Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Place in Langland's Poetics (review)

Put most simply, this is a book about puns, in medieval language theory and in Langland's practice in Piers Plowman. The Victorians disapproved of puns as a puerile undermining of the stability of language; in Chamberlin's study of hypersemiosis, his term for "surplus meaning," puns emerge as deeply ethical, the surplus being a manifestation of God's generosity. Augustine insisted that synonyms, homonyms, ambiguities, and the transferred meanings of metaphors should be considered not as matters for bewilderment but as having the potential for revealing divine mysteries. His ideas were given further development by theorists of grammar in the twelfth-century schools, whose books found their way into Worcester Cathedral library and so were available to be given poetic realization by Langland.

The first part of Chamberlin's book concerns itself with these multiple meanings: to coin an example, "Hell contains everlasting fire," as against "That was a hell of a good party." The second part of the book deals with "words-as-words" (hell contains four letters) and their capacity for participating in or encoding the nature of reality (hell is derived from "hollow," for it is void of God—factual accuracy coming a distant second to ultimate truth in such etymologies). Chamberlin takes his readers in bite-sized chunks through the development of these theories, so that even a section heading such as "Ontic logos" almost ceases to be scary. By the time he has expounded the difference between the dyadic and the triadic semiotic (the former represented by Saussure's system of signifier and signified, with its "referential agnosticism" about the world; the latter positing a three-way relationship between word, concept, and referent), the ethical position underlying the whole argument is unmistakable. Langland uses the arts doctrines to promote a theory of language, of the Word and the word, that promotes love and good living, a vision of God and the world, God in the world. Saussure emerges from the whole process looking distinctly impoverished.