The Poetics of Personification (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Literary personification has long been taken for granted as an important aspect of Western narrative; Paul de Man has given it still greater prominence as 'the master trope of poetic discourse.' James Paxson here offers a much-needed critical and theoretical appraisal of personification in the light of poststructuralist thought and theory. The poetics of personification provides a historical reassessment of early theories, together with a sustained account of how literary personification works through an examination of narratological and semiotic codes and structures in the allegorical texts of Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland and Spenser. The device turns out to be anything but an aberration, oddity, or barbarism, from ancient, medieval, or early modern literature. Rather, it works as a complex artistic tool for revealing and advertizing the problems and limits inherent in narration in particular and poetic or verbal creation in general.

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The poetics of personification

Literature, Culture, Theory

General editors RICHARD MACKSEY, The Johns Hopkins University and MICHAEL SPRINKER, State University of New York at Stony Brook

The Cambridge Literature, Culture, Theory series is dedicated to theoretical studies in the human sciences that have literature and culture as their object of enquiry. Acknowledging the contemporary expansion of cultural studies and the redefinitions of literature that this has entailed, the series includes not only original works of literature theory but also monographs and essay collections on topics and seminal figures from the long history of theoretical speculation on the arts and human communication generally. The concept of theory embraced in the series is broad, including not only the classical disciplines of poetics and rhetoric, but also those of aesthetics, linguistics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and other cognate sciences that have inflected the systematic study of literature during the past half century. Titles published Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's dislocation of psychoanalysis SAMUEL WEBER

(translated from the German by Michael Levine) Wordsworth, dialogics, and the practice of criticism DON H. BIALOSTOSKY

The subject of modernity ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

Onomatopoetics: theory of language and literature JOSEPH GRAHAM

Parody: ancient, modern, and post-modern MARGARET ROSE

The poetics of personification JAMES PAXSON

Possible worlds in literary theory RUTH RONEN

The poetics of personification JAMES J. PAXSON Iona College, New Rochelle

| CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521106313 © Cambridge University Press 1994 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1994 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Paxson, James J. The poetics of personification/James J. Paxson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-521-44539-6 1. Personification in literature. 2. Literature, Medieval — History and criticism. 3. Rhetoric, Medieval. 4. Allegory. I. Title. PN56.P38P39 1994 809'.915-dc20 93-15561 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-44539-9 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-10631-3 paperback

For my parents, Marge and Bud Paxson

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Introduction

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A history of personification theory

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Preface

As I completed the final revisions of The Poetics of Personification, I saw more and more the need to continue work on this strange device in a range of purviews only touched on in this study. I especially care to persist in examining the cultural and public constructions of personification or rhetorical embodiment in our own political and popular culture. Although I argue in this book that we have moved past a historical era when personificational literature was powerful and esteemed, I have looked suspiciously and curiously at governmental rhetoric of late: no one could miss the significance of President George Bush's charges against the One Evil Man, Saddam Hussein, who personified all the miseries of the 1990 Persian Gulf War and all the ills of contemporary Iraq. I therefore hope that this specialized book, which largely addresses a readership interested in literary theory (and in the stakes of deconstruction, in particular) and medieval allegorical literature, will prompt further interest in the continuing global implications of figural language and thought in a decisively postmodern era. The essential frame of this book began as my doctoral dissertation which I completed while holding a State University of New York Dissertation Fellowship during 1988-89. I thank, first and foremost, my wife Tammy for helping me find the time to read, write, and revise during that year and over the subsequent three years, while we were more than busy — both working and trying to raise our two babies, Maggie and John. I give special thanks to Rose A. Zimbardo, Martin Stevens, Michael Sprinker, and Thomas E. Maresca for reading and commenting on the three or so drafts that this thing has been through. I am indebted to Tom Maresca for our numerous discussions on allegory and personification; indeed, he prompted my strong interest in allegory theory in general. To my friend Jeffrey Williams I also give a special thank you. Jeff and I have had many talks - often long distance - on the current state of theory and the profession, on

Preface narratology, and on deconstruction. I wish also to extend thanks to an informal - and sempiternal, so it seems - study group I join regularly at Columbia University: Christopher Baswell, Sealy Gilles, Joan Haahr, Robert W. Hanning, Sandra Pierson Prior, Nancy Reale, Anne Schotter, Robert Stein, and Sylvia Tomasch. These generous and supportive persons have heard and read bits and pieces of this project as it came together. I am likewise grateful to my colleague at Iona College, Thomas Pendleton, with whom I endlessly discuss the problems of personification in Shakespeare — a peculiar critical problem that will warrant its own study as fast as I can get into it! Like the shimmering Body Politic of medieval political theory, this study offers a Face for the help from a legion of friends, colleagues, and teachers.

