Literature and Human Equality

Chapter 8: Reflections: Literature and Human Equality

8 Reflections: Literature and Human Equality As an example of a work of literature that, in contrast (say) to The Brothers Karamazov , does place superior knowledge in the reader’s hands, consider the Knight’s Tale, the inaugural tale of Chaucer’s collection. Toward the end of the tale (the longest of all the CanterburyTales, as though the Knight were exercising his pride of place in narrative form), some years after the freakish death of his cousin at the very moment of victory, Palamon is sent for by Theseus “unwist of hym what was the cause and why”—without knowing the reason. We, the readers of the tale, however, know that Theseus intends him to marry Emily for political reasons. This is one of many such discrepancies of knowledge in the Knight’s Tale. If the heroes of the tale, the two noble kinsmen, weren’t possessed of greatness and raised above the common level of humanity, the higher powers would take no interest in them; because they do take an interest in them, the two mortals become subject to those powers, and precisely as subjects are in the dark on certain things. Arcite does not know that Venus has granted Palamon’s prayer; Palamon does not know that Mars has granted Arcite’s prayer. But that is also to say that we ourselves do know. Neither of the knights knows, although we do, that Saturn resolves the conflict between Venus and Mars by the political stroke of awarding one knight victory and the other the lady. Only we, and the Knight, therefore, know the story behind the story of Arcite’s death. Although Theseus at the end of the tale lectures Palamon and Emily about the governance of the universe, not even he has any idea of what took place on high. From the Knight’s sense of his own eminence, both as the highest-ranking pilgrim and the first tale-teller, it seems to follow that his knowledge should extend into the heavens and should therefore exceed the knowledge available to the tale’s own actors , noble as they are. The tale is told in the pride and pathos of superior knowledge . It is as though the Knight possessed complete knowledge because the heroic age itself is complete. The tale’s first word, “Whilom,” sets it in the remote past. But the first word of the Miller’s Tale, that victorious travesty of the Knight’s 133 Tale, is also “whilom,” and it is the turn from the Knight’s to the Miller’s Tale that sets the Canterbury Tales themselves in motion, activating the potential of an occasion that gives people from different social worlds the same opportunity to woo or offend others, to idealize or avenge themselves—in a word, to speak. Resemblances across social classes in Shakespeare are in the tradition of the play between the Knight’s Tale and its comical sequel. By the same token, Shakespeare does not argue for the abstraction, human equality, any more than Chaucer does. When Shakespeare gives Hippolyta no less a voice than her conqueror, when he makes Theseus (who seems to reflect his predecessor in the Knight’s Tale) as confused in his own way as the mechanicals with their tragical mirth, when he reveals both the well-born Claudio and Pompey Bum as men that would live, the effect is not to expose the falsity of the social order in the manner of a Rousseau. In each case, it is the very reality of social distinctions that gives these resemblances their dramatic force. Social distinctions constitute the background against which they stand out. Perhaps Shakespeare’s most startling image of the state of nature— ”unaccommodated man” as “a poor, bare, fork’d animal” (King Lear 3.4.106–8)— takes its force from the fact that a king has now been reduced to this condition. A strain of carnival runs through KingLear and its complex fooling. And if the doublings just cited are in some sense carnivalesque, carnival itself was a temporary departure from the normal order and presupposed a return to that order, as indeed the holiday nature of the Canterbury pilgrimage presumes the background of a normal world where millers cannot throw words in the face of knights. It has been said that Falstaff is Carnival; but by the same token, “carnival ends, [and] social discipline is resumed.”1 “I know thee not, old man” (2 Henry IV 5.5.47). With their zeal...