Steven
Justice on how Chaucer represents “character” in Troilus and Criseyde:
The point of this essay is to explain a
compositional device Chaucer invents in the Troilus and Criseyde . . . .
Approaching Criseyde on Troilus’ errand, Pandarus apologizes for interrupting
the parlor entertainment:
“But I am sory that I have yow
let
To herken of youre book ye preysen thus.
For Goddes
love, what seith it? tell it us!
Is it of love? O, som
good ye me leere.”
“Uncle,” quod she, “youre maistresse is nat here.”
With that they gonnen laughe . . .
Criseyde’s one-line reply
caps this bit of the exchange. But what is her reply, exactly? The drift is
tolerably clear, the specific content is not: she seems to respond, with either
regret or rebuke that might be serious or humorous, to suggestions, either
flirtatious or self-pitying, that she finds or pretends to find in her uncle’s
words. The laughter that begins the next stanza clarifies a bit—oh, it’s a joke—but the
moment of clarification acknowledges that the joke cannot be confidently
experienced with clarity: the audience can read the characters’ laughter as a
clue, but cannot laugh with them. Criseyde’s sentence is not formally obscure:
the blank over which it is pleased to make readers stumble is not a difficulty
of syntax or semantics. And there is no obscurity at all for her or Pandarus:
the stanza break and the ingressive force of gonnen combine to
suggest their laughter’s fluent simultaneity. The problem is not what the
sentence means, but what Criseyde means by it, and what her uncle understands.
But asking what a character means or understands tacitly concedes that the
character has a mind that can do these things; just by being asked, the
question commits the questioner to believing in a
subjectivity that conceals at least one item of unexpressed mental
content. Further, the idea of a mind with only one thought
unexpressed is incoherent and, more important, unimaginable: a mind that has
one thought has countless others—already, in Criseyde’s case, shadowed forth by
the several guesses a dutiful reader could make about her meaning. With this,
Chaucer begins an experiment in using ordinary structures of narrative
inference to create the mirage of subjective depth. He disrupts the easy
comprehension of the characters’ words with a question which offers too many
answers and too few grounds for assessing them, and which takes the shape of a
routine and subliminal desire for understanding (what does she
mean?).
That desire in its turn smuggles along as its premise, as if it were a habit
already formed, the unexpressed mental contents that must be the object of such
investigation. The simultaneity of Criseyde’s and Pandarus’ laughter, following
the connective “with that,” shows it to be an immediate and involuntary
response. The poem is full of such moments of reflex response. When Pandarus
finally is ready to propose Troilus as a lover, he grows serious and asks
Criseyde to “take well” what he is about to say. Talk briefly and abruptly
breaks off, again signaled by the consequential “with that”: “With that she gan hire eighen down to caste, /
And Pandarus to coghe gan a
lite” (2.252–53). His nervous cough and her lowered eyes mark a shared and
involuntary reaction to stimulus. The question of what causes their awkward
self-consciousness implies that they have selves to be conscious of. It does
not need to have an answer: its job is done once it gets this premise through
the door. By its means Chaucer can conjure a psychic richness and presence that
he may, but need not, elaborate. This illusion, in its turn, enables the intrigue
that has kept Chaucer critics so long in the business of guessing at the
characters’ minds: what does Criseyde want; how much does she understand; how
and how far does she consent, and when, and for what reasons; and what
satisfaction does Pandarus get from it all? The very texture of personality the
poem evokes is the byproduct of this basic puzzle, the puzzle that makes the
reader wonder what the characters mean by sentences
that rely for their precision on things unsaid because already known to them,
and therefore assume that there are minds to rummage in for the answer.
That is the device, a machine
for making character. . . . The Troilus confronts
its readers saliently with the experience of character. Any account of the poem
that does not allow that experience cannot account for much. My explanation
ties that sense to the imprecisions that Chaucer cultivates. It has three
advantages over most of the discussions that have appeared heretofore. First,
it needs to imagine no entities (like “social persons”) apart from the
inferential procedures initiated by the narrative itself. Second, it can treat a
specific kind of indeterminacy without being itself indeterminate,
can precisely describe a technique of imprecision.
And third, it can explain
Chaucer’s development of character without making it, or worry that it might
make it, a way-station on the road to the novel. Chaucer devised the trick of
character to do a job peculiar to the Troilus, to produce
an erotic intrigue that arises less from what characters either say or avoid
saying than from what they do not need to say, from what seems clear to them
but not to us. The mystery about Chaucer’s characters lies in
what they do not need to think about, what comes without prompt and goes
without saying—in what they presuppose. The poem’s most engaging indirections
are not those that characters execute against each other, but those the reader
encounters as if by accident. It is an experiment peculiar to the Troilus, and so
therefore is the device of characterization he crafts to enable it; there is
nothing quite like either in the Canterbury Tales. (Indeed, he
seems rather to have lost interest in it.) It was an experiment that we may call,
in shorthand, the subjectivity-effect.