no history, other than what the fiction allows, so that the psychoanalytic practice of determining a past of childhood sexuality is irrelevant. However, Lacan’s technique centers on the structure of the subject (hysteric, obsessive, pervert, psychotic, all diagnoses of unconscious structure), which emerges in present, synchronic time, and that structure becomes apparent in the speech of the subject. The language of the tales is inflected by the rhetorical tropes that are unconscious activity, in the case of the Merchant, by a pattern of denial and disavowal.

14 Patricia Gherovici, Please Select Your Gender (New York: Routledge, 2010), 154, 231.

15 See Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, “The Extraordinary Case of Jean Genet,” lacanian ink 34 (2009): 94-105.

his mode of enjoyment.”® His is one particular compromise any subject may construct, while it is also a conventional one, characteristic of the fabliau genre, a common way to enjoy and to make sense of sexual division.

The Merchant’s suffering is, then, a signifier, a message sent by the body to the Other that is language. It is, as well, an address to the imaginary; the unconscious Other is the source and also the destination of desire. Suffering in marriage addresses the Other who victimizes him. As a real sinthome, suffering is a means to make up for the absence of sexual relation; as well, it is the excess of the jouissance that is a fusion of pleasure and pain. Suffering articulates the subject’s obdurate refusal to give up on the fantasy of complete satisfaction, of a limitless enjoyment escaping restriction. His self-presentation as a victim of marriage allows him to keep pursuing the possibility of excessive gratification. Suffering is itself the form of the gratification he seeks.

The Merchant’s demand for enjoyment and the inevitable disappointment of complete fulfillment in marriage are exaggerated in the tale’s consistent repetition of blisse and blissful. Appearing on thirteen occasions, frequently in conjunction with parfit [perfect] and joye, blisse signifies Januarie’s excessively egocentric and deluded demand that marriage provide perfect enjoyment, the source also of the Merchant-narrator’s disillusion. That Januarie is a surrogate or mirror of the narrator is indicated by the description of the misery he suffers in being struck blind: “He wepeth and he wayleth pitously” (1. 2072), repeating the Merchant’s opening complaint. The narrator’s obvious irony in declaring a wife to be man’s “paradys terrestre” (“earthly paradise,” 1. 1332) accounts not only for disappointment but also for the simultaneous, obdurate wish for a perfect happiness, understood in Christian terms as the perfect happiness that preceded knowledge of one’s own participation in one’s fall. The irony,

16 In “Marriage and the Question of Allegory in the Merchant’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 24, no. 2 (1989): 115-31, Richard Neuse argues that “he is preoccupied with his personal unhappiness and eager to find its cause” (116), and that the tale thematizes the reading of allegory in its investigation of Biblical and Church treatments of marriage and allegorical interpretations in particular.

like negation generally, both denies the expectation and, at the same time, maintains a wish for more than what is delivered, a doubleness that keeps desire alive but also fixed to an immobile position. The negation put in play by irony functions to ignore unconscious knowledge; for example, the statement “I won’t claim that marriage is bliss” (an example of the rhetorical strategy of apophasis) maintains that marriage is bliss in the very act of denying it, as do the narrator’s hyperbolic expressions. Disavowal is another unconscious strategy to get around the prohibition of excessive enjoyment. Disavowal is exemplified in the cynical attitude, “I know very well, but nevertheless,” evident in the narrator’s attitude, “I know very well marriage is imperfect, but I want it to be bliss.” Disavowal, like irony, opens a gap between what is enunciated as the statement and the act of speaking; the symptom of suffering fills up that gap. Objectifying his symptom in the delusions attributed to his character, Januarie, the Merchant displays an unconscious knowledge of his symptom, but maintains expectation with “but nevertheless,” and thus sneaks enjoyment back in. The structure replicates the gap in the Merchant’s subjectivity along with the split consciousness producing the narration’s cynical affect and effects. Both the Merchant’s and his character’s expectations of bliss and the narrator’s technique of disavowal signal their position as men in sexual division.

