Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (David Aers)

Keane’s review in MLR sums up this book’s thesis well:

[B]oth poets [i.e. Langland and Chaucer] are ‘creative’ in a special sense. That is, that although they may set out to examine the world in which they live and its problems in the light of accepted conventional ideas, the very integrity of their creative genius forces on them a picture which is truer to fact, so that they reflect more or less faithfully the strains which were being felt in the social and religious structures of their day and the changes which were taking place. (424)

Aers’ Langland seeks to learn two things: what is the truth, and how does one live rightly (“Dowel”)? In his many allegorical dream excursions, he meets many representatives of the standard answers his culture offers for these questions; they contradict one another and (more importantly) the social reality Langland’s candid imagination perceives. As a result, Langland sets out finally from the church, “search[ing] for the lost Plowman and the Grace he may mediate to the present world” (37).

A Quibble: he presents the account in Passus VI of the laborer (“Wastour”) who refuses to work and the inability of the knight to render him tractable. The term “Wastour” is treated as an ideologically loaded label--society defines this recalcitrant worker as a wastrel. However, Aers’ Langland perceives a social discontent among the peasantry that may justify the “wastour”: they want a bigger stake in their own production (VI.307-11). Therefore, “wastour” is really just a perceptive peasant who sees the “violence inherent in the system” and goes on strike. Only one problem: Passus VI.307-11 describes the time of plenty after an abundant harvest, comparing the peasants’ former contentment with beans and greens to their current decadent enjoyment. They are not asking for better food and not getting it: they are enjoying the fruits of their labors, and that is the point.

Regarding Chaucer, Aers discusses a faculty he calls “reflexivity” or “reflexive imagination”: “reflexive imagination grasps the way human beings constitute the world, the way they are agents in creating ideologies, dogmas and all that is known, not merely passive recipients of reality and impersonal verities” (81-2). Aers’ first example of reflexivity in Chaucer is the Wife of Bath’s “Prologue”, in which she proceeds to situate anti-feminist clerical dogma in social and historical contexts. Men write these things about women: celibate old men, burning with the envy of sterile age. She then offers her own readings of familiar texts, using her own experience as support: she overtly and self-consciously practices the same approach the clerics use (albeit covertly and probably unconsciously), because that is only option human readers have.

By contrast, Aers’ Troilus is an unreflexive reader: “Troilus still cannot see the primary role of his own culture and social organization in creating the present tragedy, and so he perceives Criseyde’s actions in a very different perspective from the one open to Chaucer’s readers,” who presumably understand the cruel social mechanisms that trapped Criseyde into a situation she would not have chosen (138).

Yeah, okay. Reflexivity I’ll buy.