"Foryet it thou, and so wol I": Absolving Memory in Confessio Amantis

Abstract

"Foryet it thou, and so wol I":Absolving Memory in Confessio Amantis Paul D. Stegner John Gower structures Confessio Amantis on the sacrament of confession and, more particularly, on medieval penitential handbooks in order to treat the problem that "love is falle into discord."1 Confession is doubly inscribed in the Confessio—externally to repair "divisioun" and internally to lead Amans toward self-awareness (pro. 992). Just as Gower's style of "the middel weie" between "lust" and "lore" (pro. 17-19) is grounded in his intent to repair the external division caused by religious, political, and social discord, the poem's penitential structure is designed to remedy the lover's internal division and to function as an "[e]nsample" for readers (pro. 196). Amans identifies his confessional exchanges with Genius as capable of restoring his debilitated senses and providing a means to confess satisfactorily. Indeed, Amans expresses anxiety that his sinfulness has so afflicted his senses that he might fail to deliver a complete confession to Genius. He fears that he might "mistime / Mi schrifte" because he is "destourbed / In al myn herte" and "schal I moche thing foryete" but suggests that he can confess satisfactorily if Genius "my schrifte oppose / Fro point to point . . . / Ther schal nothing be left behinde" (1.220-27). Central to Genius's confessional program, then, is the rehabilitation of Amans's memory. The final events of the Confessio point to the effectiveness of Genius's penitential method in restoring Amans's memory. Amans may continue to be a reluctant penitent after the end of "The Tale of Apollonius," but once Cupid pulls out the arrow from his heart and Venus gives him a [End Page 488] wondrous mirror that reveals his age, he experiences a conversion and asks for and receives absolution from Genius, who explains, "Thou hast ful pardoun and foryifte" (8.2897). He then withdraws "Homward a softe pas y wente" (8.2967). Critics have variously interpreted Amans's memorial state at the conclusion of the Confessio as demonstrating a "regained . . . sense of personal kingdom," because "he now prays, as poet, for common profit, and right use of memory, and good governance" and a reintegrated Augustinian "spiritual memory."2 In such interpretations, the successful restoration of memory at the end of the poem reflects Gower's literary project. Yet for all of Genius's care to revitalize the lover's memory and to reconcile his interior spiritual condition, his absolution of Amans appears to undo this project: "Sone, as of thi schrifte / Thou hast ful pardoun and foryifte; / Foryet it thou, and so wol I" (8.2895-97). Whereas Genius typically associates forgetting with sinful behavior, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar's Dream, it here becomes a positive, essential mechanism for Gower's reintegration into the Christian economy.3 Genius's command to forget demonstrates the limits of memory: spiritual transformation cannot occur without the appropriate remembering of sin, but the process can only be completed through the productive forgetting of the desire to sin. In this essay, I argue that Gower represents a recuperative form of forgetting in order to signal the difficulty of reconciling auricular confession with narratives of desire, and I reveal the deep pressure between the penitent's memory of past transgressions and his reformation through confession. Forgetting amatory desire functions as a necessary conclusion to Amans's memorial rehabilitation because of Gower's treatment of the complex relationship between confession, amatory desire, and reason. From the prologue to the Confessio, Gower establishes an oppositional relationship between love and reason: "love . . . doth many a wonder / And many a wys man hath put under" (pro. 75-76).4 He figures this [End Page 489] conflict in terms of the tensions between the "lawe of kinde" (natural law), which he associates with Venus and venereal love, and the exercise of right reason (1.31). Gower represents the limitations of kindely love separated from reason by associating it with blind, irrational lust and by defining it as fundamentally implicated in incestuous desire. Incest functions, as C. David Benson observes in his discussion of the brother-sister incest in the "Tale of Canace and Machaire," "not [as] a wild aberration...