The Merchant’s Tale tries to demonstrate that happiness in marriage is impossible because women emasculate men. This conviction recurs in the fabliau narrative of May and Januarie, in the narrator’s characterizing symptom (suffering), in the tone of the narration marked by disavowal, in the lengthy debate on marriage that rehearses disavowal by dramatizing the antithetical positions of the allegorical spokesmen, and, finally, in the concluding origin myth. Every element of the tale’s construction indulges the narrator’s suffering. The tale, however, marks the limitations of its narrative position by manifesting the reasons for its cynicism, unmasking it as a strategy of disavowal, the unconscious position that “I know very well, but nevertheless,” that chooses not to know. The Tales conclusion rises above its tale’s limits to acknowledge the real obstacles that resist and continue to generate interpretation.

Speaking the Synthome

The Merchant attempts to account for the sexual division with a fabliau that takes off from a generic plot and generic characters. The old, wealthy Januarie decides on marrying young May, the surnames enforcing the predicate of other Canterbury tales where mismatches lead to male jealousy, and jealousy to inevitable betrayal. Thus, following the marriage, May agrees to love Damyan, a young squire in the household, despite obstacles to their desire. Januarie loses his sight. May and Damyan connive to meet in a garden Januarie has built. With May using the blind Januarie’s back to climb into a tree, and with Proserpyne and Pluto watching on, they begin to have sex in the tree. Januarie’s sight returns suddenly, and he berates his wife, and Pluto promises that men will forever have the ability to see women’s treachery, a promise that intends to address the enigma of woman’s enjoyment. May provides an alibi, for Proserpyne announces that women will always be able to excuse themselves. The epiphany of the gods transforms the fabliau into a fairy tale that gives a comic account of the origin of sexual discord in a real division that seems always to have always existed.

The narrative, however, is constantly interrupted and the action delayed, first by an extended commentary on marriage, then a debate that precedes Januarie’s choice of mate, and throughout with narrative intrusions in the form of exempla, rhetorical encomia and epic apostrophes, descriptive dilations, literary allusions and biblical references. The structure of the symptom is repeated in the rhetorical features that characterize the narration: the commentary and debate on marriage, split between an insistence on an illusion of full enjoyment and a refusal of illusion; a recourse to the diction of high style undercut by coarse, low statement; and a slippage between metaphoric and literal levels of speech. Setting off and juxtaposing antithetical features of language, the rhetoric thereby reproduces the compromises of disavowal maintained by the symptom.

The debate on the wisdom of Januarie’s wish to marry is bound to be ineffectual, since it merely dramatizes a forced choice meant to confirm his demand. It is a staging to support his will, like King Lear’s demand for love. Speaking as embodied adjectives, each allegorical spokesman stands for an exaggeration of one side of the unconscious split that refuses the knowledge it knows; the debate acts out the symptom as a compromise formation, a synthesized conflict between enjoyment and obstacle: Placebo arguing in support of excess without limit, Justinus for distrust of women and the inevitable disappointment of excessive enjoyment. Attempting to flatter and to please, Placebo confirms a fantasy of sexual satisfaction; Justinus cites experience and stereotypes to warn of the evils of wives, and he appeals to Christian precepts to urge moderation. Clearly Justinus’s is the more reasonable position, backed by doctrine and experience, while Placebo duly confirms the fantasy by presenting what Januarie wants to hear. But the conclusion is also predetermined by the conviction that men are victims of marriage, and Justinus is the voice of what the narrator thinks he knows. Hence, the supposed realism of Justinus perpetuates the misogyny that is a corollary of the symptom: alluding to the Wife of Bath with the warning that a wife “may be youre purgatorie!” (1. 1670), in an echo of the Wife’s “By God! In erthe I was his purgatorie” (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 1. 489), he ends by enlisting her authority on marriage as one who succinctly “declared ful wel in litel space” (spoke economically, |. 1687) to confirm his bias. As Chaucer makes of his fictional Wife an authentic precedent for influencing judgment, the reference pulls back from the immediate dramatic context to put the advocacy of Justinus in suspense by reminding us that Justinus too is a fiction, one angle on the real that denies the intransigence of desire and of the sexual divide that does not in fact conform to reasonable constraints. The debate demonstrates that this husband and his councilors understand marriage to be an arrangement intended for the satisfaction of the husband. That understanding is replicated in the commentary of the narrator that reflects on Januarie’s initial decision to wed. The narrator’s voice conveys a pose of innocence, reflecting Januarie’s indulgent, forced, naive tone, and his commentary insistently disavows with a knowing irony what is simultaneously asserted. For example, the narration simultaneously debunks the traditional expectations it hyperbolically cites:

If he be povre , she helpeth hym to swynke;

She kepeth his good, and wasteth never a deel;

Al that hire housbonde lust, hire liketh weel;

She seith nat ones ‘nay,’ whan he seith ‘ye.’

