So what's with the feathers?
The
“Summoner’s Tale” is a brilliant satire that attacks the hypocrisy and venality
of some mendicant friars, perhaps Franciscans or Carmelites. The mendicants (beggars) took their name from their
religious practice of depending entirely upon the kindness of strangers for
their often quite comfortable upkeep.
As the tale begins, a particularly suave religious beggar arrives at a village
house, flirts briefly with the wife, then makes himself at home as he prepares
to make a serious financial solicitation of the bedridden householder.
And fro the bench he drove away the cat
And laid adown his potente and his hat [walking stick]
And eek his scrip, and set him soft
adown. [eek=also scrip=purse,
bag]
A frere the was, a wantowne and a merrye
As usual, learned commentary can enrich one’s
enjoyment of the comedy. It helps
to know for example, that in commissioning his disciples Jesus said (Luke 9:3) “Take nothing for [your] journey, neither staves, nor scrip”; and if you’re dirty-minded
enough to suspect something slightly fishy in the word potente, so much the better.
But no reader will require a footnote to savor the deliciousness of the
detail of the first line—the easy presumption with which the friar shoos the
cat away, so that he can sit down soft.
Or how about this one from
Dante? Is there anything more
fantastic than the amazing pageant of the Church in Purgatorio xxix? It’s
so fantastic that it completely nonpluses even Virgil, whose imagination dreamed up the whole
Æneid. It features, among other things, the four feathered “living
creatures” from the beginning of the prophecy of Ezekiel—with faces of a man, a
lion, an ox, and an eagle respectively.
You probably know that in Christian iconography these became the symbols
of the four evangelists. But Dante
describes the feathery parts not in the fashion of Ezekiel, but in that of
John’s slightly altered reprise of the image in the Revelation (4:6-9). Then
Dante says this: Giovanni è meco, e da
lui si diparte. “John is with
me [!!!], and departs from him [Ezekiel].” Note: Dante does not agree with Saint John the Divine. No, John agrees with Dante. Only a genius could write that line.
Details, details. In the second book of Gulliver’s
Travels Swift is faced with the problem of convincing the reader that his
narrator is in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, in comparison with whom he—a
normal-sized man—seems minute.
There are only so many ways of saying “They were very big, and I was
very small,” and so Swift lets carefully chosen detail do the work for him. As Chaucer could use a cat, Swift uses
a salt cellar.
The court of Brobdingnag reviews the British navy
Gulliver explains that the king of
Brobdingnag, having taken a shine to his minute house guest, has had some tiny
furniture made for him. But
just how tiny? “T’is the custom,
that every Wednesday (which, as I have observed, is their Sabbath) the king and
queen, with the royal issue of both sexes, dine together in the apartment of
his majesty, to whom I was now become a great favourite; and at these times, my
little chair and table were placed at his left hand, before one of the
salt-cellars.” (G.T., ii, 3). Gulliver dines not at
the King’s table, but upon it.
But
let us turn to the world’s greatest novel, Tom
Jones. (May peace be upon the
advocates of—in alphabetical order--Brothers
Karamazov, Madame Bovary, Les
Misérables, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Portrait of a Lady, Vanity
Fair, War and Peace, etc.,
etc.). Fielding’s novel is at
the very least the world’s greatest novel of amazing revelations, the chief
such revelation being that of the identity of the hero.
At
times the revelations are a little, well, delicate. Young Tom Jones,
a foundling, is a lovely lad, but he does have a normal sexual appetite,
and at one point he falls into a brief fling with a handsome woman of a certain
age and of uncertain morals who goes by the name of “Mrs. Waters”. “Mrs. Waters” is in fact the
middle-aging Jenny Jones, who as a young housemaid twenty years earlier, was accused of being the unwed mother of Tom, to whom her surname was given.
It
turns out eventually that this belief is mistaken, but not before
the misinformation comes to Tom’s ears from his garrulous sidekick
Partridge. Having carnal knowledge
of one’s mother, even unawares, rarely turns out well in our literature. Think Oedipus Rex. The
hyphenated vernacular term for the taboo activity was not in the eighteenth
century a commonplace of African American or any other English dialect. Poor Tom is absolutely horrified to be
told he has done it.
“Why,
then, the Lord have mercy upon your soul, and forgive you,” cries Partridge;
“but as sure as I stand here alive, you have been a-bed with your own
mother.”…."Sure," cries Jones, "Fortune will never have done
with me till she hath driven me to distraction. But why do I blame Fortune? I
am myself the cause of all my misery. All the dreadful mischiefs which have
befallen me are the consequences only of my own folly and vice. What thou hast
told me, Partridge, hath almost deprived me of my senses! And was Mrs Waters,
then--but why do I ask? for thou must certainly know her…O good Heavens!
incest----with a mother! To what am I reserved!" Book XVIII, 2
Fielding
does not write “incest with my
mother” but “incest with a mother”. Is there a more brilliant use of the humble
indefinite article in English literature?
Poor Tom is recalling as best a layman can such moral guidance as may be
in the layman’s common domain. The
Anglican Prayer Book of 1662, the official liturgical and doctrinal handbook of
English religion as re-established at the time of the Restoration, contained a
chart called “A Table of Kindred and Affinity: Wherein Whosoever Are Related Are Forbidden by the Church of
England to Marry Together”. There
are no fewer than twenty-four relations with whom a man is forbidden to have
relations, including some pretty unlikely ones such as a “daughter's
son's wife,” but right at the top of the list is a mother.
a memorable dinner with Mom
