CSUN ENGL 414 - “IT LYTH NAT IN MY TONGE”

Unformatted text preview:

“IT LYTH NAT IN MY TONGE”: OCCUPATIO AND OTHERNESS IN THE SQUIRE’S TALEby Alan S. AmbriscoTaking place at the Mongol court at “Sarray, in the land of Tartarye” dur-ing the birthday celebrations of the fabled Ghengis Khan (V 9),1Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale is confined to a non-Christian cast of characters,and this tale of exotic eastern marvels has garnered much recent atten-tion as medievalists have begun to examine the precolonial discourse ofOrientalism.2In the process, criticism on the tale has shifted somewhataway from formal concerns about both the Squire’s flawed use of therhetorical trope of non-description called occupatio and the poem’s sep-aration into narrative sections long deemed to comprise a disjointed andsingularly inartistic whole. Far from accidental or stylistic features of thetext, however, the Squire’s egregiously bad use of occupatio and his self-conscious admissions of rhetorical inadequacy in Part One (prima pars)of the tale serve to contain the foreign, acknowledging Mongol culturaldifference but failing to present the concrete terms on which such dif-ference rests. In tactically mobilizing this rhetoric of failure, however, theSquire’s Tale suggests limitations, not merely to the Squire’s English, butto the English language itself. Recognizing that Part Two (pars secunda)of the tale offers plot developments that are neither anticipated by ear-lier events nor resolved by the poem’s abortive ending a few lines into thefragmentary Part Three (pars tercia), I argue that the tale is unified notby its narrative elements but rather by the way its linguistic anxieties arerevealed and processed. In contrast to the overt difficulties of descriptionand translation evinced in Part One, Part Two shows the Squire effort-lessly recording in English a conversation between the Khan’s daughterCanacee and a bird from a foreign land, thereby constituting a fantasyresolution to the Squire’s rhetorical dilemma and recouping the Englishlanguage as a fit medium of translation precisely at the moment of itspotential debasement. Such fantasy resolutions, however, are rarely seam-less, and while in Part Two of the tale Chaucer temporarily resolves theseTHE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2004.Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA03_38_3_3rd 2/10/04 11:25 AM Page 205anxieties, they ultimately resurface in the poem’s ambivalent represen-tation of Canacee.The Squire’s Tale takes place during the two-day celebration of GhengisKhan’s birthday at his court in the city of Sarai. Part One of the taledescribes the festivities, focusing especially on the arrival of an emissarybearing gifts from the King of Arabia and India. Part Two begins with abrief account of how the drunken court retires for the evening, followedby an encounter between the Khan’s daughter and a bird on the morn-ing after the revelry. Much scholarship on the Squire’s Tale has beendevoted to finding Chaucer’s sources for the tale, both in western andeastern literary traditions. Poets, chroniclers, missionaries, and papallegates wrote about the Mongol Empire, and, as critics have shown, bothparts of the tale have sources from which Chaucer borrows, but no sin-gle source exists as a template for this tale of the Mongol world.3Chaucer, in other words, drew on many sources for his depiction ofthe Mongol court, and his tale also relies on a general knowledge ofMongols possessed by his original audience. Marie Cornelia has assem-bled the range of information about “Tartarye” that a well-read mem-ber of Chaucer’s audience would likely possess. She reminds us thatpersistent myths about the Mongols had a long history, and were onlypartially replaced by reliable accounts of European travelers to theregions under Mongol control. The result is that “[t]o the fourteenth-century imagination Tartary was a land of fable, and European geo-graphical knowledge of it was a body of fact liberally sprinkled withfiction.”4Ranging from vague to precise, from patently false to proba-bly true, the claims made about Mongols in romances, chronicles, andtravel accounts present them as provoking both fear and wonder in theirEuropean counterparts. Graphically recounting the sudden advances of the Mongols intoRussia during the thirteenth century, Matthew Paris’s Chronica Maioragives a good sense of the anxiety Mongols generated in Western Europeand foregrounds the most sensational trait ascribed to the invaders,whom it claims were “inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to becalled monsters than men, thirsting after and drinking blood, and tear-ing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings.”5These accusa-tions of Mongol cannibalism were widespread in thirteenth-century Latintravel accounts and chronicles, but they lack any support and have beenthoroughly refuted by modern scholarship.6While Paris’s text is typicalin its verbal description of Mongols, it is notable for the lavish illustra-tions, drawn by Paris himself, that accompany the text and contribute toits propagandist effects. In these images we see the Mongols depicted asanimalistic, sneering creatures, and in one illustration we even see thebarbaric practices of the Mongol cannibals, who are depicted as roastingmen on spits and eating their flesh.7THE CHAUCER REVIEW20603_38_3_3rd 2/10/04 11:25 AM Page 206ALAN S. AMBRISCO207But while anxiety-ridden, apocryphal legends of the Mongols and theirreputed cannibalism certainly circulated in the later Middle Ages, so toodid a genuine knowledge of the Mongol court enabled by a period ofpolitical and military calm referred to as the Pax Mongolica, during whichroads to the Far East lay open for travelers until Tamurlaine rose to powerafter 1368. Traveling the Empire’s well-guarded roads with the permis-sion of Mongol authorities, merchants like Marco Polo and missionarieslike William of Rubruck and Odoric of Pordenone brought back detaileddescriptions of the economies, political structures, belief systems, cloth-ing, and dietary habits of the Mongols and their conquered territories.Western ideas about Mongols, then, included a mixture of real and imag-ined practices ranging from the nomadic lifestyle of the Mongols them-selves, to the idol worshipping of medieval Tibetans, to the graphicallyreported ritual and customary cannibalism. The resulting constructionof Mongol culture engaged the imagination of Europeans long after thepractical fear of


View Full Document

CSUN ENGL 414 - “IT LYTH NAT IN MY TONGE”

Download “IT LYTH NAT IN MY TONGE”
Our administrator received your request to download this document. We will send you the file to your email shortly.
Loading Unlocking...
Login

Join to view “IT LYTH NAT IN MY TONGE” and access 3M+ class-specific study document.

or
We will never post anything without your permission.
Don't have an account?
Sign Up

Join to view “IT LYTH NAT IN MY TONGE” 2 2 and access 3M+ class-specific study document.

or

By creating an account you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Of Use

Already a member?