Gower’s Chronicles of Invention: Historiography and Productive Poetry in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis

Abstract

For Nowlin, passage in CA 4.2362-2745 that Macaulay headed Uses of Labour actually consists of three separate of invention, detailing the greatest 'inventions' of human culture (183), and these chronicles, he argues, allow to speak to historical project of as a whole--that is, historical project of rewriting of past in order to help restore a fallen present (183). reveals his interest in historiography and his awareness that 'history' itself is a discursive construction (184) throughout his works, but particularly in Visio in VC Book 1 and also elsewhere in CA, where he claims the form as well as matter of (185). The chronicle form does pose a certain dilemma, however, for while offering instructive examples from past, also suggests inevitable decay, contrary to Gower's own purpose, as illustrated in discussion of gentilesse that precedes passage in Book 4 that Nowlin examines. This, then, is problem for chronicler: How can a poet activate productive aspects of chronicle form without reintegrating its potentially corrosive elements? (188). The answer lies in Gower's imitation of practices in late medieval English chronicles that embed within a historiographic expression a dramatization of processes of invention. The productive, imaginative, and ultimately generative work of counteracts corrupting effects of chronicle narratives (188). The model is provided by Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon and Trevisa's translation, which offer a model of both in their principles of selection and arrangement and in invitation to reader to participate in historiographic process. In Book 4, Gower carefully works through conflation of historiography and characteristic of Polychronicon. There, he locates and enacts a compositional process that works to restore productive potential of chronicle form and estrange that form from movement toward discord demonstrated by history of 'gentilesse' (192). The details of Nowlin's account of that process cannot adequately be summarized here. In brief, Gower begins in first chronicle of by emphasizing form and labor of historiographic production, then by narrating simultaneous emergence of and historiography from chronicle of cultural development (192). seems to offer analogue for poetic invention that might be able to 'invent' a way out of corrosive chronicle form established in history of 'gentilesse.' But opposite turns out to be case because of failure of modern alchemists to match their predecessors (195). Alchemy represents at once failure of historiographic narration and productive invention (196). final chronicle in book 4 is something of a restart. It focuses specifically on 'our Marches hiere' (4.2633), that is, Roman tradition that produced Latin grammar, rhetoric, and ultimately Ovid--and by extension, 'Confessio Amantis' (197). The operating principle is congruite (4.2646): the Roman chronicle operates through an appositional, congruous organization that combines tenets of poetic with chronicle form. encodes process of poetic composition into structure of Roman chronicle, replacing chronology with inventional topics. He thereby replaces temporal discord that characterizes progression of chronicles with a structural system that, by definition, encourages discovery, choice, and possibility (198). Here, then, generates a new kind of English poetry, one that invests chronicle form with a vitality that would seem to have productive consequences for of both historiography and poetry (199). In conclusion, These chronicles reveal Gower's working through central historical problem for Confessio--the effort to salvage form of historiography along with its matter, but in a 'newe' way. . . . Adapting a fourteenth-century chronicle practice and applying to his long poem about love, foregrounds mechanism of poetic and historiographic composition and transforms force of codified historical progression into productive poetic creation. His chronicles prompt reflection and investigation, but they also suggest how a massive English poem like might be imagined as self-sustaining, and capable of becoming a kind of imaginative algorithm for poetic posterity. The labor of an English poet-chronicler, Confessio itself becomes a new kind of chronicle that invents history rather than a poem that merely uses it (201). [PN. Copyright. JGN 33.1].