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

The Noise of History

201 FIVE The Noise of History Consonance is a mixture of high and low sound falling pleasantly and uniformly on the ears. Dissonance, on the other hand, is a harsh and unpleasant percussion of two sounds coming to the ear intermingled with each other. For as long as they are unwilling to blend together and each somehow strives to be heard unimpaired, and since one interferes with the other, each is transmitted to the sense unpleasantly. — [Music] is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society. . . . Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political. —   When we listen to the poetry of Chaucer’s words, we listen to meaningful sounds as well as to sounds that are culturally coded to carry little or no meaning. As medieval grammarians explained it, when we attend to vox articulata literata, to transcribable and humanly understandable speech, 202 D I S S E M I N A L C H AU C E R we are also committed to suppressing various kinds of sonus—nonverbal and thus not fully meaningful sounds. A similar form of discrimination, repression, and purification happens when we listen to music. Music, as medieval and modern theoreticians have maintained, is essentially dissonance harmonized, sounds mathematically arranged into an order of ultimately concordant significance. But this concordance is always achieved by a form of cultural proscription, by determining that certain sounds are insignificant noises that if unrepressed would otherwise disrupt the decorum of harmonic design. It is perhaps not surprising that these same prescriptive discriminations between meaningful and antimeaningful sounds in language and in music are also found in traditional models of the body politic, where dissonance generated by a discordant element is likely to be classified as a violation of the authorized harmonics of the orderly state. The dialectic between order and disorder in the realms of music, language , history, and social politics is powerfully dramatized in the classical myth of Harmonia. The child of Venus and Mars, Harmonia is conceived as the realization of concors discordia, the well-tempered union of erotic love and martial power. And Harmonia’s marriage to Cadmus, the inventor of the Greek alphabet, might well have translated these principles of order into civilized institutions such as writing. However, Cadmus established Thebes, a city where the collision of savage desire and feral aggression—incest,fratricide,parricide,and internecine war—ultimately defines civilization at its most tragic and self-defeating. After the final battle among the sons of the Seven against Thebes, the city is razed, the only surviving object in its silent rubble proving to be Harmonia’s necklace , the city’s originary symbol of order. Chaucer, choosing to center Statius’s Thebaiad as a foundational historical text in The Knight’s Tale, obviously understood the symptomatic “noise” of Theban history as a cautionary narrative of human civilization run amok. However, Chaucer was absolutely fascinated by noise throughout his career, and by the possible significance, political and otherwise, of sounds that are traditionally understood to be devoid of meaning. A number of musical models that directly influenced Chaucer’s thoughts about the politics of sound hark back to Cicero’s seminal work, De Re Publica. For Cicero, the political state is analogous to a musical body wherein a pleasing consonance is produced by maintaining fit intervals between highest, lowest, and middle tones and highest, lowest, and middle classes: For, as in the music of lyre and flute and as even in singing and spoken discourse there is a certain melody [concentus] which must be preserved in the different sounds—and if this is altered or discordant it becomes intolerable to the ears of a connoisseur—and as this melody is made concordant and harmonious in spite of the dissimilar sounds of which it is composed, so the state achieves harmony by the agreement [consensu] of unlike individuals, when there is a wise blending of the highest, the lowest and the intervening middle classes in the manner of tones. And what musicians call harmony in song is concord in a state.1 Cicero’s audition of the harmonics of the state is obviously classical and conservative—it is unimaginable that melodies could be produced outside the order of preexisting tones. Yet Cicero’s awareness of...