5 - Personification, dreams, and narrative structures in Piers Plowman B

Summary

In the last chapter, we saw the ways in which Chaucer's The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls resemble Prudentius' Psychomachia in narrative and characterological structure. The two Middle English poems, like the fifth-century Latin one, provide a design in which personification figures are quarantined and ontologically differentiated from genuine human characters. If Chaucer's poems “imitate” personification tabulation of a characteristically Roman and archaic kind, Piers Plowman marks a modification of that tradition in other directions. In the physical proximity or presence of personification figures, Langland's Will the dreamer is far from silent or mute, and he freely “mixes” with them. Piers Plowman follows the “newer” style of personification popularized by de Lorris and de Meun, and Raoul de Houdenc and Huon de Mery. (It is plausible that the intensified confusion we and Will experience trying to distinguish local personifications from authentic personified characters is a shifted manifestation of psychic distortion or reduction; the epistemological problem, noted by Griffiths as central to the poem [4], did have a precedent thematization in the troubadour lyrics of the twelfth century; see Zumthor 185.) Nevertheless, the poem does reveal a phenomenological correlation between the primary narratorial consciousness and the invention of personification figures. I will begin with a critique of this correlation as it operates in Piers. Afterwards, I will show that this condition is connected to a narratological description of the poem's structure, which divides, not unlike Chaucer's or Prudentius' texts, into ontologically and epistemologically distinct levels and sectors of diegesis.