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Personification, or prosopopeia, has enjoyed serious attention only in recent critical and literary theory. The readily spotted figure — through which a human identity or " face" is given to something not human-was for years automatically equated with "allegory." 1 Moreover, personificational allegory was thought of as wooden, tedious, obvious, simple, and juvenile.2 But a recrudescence in allegory theory, founded largely on more incisive readings of the classical rhetoricians and the Church Fathers, rehabilitated the mysterious narrative mode called allegory and in turn removed personification from its purview.3 Next, poststructuralist thinkers re-evaluated, along with allegory, the highly complex nature and key value of personification in literary discourse. Of late, prosopopeia has even come to enjoy theoretical primacy over irony and metaphor. Paul de Man has proclaimed it "the master trope of poetic discourse" (Resistance 48). The present book aims to extend and enrich the current theoretical rehabilitation of personification begun by de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and others. Granted, the deconstructive theory of personification (like the deconstructive theory of "allegory") seems to expand to the point where it encompasses all narrative or lyric. This book tries to reach a theoretical line of mediation between the poststructural posture wherein all kinds of poetic knowledge register an "allegorical" and "prosopopoetic" cognition, and the traditional critical posture that attends to canonically received (and for the most part pre-modern) allegorical texts. The first step in such a rethinking of personification must thus be a careful investigation of its formal nature, for tropological poetics is certainly the methodological common ground shared by poststructural deconstruction and traditional grammatical or rhetorical theory and praxis. I contend that the trope, especially in the works of certain major authors, is sufficiently complex — as are irony, metaphor, metonymy, or catachresis — to warrant minute structural description. Such a description should provide the ar-

The poetics of personification ticulation of a formal system or a set of laws that govern the creation and functions of personified characters - in short, a "poetics" of personification. Ideally, this projected poetics should entail treating examples of literary personification from many different periods and national traditions, including an analysis of the historical fountainhead of Western literary personification: the personified abstractions seen on Achilles' shield in the Iliad or those that people Hesiod's imaginative genealogies in his Theogony. In this line of works stand Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Book vi of Vergil's Aeneid, the works of Martianus Capella, Boethius, Allan of Lille, Bernardus Silvestris, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and so on. For practical purposes it should suffice to establish the preliminary grounds for such a poetics upon the detailed examination of four canonically major authors who use a variety of methods in the invention of personification characters. The texts under study are Prudentius' Psychomachia, two of Chaucer's long allegorical dream poems as well as The Nuns Priest's Tale, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The selection of texts and authors is not intended to posit a chronologically chartable, genetic line of evolution. Nor does it imply that the works of the four authors under discussion are, by necessity, superior to other examples from the allegorical tradition in a formally qualitative sense. That is, canonically " great" authors do not always employ tropes in cleverer, more profound ways. Texts of minor authors, works of popular culture (like modern cinematic cartoons), or bits of everyday speech for that matter, can contain personification figures of a complex nature. The texts in this book's selection reveal paradigmatic employments of personification that best dramatize the formal codes which constitute the trope and that in turn advertise the limits of tropological formalization. The first chapter of this study isolates the theoretical problem in terms of an historical survey of ideas about personification. Here, I consider the opinions of Aristotle and the classical rhetoricians Demetrius, Cicero, the Rhetorica Ad Herennium author, and Quintilian. I mention the work of major medieval writers on the subject, such as Bede and Geoffrey of Vinsauf. And I include theories offered by certain Renaissance thinkers, such as Erasmus, Henry Peacham, George Puttenham, or Richard Sherry. I also treat Enlightenment and Romantic theorists like Fontanier, Lord Kames, and Coleridge. The considerations of personification by twentieth-century theorists caps the

