Pandarus, Poetry, and Healing

Pandarus, Poetry, and Healing Mary Wack Stanford University In this anick I explore one ,spw of what h,s been rnlled Chaucds "drive to solve puzzles through philosophy and science."1 Critics have discussed Pandarus in terms ofhis numerous roles in Trozlus and Criseyde: friend, courtly go-between, priest of love, earthly maker. These roles are embodied in the rhetorical codes, such as the "religion of love," "court­ liness," "love as feudal service," and so on, that Chaucer uses to amplify the Fzlostrato. 2 One fact underlies this multiplicity ofmasks: Pandarus medi­ ates, and this enables his various roles to be aligned and compared, often with complex results, as when we consider him both priest of love and "swich a meene / As maken wommen vn-to men to comen" (TC 3.254-55).3 Although the language of love as illness is one of Chaucer's significant additions to the Filostrato, Pandarus's role as physician has remained largely unexamined. I think it worth the trouble to add onemore role to the catalogue because medicine as Pandarus practices it becomes, in limited but significant ways, a model for the operations of poetic rhetoric. My analysis focuses on Pandarus's first conversation with Troilus, in which allusions to Ovid and Boethius define the depth and complexity of Pandarus's role as a physician.4 Both "auctores" use medical metaphors. 1 Derek Brewer, "The Reconstruction of Chaucer," in Paul Strohm and ThomasJ. Heffer­ nan, eds., Studies in the Age ofChaucer, Proceedings, No. 1, 1984: Reconstructing Chaucer (Knoxville, Tenn.: New Chaucer Society, 1985), p. 10. 2 Barry Windeatt, "Chaucer and the Filostrato," in Piero Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 168. See also David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings ofBoccaccio (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985). 3 QuotationsofthetextarefromB.A.Windeatt,ed.,Troilusand Criseyde: A NewEdition of "The Book o/Troilus" (London and New York: Longman, 1984). 4John Fyler, Chaucerand Ovid (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 19, notes thatJean de Meun's Roman de la Rose had already fused Ovid with The Consolation of Philosophy. Further discussion of Pandarus can be found inJohn Fyler, "The Fabrications of Pandarus," MLQ 41 (1980): 115-30. 127 FIFTH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS Ovid's remedies proclaim the power of his poetry to shape lovers' behavior, while Boethius invokes medical language ("lethargy," "lighter" and "stronger medicines") to describe the prisoner's philosophical anamnesis. By casting Pandarus as a physician of lovesickness whose identity gradually emerges through Ovidian and Boethian allusion, Chaucer measures the curative powers of poetry against the medicines of philosophy, Ovidian oblivion against Boethian remembrance.5 In so doing, he explores his own poem's place in the unstablemiddle between persuasion and proof, proba­ bility and truth. When Pandarus first sees the lovesick Troilus, who has by this time "lost his hue" sixty times a day, is bereft of sleep, a foe to food, and fevered (1.441, 484-91), he tries to persuade the young Trojan to accept his help. When Troilus objects that Pandarus has failed in love, Criseyde's uncle replies that an unsuccessful lover can indeed help another to success. He refers to a letter-anaddition to the Ftfostrato from Ovid's Herotdes-that Oenone sent to Troilus's brother Paris.6 In the letter Oenone characterizes her own impotence by referring to Apollo as a healer who could not heal his own love (1.659-65): "Phebus, that first fond art of medicyne," Quod she, "and couthe in every wightes care, Remedye and rede by herbes he knew fyne, 3et to hym self his konnyng was fol bare; ffor loue hadde hym so bounden in a snare, Al for the daughter of the kyng Amete, That all his craft ne koude his sorwes bete." Pandarus in turn identifies himself with her (1.666-72): "Right so fare I, vnhappyly for me; I loue one best, and that me smerteth sore; And 3et, peraunter, kan I reden the And nat myself-repreve me na more. I haue no cause, I woot we!, forto sore ' My forthcoming study of Troilus, ofwhich this is a part, will also address the influence of the Roman de la...