Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls: Reading as an Act of Will

Abstract

The nimbleness Bronson attributes to Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls' may be less an intellectual agility than a formal demonstration of the limitations of the intellect itself. The poem's well-acknowledged resistance to interpretation or, to state it perhaps more accurately, its over-obliging accomodation of a multitude of interpretations, at times mutally exclusive yet equally possible, lends to the Parliament a disconcerting fascination. The poem may well be a presentation of choices or points of view concerning a particular subject. To read the poem in this way is to take it as an example of what Delany has termed Chaucer's pluralistic impulse, the equipoise of multiple perspectives with judgement suspended.2 If we wish to explore these perspectives, however, we must identify the poem's subject. We must make at least a tentative commitment to the poem's principal thematic concerns. Committing ourselves, we commit the author and narrator as well to a formulated position which may, in fact, be antithetical to the process which the Parliament describes. To say with Bennett, Burlin, and a host of other readers that the Parliament is about love or the idea of love limits the poem to a level of discourse and displaces in our reading the act of telling with the content of the told.3 The poem becomes a tract which says something regardless of the degree to which that something is ambiguous or multivalent. I wish to call such a subject-oriented reading into question and to suggest a manner in which the Parliament may be read not as subject and content but as process and act. The narrator of the Parliament does not present us with his understanding but with his struggle to understand, a struggle which terminates in dissatisfaction and irresolution. We have in the poem a record of an intellectual experience, the quest for an unidentified certeyn thing to lerne. The narrator's failure to identify the object of his quest may be taken as a playful teasing of the reader's interest, but I believe we may be justified in feeling that this teasing is taken too far. We are, after all, never told what the narrator seeks, only that he fails to find it. It may be that the object of the quest is not as important to the poem as the fact of the quest itself. If we see a specified subject as relatively unimportant, the experience which the narrator records may assume a position central to our reading of the poem. If we are not to be told what the Parliament is about, we may feel free to concentrate upon what the poem, in fact, is. I would suggest that the Parliament of Fowls is a quest for a point of resolution, a point never attained and perhaps unattainable. The narrator within the poem