-
Coleridge's Sublime and Langland's Subject in the Pardon Scene of Piers Plowman
- University of Ottawa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Murray J. Evans COLERIDGE'S SUBLIME AND LANGLAND 'S SUBJECT IN THE PARDON SCENE OF "PIERS PLOWMAN" Much has been written on the pardon scene in Passus 7 of the B-text of Piers Plowman. Not only is the passage an important one, the climax of the first section of the poem or Visio according to some of its manuscript traditions; but the interpretation of the episode has also been one ofthe chief controversies in Langland criticism. Useful surveys of the controversy already exist (e.g., Pearsall, Bibliography 200-06). I am instead interested in how frequent characterizations of the poem as sublime raise questions about the subject in Passus 7 and the larger poem.1 In a recent essay, which surveys theories of the sublime in relation to criticism of the poem, I have suggested a contrast betweenthe views of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eminent theorist on the subject and the sublime, and those of Freud and Lacan (Evans 437). I do not dispute that there is value in psychoanalytic readings of medieval texts. I am concerned, however, that familiar repetition can transform this one hermeneutic model into fossilized presupposition: for "cultural schema, taking onmaterial weight withthe names they assume, not only expose or describe actions and allow us to identify them . . . but also preclude alternative perceptions of the same scene." It is thus all too easy to allow "the unnamed and the unmarked to merge undifferentiated into the background" (Stanbury 262). Asa counterpoint to the limits, and sometimes fossilization, of a neo-Freudian hermeneutic, this essay provides a reading of Passus 7 according to Coleridge's views of the subject and the sublime. I begin with a definition of the psychoanalytic sublime and its presence in the work of Anne Middleton on Piers Plowman. Then, in contrast, I discuss the Coleridgean sublime and show how it informs Piers's literal departure from the poem in the pardon scene. Here the relevance of Patricia Yaeger's notions of the female sublime leads me to consider, in turn, two curious moments inthe pardon scene: Will's gaze at the pardon over Piers's 155 FROMARABYE TO ENGELOND and the priest's shoulders, and Will's musing upon waking, "ful pencif in herte," on Piers. These two moments inthe passus raise questions about the construction, distinctness, and stability of the subject, questions to which Coleridge provides alternative answers to those of modern psychoanalytic theory. After noting a theoretical gap, which defers my consideration of the gendering of Langland's subject, I finally relate my Coleridgean analysis to the problematic status of Will's making poetry (challenged by Imaginatif in Passus 12) and the nature of "doing well" in the poem. Thomas Weiskel's Romantic Sublime is a major modern Freudian reading of the sublime, i.e., the sense and articulation of what "transcend[s] the human" (3). Weiskel proposes three stages in human experience of the sublime: an initial and "habitual[,].. . unconscious" relation between mind and object; a breakdown of this relationship by which "[e]ither mind or object is suddenly in excess"; and finally, the recovery of balance when the mind establishes a new relationship between subject and object, taking the eruption of the second stage "as symbolizing the mind's relation to a transcendent order" (23-24). Neil Hertz underlines that Weiskel's characterization of the experience of the sublime is Oedipal, involving the resolution of "the Oedipal moment" or "moment of blockage" into "a one-to-one confrontation" (Hertz 53) between the Kantian imagination and its symbolic father, Kant's reason, as well as the self-sacrificing identification of the former with the latter (Hertz 51, citing Weiskel 92ff.). In this paper, I will use "Oedipal" in this sense of conflict and forceful resolution. One Piers Plowman scholar who adapts such a view of the sublimein eloquent and illuminatingessays onthepoemisAnneMiddleton.2 Sheargues that a recurring kind of episode-the dispute or combat, without clear resolution-is paradigmatic to Langland's poem ("Narration" 95-97). Typically, one combatant stands for "natural knowledge" from "personal experience," and the other for "authoritative, . . . systematic, universal" knowledge (106). Middleton's Freudian terminology is evident in her focus on this recurring narrative dynamic as a manifestation of'"the unconscious of the work,'" an "enabling gesture" not confined to any one character, and a "free-floating combative animus" often disproportionate to the event (100-01, citing Macherey 92): "The self as a fictive narrative center for the work appears as an abashed interloper in a stern...