Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading The Nun's Priest's Tale

Chaucer's Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor

169 FOUR Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor What is proper to the sun? . . . Unceasingly, unwillingly, we have been carried along by the movement which brings the sun to turn in metaphor; or have been attracted by what turned the philosophical metaphor toward the sun. Is not this flower of rhetoric (like) a sunflower? That is— but this is not exactly a synonym—analogous to the heliotrope? —  One possible way of dealing with the strange art of rhetoric is to claim one knows nothing about it. This is the tack taken by Chaucer’s Franklin in his prologue to his Canterbury tale: I lerned nevere rethorik, certeyn; . . . . . . . . . . . Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede, But swiche colours as growen in the mede, Or elles swiche as men dye or peynte. Colours of rethoryk been to me queynte. (V.719, 723–26) 170 D I S S E M I N A L C H AU C E R Here the Franklin pretends to be an ignoramus when it comes to understanding the figurae—the colors, or flowers, of poetry—taught in the rhetorical handbooks. The Franklin’s antipoetic sentiments are of course problematic, for his four-line demurral concerning the proper understanding of “colours” contains a subtle illustration not only of the word “colour”being put to good metaphorical use but of metaphor’s complex linguistic, ontological, and indeed epistemological nature. Here, in the Franklin’s modesty trope,“colour” is a word that seems to have so many metaphorical meanings that it is difficult to descry its proper or original significance. Transported from what we might assume is its realm of original, literal meaning (the colors of pigment) into another linguistic realm as a name for poetic tropes (the “colours” of rhetoric), it is translated by the Franklin back to the domain of nature to serve as a synecdochic name for flowers (“swiche colours as growen in the mede”), even though“flowers” is a traditional medieval name for verbal tropes, the “flowers” of poetry. A host of philosophical questions relating to the nature of metaphor is compressed into these quicksilver category shifts and semantic exchanges . What in fact is denoted by the name“colour”? Is there an absolute divide between“colour”meaning flower,“colour”meaning a quality in paint, and “colour” meaning a poetic trope? Does paint belong to nature or to art? Are the pigments of paints the properties of things, are they actually substances, or are they some kind of prima materia upon which nature itself is predicated? Is it possible that all the Franklin’s “colours” are metaphorical names for things,and,if so,does this mean that all literal language is fundamentally metaphorical or, contrariwise, that all metaphorical statements are ultimately literal propositions? Indeed, what is meant when we say we“knowe”colors in this world: do we know the world first, before learning its“colours,”or do“colours”bring us knowledge of the world? All of these questions concerning metaphor—its denotive functions, truth-value, ontological character, and epistemic powers—are questions that derive from an animated aesthetic debate that can be traced back at least to the twelfth century.A seminal contribution to this debate is Alanus de Insulis’s characterization of rhetoric as painting in his twelfth-century epic of the seven liberal arts, the Anticlaudianus. At the center of Nature’s paradisiacal garden in the Anticlaudianus, a hortus conclusus which Alanus terms a“place apart,”1 stands a mural of magnificent paintings.“Oh painting with your new wonders!”Alanus exclaims: by“turn[ing] the shadows of things into things and chang[ing] every lie to truth,” painting “checks logic’s arguments and triumphs over logic’s sophisms.”2 Whereas painting appears here to symbolize all of the creative arts, later in the epic it is the allegorical figure of Rhetoric that proves to be painting’s linguistic equivalent.3 “[E]nfold[ing] in her bosom the complete art of the painter,” Rhetoric’s verbal elegances are palpable in the very colors of her person: “Her countenance is steeped in radiant colour: a brilliant red glow tints her face with roseate luster.”“But,”adds Alanus by way of anxious qualification ,“a foreign glitter haunts her face to some extent and tries to combine with the native hue.”4 Despite his exuberant praise, Alanus is clearly troubled by the oddity of linguistic tropes, by the...