Piers Plowman: The Field and the Tower by Priscilla Martin (review)

REVIEWS PRISCILLA MARTIN, Piers Plowman: The Field and the Tower. New York: Barnes and Noble; London: Macmillan, 1979. Pp. ix, 172. $22.50. Piers Plowman enjoyed a particularly rich decade of criticism in the 1970's, with the publication of a number of thoughtful and original essays and monographs concerned with the formal as well as intellectual problems of this most difficult of Middle English poems. This happy period was stimulated in part by the publication in 1969 of a volume of critical essays edited by S. S. Hussey, which contained a fine contribu­ tion by Priscilla Martin (Jenkins). That essay, on Conscience and the limitations of allegory, forms the germ and kernel of her present book. Martin is concerned with allegory, though her emphasis is upon its limitations as a form both for thought and literary expression. The book begins with a chapter on "The Endings", which comments upon the Pardon scene and on Passus XIX and XX of the B Text as examples of how, in Piers, forms which propose understanding produce inconse­ quence or paradox. Thus the Pardon, promised to solve the problems of the Visio, in fact only introduces more' complications because it is itself ambiguous; the ending ofthe poem leads to no conclusion, only to more uncertainty and doubt. The book next discusses irony as a pervasive structural device, including a brief analysis of the poem's many "false starts" and its use of dream-vision conventions. The third chapter deals with Will's conversation with lmaginatyf as an attempt by the poet to express his doubts concerning the nature and value of poetry. Entitled "The Christian Poet and the Christian Satirist," it explores in part the problems oflanguage, and Langland's fear ofmisusing it, embodied in his frequent return to the theme of "good" and "bad" minstrels. Martin comments that satire is a difficult genre for a Christian to use, since it seems to go against the commandment to love one's neighbor. She concludes: It is only on the question of satire that Langland can formulate the problem latent in the entire poem: that one might say the right thing in the wrong way . . . It is the clearest-if crudest---example of the paradoxical use oflanguage ... which is so characterisitc and mysterious in Piers Plowman" (p. 70). 161 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The last half of the book is concerned with certain traits of allegory which Martin believes that Langland tests and (in the main) discards in Piers: "prejudice", or the tendency in allegory to view the world "as a pattern of intended analogies" (p. 104) which, all too often, seem trite and platitudinous; "idealism", or the tendency to lose the concrete world ofexperience in order to present "a world ofclear-cut moral distinctions" (p.112); and "spiritualism", or the tendency of "allegorical interpreta­ tion ...to gloss over uncomfortable literal meanings" (p.141).Martin insists that Langland exposes and rejects in his poetry these tendencies in allegory: Allegory is a mode of thought which Langland is investigating and defining through the juxtaposition ofallegorical and literal. This reading suggests that the allegorical habit of thought is indispensable in formu­ lating moral concepts, but that, since these concepts are modified by actual situations, allegorisation comes under increasing suspicion. By the end of the poem the mode has been so strained that 'perfect' characters behave inconsistently. Yet the desire for the idealism and intellectual coherence of allegory cannot be abandoned. The final image of the pilgrim reinstates the allegorical, not as a statement ofa scheme, but in terms of a quest for the unknown (p. 129). There is much truth in thisstatement, but there is also much imprecision and begging ofthe formal problems presented by the poem, which other critics, like Elizabeth Kirk, Ruth Ames, and David Aers, have analysed with more acumen and critical skill. For example, why "cannot" the desire for coherence be abandoned? What about an allegorical habit of mind is "indispensable" to the formation ofmoral concepts? Is "allegor­ isation" a monolithic process, as this analysis assumes? And does allegory "come under suspicion" (ofwhat?), or does the "mode ofthought"evolve and change in the poem? These are problems which recent studies...