Tuesday, July 19, 2011

A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: Chaucer's "The Former Age"



If you don't know "The Former Age," it's structurally and thematically based on Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy Book II, Meter 5 and a handful of other works. It describes a time when people were free of commerce, agriculture, or technology: they do not harvest grain, for example, but rather rub the kernels between their hands (l. 11). They're vegetarian communists who refuse to harm anyone or anything: not each other, not animals, not the earth or the sea, not wounded by the plow (l. 9) or carved by the prow (l. 21).

Criticism of "The Former Age" typically does souce or historical studies, the latter tending to see the poem's pessimism as a symptom of the politics of the late 1380s or early 1390s. That's fine. However, I'm reading the poem as a critique not only of human institutions but of the human itself. In sum, I read it as an antihumanist manifesto in the vein of Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour's wonderful "Morality or Moralism." I do this by attending, especially, to the former agers' unlimited moral sensitivity but also to Chaucer's additions to his sources, and its affinities with a thematically related set of texts, the British witnesses to the encounter between Alexander the Great and the ascetic philosophers of India, the Gymnosophists and Dindimus and the Brahmans. I plan to talk about this Dindimus material in another post.

Chaucer's few additions include a few animal comparisons and his despairing final stanza, which bemoans that the world is now full of lust, deceit, and murder, with no way out. Lines 7 and 37 in effect say that these people eat like pigs: "They eten mast, hawes, and swich pounage"; "noght but mast or apples is therinne." Golden Age people eat acorns: this is a cliché, mocked from Cicero to Petrarch, and sneered at by Lucretius, who says that primordial people traded acorns for sex. The pig-comparison's unusual, though, at least in the Golden Age tradition. In my book, I read this as a humiliating contrapasso against people who don't eat pigs: eat pork or be treated like pork. In medieval Christian texts, this happens to Jews, Muslims, and now to these vegetarians, who, like pigs, eat "mast, hawes, and swich pounage" in the woods rather than enjoying the products of the grange.

The other animal comparison comes in line 50, where Chaucer calls these people lambish. Perhaps not alarming, until you remember that for a dozen years Chaucer oversaw the wool custom and wool subsidy for the Port of London. In this time, few English were more involved in the sheep trade: worthy is the lamb &c. Note too that one of the witnesses of "The Former Age" traveled with Lydgate's "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep," a poem that the ram wins by arguing, in effect, that English industry commercializes every bit of the sheep, its fleece, meat, horn, hooves, and skin (here I think of Upton Sinclair's "they use everything of the pig except the squeal").

And then there's the despair of the last stanza, Chaucer's longest addition. Taken as a whole, "The Former Age" imagines a time without human domination, a time whose people recognize the constitutive vulnerability of everything as morally significant (see Derrida on the "nonpower at the heart of power" in The Animal that Therefore I am); a time whose people saw the face (in a Levinasian sense) everywhere and acted accordingly. "The Former Age" imagines this time, and admires these people, sure, but it also chooses to think of them as animals, there to be used and traded; and it chooses to imagine this time as irrevocably lost.

But Chaucer's other so-called Boethian poems ("Truth," "Lak of Stedfastnesse," and "Gentilesse") hope for something better. Why not this poem too? I read it as written in a voice unequal to its subject, a voice that cannot give up on human privileges (Nicola Masciandaro and Gillian Rudd have also read the poem's voice suspiciously). I see the failure of the poem's voice as indirectly asking us to do better, to try harder to get past the despair and sad domination of being human. Unlike the poetic voice, we readers, hoping better, can use this supposedly lost past to get at another future (infinite citations here, but Piotr Gwiazda's Former Age article, which uses Ernst Bloch, is more than good enough).





Jeffrey J. Cohen said...