‘Do this,’ seith he; ‘Al redy, sire,’ seith she.” (Il. 1342—46)

If he is poor, she helps him work;

She keeps his goods and wastes not at all; All that her husband desires, she well likes; She not once says nay when he says yes.

Do this, says he; All ready, sir, says she.

The parody mocks an inexperienced anticipation of perfect wifely congruity with the husband’s will in an impersonation whose exaggeration would be emphasized in oral delivery. The performance draws on commonplace instruction to wives and adopts the biblical declaration that a wife is a helpmate and of one flesh with man, notions validating the narrator’s claim that a “wyf is mannes helpe and his confort, ... O flessh they been” (“they be one flesh,” Il. 1331, 1335). The ideal is manipulated to dramatize the self-regard and selfish indulgence that allows Januarie his fantasy of limitless enjoyment and reflects the point of view of the male victim of marriage, and the narrator’s overall cynicism disavows the disappointed demand for enjoyment to which it simultaneously caters. Obsessive talking over the ideals of marital satisfaction in order to contradict those ideals defends the enjoyment of the sinthome.

Swerving between high and low speech, the tale’s language balances contradictory stylistic elements. The courtship between Damyan and May adopts conventions of sophisticated courtly romance. Damyan languishes and “So brenneth that he dyeth for desyr, / For which he putte his lyf in aventure” (“So burns that he dies from desire, because of which he puts his life in jeopardy,” Il. 1876-77), his literal fever caused by Venus’s metaphorical “fyr” (l. 1875), and he lies sick until “fully in his lady grace he stood” (1. 2018). May shows “pitee” (l. 1979) and grants “hire grace” (I. 1992), acting as physic to the lovesickness, “for to doon him ese” (“to ease him,” |. 1981). The narrator approves, adopting the Knight’s delicate phrasing and graceful rhythmic flow, “Lo, pitee renneth soone in gentil herte!” (1. 1986). The noble style of romance, however, is undercut by imagery, detail, and salacious diction. The rejuvenated Damyan cultivates the noble honor of narcissistic self-improvement, “He kembeth hym, he preyneth hym and pyketh” (“he combs himself, he preens himself and adorns himself, 1. 2011), but to Januarie he fawns like an animal, “As evere dide a dogge” (1. 2014). May reads Damyan’s letter and throws it, torn to little pieces, “al to cloutes” (1. 1953), into the privy, like waste. The coupling of May and Damyan in the tree is descried by the narrator’s direct, colloquially monosyllabic “and in he throng” (“thrusts,” 1. 2353), while Januarie, his sight suddenly enabled, bluntly insists “in it wente!” (1. 2376).

Such juxtaposition of high and low style characterizes the elaborately detailed description of the wedding celebration, which, adorned with classical decoration, is introduced by a bare, perfunctory rite: “Forth comth the preest ... And seyde his orisons, as is usage, / And croucheth hem, and bad God sholde hem blesse, / And made al siker ynogh with hoolynesse” (“Forth comes the priest ... and said his prayers as is customary, and makes the sign of the cross over them and bade that God should bless them, and made all secure enough in holiness,” Il. 1703, 1706-8). The haste imitated in a rapid-fire rhythm concluding the list of prescriptive acts is checked off with “and.” The wedding ends with the company, “this lusty route” (“lusty company,” I. 1800), leaving with suggestive, enigmatic purposes: “Hoom to hir houses lustily they ryde, / Where as they doon hir thynges as hem leste” (“home to their houses lustily they ride, where they are used to doing their things as they please,” II. 1802-3). Januarie himself can’t get rid of the guests fast enough, stating “I wolde that al this peple were ago [gone]” (1. 1764) and indirectly tries to hurry the party from the banquet, “To haste hem fro the mete in subtil wyse” (l. 1767). The social rituals are no sooner finished than “this hastif Januarie / Wolde go to bedde” (“this hasty January would go to bed,” Il. 1805-6). Ceremony is cynically enlisted as a pretext to legitimatize a demand for sex.