Loving Confession in the Confessio Amantis

Gower's approach to the sin of forgetfulness as a form of Sloth in Book IV of the Confessio Amantis uses memory and desire to reveal a chiastic structure between the poem's discourses of love and confession. The subject in confession creates narratives that revise memories in order to enter into a confessional history that stretches from the past to the future; the subject in love creates exemplary narratives that remain in the present. For both, the problem of remembrance and representation becomes one of narrative agency—the ability to use one's will as a mechanism for subject-formation. As such, the narrative structures of both discourses echo one another, but they do not map onto a teleological or dialectical relationship (as much as we might like them to do so). In this, our desire as critics to reach a resolution between love and confession reflects Amans's own desire for success in love through confessional practice. The poem and the poet resist this desire and instead find in the crossing of the two discourses a source of narrative production and pleasure.