This post deserves a fuller response than I -- with one foot out the door for a Huge Trip and one finger on the keyboard trying to complete what I need to so that I can depart -- can give it. So I will just say (1) this is great, thoughtful stuff. The analysis and the conclusion is wholly yours: quite original, and makes me see the poem in a new way. (2) I'm interested in how the Former Age as a medieval space of prehistory works. Only as a thought experiment inherited from antiquity, and therefore a place of safe play? It can't be harmonized with the biblical vision of prehistory (the antediluvian), so what's its status as a temporality? A realm for speculation unmoored from "real" time? Or a temporal possibility that co-exists uneasily with the biblical narrative?

Anne said...

Your wonderful post, and your use of the Golden Age from the MS Douce manuscript of the _Roman de la Rose_, prompts me to rethink the character and placement of the Golden Age discussion in Jean de Meun's text. It spends a lot of time on the food (one could talk of delicious longue durée), and the springtime is eternal, and there is shelter from storms, and (repeatedly) no laws or kings. But the beauty of the Golden Age is undermined by its immediate juxtaposition with the graphic and horrible Jealous Husband scene - supposedly to illustrate how far we've fallen with our laws and strictures, but my students (and I for that matter) can never "get over" the violence and the spite to the moral message of contrast."(And what happens to you ethically if you do get over it?) The juxtaposition of Golden Age and Jealous Husband itself comes within the incredibly problematic (because should _any_ of his advice be followed?) Advice of Friend speech. The other mention of the Golden Age appears in Reason's earlier arguments with the Lover - the philosophical debate that implodes when the Lover is shocked and deterred from discourse by Reason's use of the words "balls" (she'd been describing the demise of Saturn's "couilles" which brought about the end of said Golden Age). In the Roman, the Golden Age is made conditional by what frames it in the poem - while textually self-contained as a remembered story by the speaker, it is conditioned by the experience of the reader in these problematic (violent, comic) juxtapositions. Your wonderful work on this makes me wonder about the "stand-alone" quality of Chaucer's poem, and has made me very excited to think further about the effect of the description of Golden and Former Ages. I'll be teaching an "Ecology of Medieval Art" course next year and _can't wait_ to use your book, and, now, this, and what will come of it!

Alex said...

It's a refreshing change from the naive environmentalist invocation of Eden. But I want to think about how hunger and vulnerability work against, rather than towards, such sympathy. Especially after that Derrida interview you linked to. Other forces, notably ideology (here I'm thinking of St. Eustace) can help to maintain an equilibrium that would otherwise be intolerable, but these carry their own risks.

Your reading of "The Former Age" makes me want to read it (which is no small feat) and I look forward to the impending dressing of The Canarien.

Karl Steel said...

LONG LONG overdue response.

Jeffrey: great questions. I feel as though I've found SOMETHING somewhere about efforts to harmonize the Golden Age w/ Eden, but I can't remember where. I wonder if the difficulties in that lead to making the Golden Age geographically rather than temporally distant (where the Brahmins and the Canary Islanders for example live in prehistory).

Anne: thanks, please do share you syllabus with me if you can, and if you're still here! I know I'm borrowing from your reading this Wednesday, when I teach the RR Golden Age alongside Dindimus and Chaucer.

Alex, "hunger and vulnerability work against, rather than towards, such sympathy": exactly, yes, well put. Here's the problem: we have to eat. There's no way around that. And that eating has to be a moral challenge to us. I love that the Golden Age tradition, in its best forms (the Dindimus material and Chaucer's FA), don't shy away from the human misery that would result from a life of radically trying to do right by all.

Reid Hardaway said...

Very interesting ... I also wonder about Nimrod's (builder of Babel) inclusion at the end of the poem. As you say, it seems Chaucer may be fantasizing about a world without people - does the inclusion of Nimrod reveal a kind of lamentation over the nature of language as well?

Karl Steel said...

Reid, I'd say YES. I hadn't considered that, and sadly (?) the article that this post was leading to has already appeared here. If I ever revise this for a book though, I'll include that idea and properly credit you.