"It lyth nat in my tonge": Occupatio and Otherness in the Squire's Tale

Abstract

Taking place at the Mongol court at “Sarray, in the land of Tartarye” during the birthday celebrations of the fabled Ghengis Khan (V 9), 1 Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale is confined to a non-Christian cast of characters, and this tale of exotic eastern marvels has garnered much recent attention as medievalists have begun to examine the precolonial discourse of Orientalism. 2 In the process, criticism on the tale has shifted somewhat away from formal concerns about both the Squire’s flawed use of the rhetorical trope of non-description called occupatio and the poem’s separation into narrative sections long deemed to comprise a disjointed and singularly inartistic whole. Far from accidental or stylistic features of the text, however, the Squire’s egregiously bad use of occupatio and his selfconscious admissions of rhetorical inadequacy in Part One (prima pars) of the tale serve to contain the foreign, acknowledging Mongol cultural difference but failing to present the concrete terms on which such difference rests. In tactically mobilizing this rhetoric of failure, however, the Squire’s Tale suggests limitations, not merely to the Squire’s English, but to the English language itself. Recognizing that Part Two (pars secunda) of the tale offers plot developments that are neither anticipated by earlier events nor resolved by the poem’s abortive ending a few lines into the fragmentary Part Three (pars tercia), I argue that the tale is unified not by its narrative elements but rather by the way its linguistic anxieties are revealed and processed. In contrast to the overt difficulties of description and translation evinced in Part One, Part Two shows the Squire effortlessly recording in English a conversation between the Khan’s daughter Canacee and a bird from a foreign land, thereby constituting a fantasy resolution to the Squire’s rhetorical dilemma and recouping the English language as a fit medium of translation precisely at the moment of its potential debasement. Such fantasy resolutions, however, are rarely seamless, and while in Part Two of the tale Chaucer temporarily resolves these