Contentio: The Structural Paradigm of The Parliament of Fowls

Contentio: The Structural Paradigm of The Parliament ofFowls Denis Walker University ofCanterbury, New Zealand 0nt of the topics to which most «itics of The Par/;oment of Fowls turn at some point is what RobertJordan has called "The question of unity."1 Confronted with a poem unusually diverse in subject matter, styles, and tone, the literary critic has often felt it his duty to disclose the principle of unity or cohesion which governs the seemingly disordered and disunified text of the poem. It has been a long and often fruitful tradition in studies of the Parliament, but it is not without problems. The greatest of these concerns the theoretically dubious reading practice it encourages: the reader is asked to look through the text, rather than at it, to disregard the apparent unrelatedness of much of the text in the belief that a principle of "relatedness" or unity is to be found somewhere beyond it. This is prob­ lematicpreciselybecause it is a matter of belief, not one of demonstration. The search for unity rests on an a priori valorization ofunity as an essential aesthetic concept; disunity, it then follows, is both insignificant (at best, an artistic flaw) and unsignifying (at most, a puzzle to be resolved into unity and sense). This aesthetic assumption and the reading practice based on it lead the reader away from the experience of the text in the act of reading and, by assuming the insignificance of disunity, unnecessarily restrict the range of possible meanings the text may have. The resistance of the text to attempts to disclose its unity may perhaps be seen in the numerous, often conflicting, accounts that have been offered, none of which have won general acceptance. If there is a unity in the text, then it is clearly much more elusive than we generally think. If, however, we simply want to account for our sense that, despite its diversity and apparent disunity, the Parliament somehow "hangs to1 R. M. Jordan, "The question of Unity and the Parliament ofFowls," ESC 3, no. 4 (1977):373-85. 173 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER gether," then it might be better to start with that initial impression of disunity than with an a priori commitment to unity as an aesthetic univer­ sal. By trusting that perception, and by accepting structural disunity as a possiblemode of signification, we may beable to offer a stronger account of how the poem "hangs together." It is here that contentio is important. Many critics have commented on Chaucer's use of the device in the poem. Dorothy Everett related it to Chaucer's state of mind at the time of composition: "It is not mere accident that Chaucer introduces so many examples of the rhetorical device of contentio, of contrasted phrases and statements, in this poem. It is, I believe, an indication of how his mind was working when he wrote it."2 Wolfgang Clemen, however, relates it more specifically to the structure of the work, "...contentio -a rhetorical figure...often recurs in the course of the poem and reflects even on the smallest scale and on a purely linguistic level the basic polarity of the poem."3 Clemen's view was devel­ oped by Michael Kelley in an important article, "Antithesisas the Principle of Design in thePar/ement a/Foules."4 Kelley sees contentio, or antithesis, as "the basic principle of organisation"5 in the poem: the repeated use of antithetical structures forms a design, a pattern in the work, and this is responsible, in Kelley's view, for the sense of harmonyand unity the poem as a whole conveys. While this represents a real advance in understanding the importance ofthe device in the Parliament, it still involves a denial of signifying function to textual disunity: unity, for Kelley, is still an intrinsic structural property of the text. Kelley and Clemen are right to stress the importance ofthe device in the work, but their emphasis on its function as a mere element in the overall design is, I feel, too limited. It is not just the repeated use of contentio which is important but, more particularly, the fact that the nature of the internal relationships of the elements constituting the device functions as...