Introduction

historical survey in chapter 1 but also punctuates the whole study. My intention here is to trace and compare the ways in which ideas about personification evolve through time, and to highlight theoretical treatments that do handle personification as a complex device. As a sideline, this comparative program supplies brief etymological points regarding the successive connotations of terms like "prosopopeia," "conformatio," or "personification." In line with the spirit of the diachronic sketch in chapter 1, the second chapter of the book reassesses the conventional terminology associated with personification. The subject cries out for rigorous taxonomy. Many literary characters who appear in personification narratives are automatically and decisively labeled "personifications." Such a general type-label makes no distinction among the textual and ontological statuses of what might be radically different fictional entities. For example, the mute and blank characters whom Aeneas encounters at the gate of the underworld in Book Six of Vergil's epic are poetically or formally different from the outspoken and minutely described figures who converse with and instruct the dreamer in Piers Plowman. Yet, conventional criticism treats these quite different categories of figural character invention as though they were the same. As the example shows, the speaking aspect of a prosopopeia is essential in describing a personification character's essential status. Thus, a primary taxonomic point must be the presence, absence, or varieties of speech produced by such characters. Another primary point has to do with labels or names of personification figures: are they named? How fully? In what languages? Taxonomy is crucial to any effective formal poetics. The taxonomic tactic in this chapter centers, of course, on the structural distinction of personification used as a component of narrative discourse and as a component of narrative story or fabular, material event. This distinction, in turn, shapes much of the book's theoretical framework, which in some way addresses the thematization of or focalization on the coded structures of personification evinced in the works of four principal authors. Chapter 3 deals with the Psychomachia, and centers upon a narratological program analyzing "layers" or levels of diegesis in Prudentius' narrative. This program of analysis also tries to account for the relationship, from the Apologetic and Patristic periods on, between personification and the traditional medieval four-level paradigm of literal and extra-literal signification. From the topic of diegetic structuration in Prudentius' poem, I move

The poetics of personification in chapter 4 to the sketch of a phenomenological model that explains the textual " generation" of personification figures. (Rather than an apology for phenomenology as an epistemological mode, the chapter provides the framework for showing how personificational thinking in medieval literature presages modern philosophical or critical phenomenology.) Such characters, I will show, are figural indices of a psychically or spiritually diminished narrator. This argument involves a brief excursus into medieval notions of psychology and sin. I also show its application to problems of narrative structure and the thematic foregrounding, specifically in The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, of images and ideas of pictorial art. Via a consequent discussion of narratorial " diminution " and a review of the philosophical notion of acedia or " sloth," I take up a discussion of personification in chapter 5 of Langland's Piers Plowman. In this chapter, I shall argue that the embedded dreams of this peculiar and complex Middle English poem correspond to layered diegetic registers. Taking the cue from the second chapter of my study, I also map out the variety of denominational methods Langland employs for naming the species of his figural characters. The chapter focuses on the uncovering and articulation of a precise proairetic code that programs the means by which Langland's narrator, Will, recognizes, names, and interacts with various personification figures. This code is determined, of course, by the poem's complex narratological structure. Chapter 6 devotes itself to what tradition has undoubtedly cast as the grandest of personification narratives in English letters - The Faerie Queene. Clearly the fields of personification theory and Renaissance studies require a multi-volume study of the personification figures, their variety and variability, in Spenser's poem. No doubt, my confined look at personification in two or so Books of The Faerie Queene will feel too brief given the vast scale of the poem. But my focal interest in this chapter falls upon several sites in the poem where Spenser, like his two innovative predecessors, self-consciously plays with and foregrounds the features of personification understood as an artificial, complex, literary trope. I first examine the final cantos of Book 11, where Sir Guyon encounters such figures as Eumnestes ("Memory") in Alma's House of Temperance. In this section of his poem, Spenser constantly foregrounds and examines ideas and images of language, writing, texts, and textualized entities to which he gives human or other substantial form. I also examine cantos 11 and 12 of Book iv, in which we meet the peculiar pageant-procession of the

Introduction

personified Rivers. This site in Spenser's poem offers a sustained examination of types of figural character invention and the problem of narrative temporality. I demonstrate the process by which Spenser's passages on the personified Rivers of the world deconstruct traditional formal notions of literary character, description, and narration. In addition, my discussions of characters including Error, Duessa, Orgoglio, Malbecco (Jealousy) and Death disclose how Spenser's text narrates the literalized moment of the "making" or "unmaking" of a personification figure. By these examinations of Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland, and Spenser, I seek to show how these texts embody art that is far more sophisticated than the simple visual or functional verbal personification that had nearly turned serious critical inspection away from the face of the trope.4 Indeed, fewer and fewer thinkers today believe in the old "axiomatic association" between personification and allegory. But even misdirected wisdom finds its basis in some truth. Is there a direct and sometimes necessary connection between personification and allegory? Basing my conception of allegory on the most current, complex, insightful, and convincing theoretical models of this mysterious narrative mode, I attempt in my Conclusion to show how and why the use of personification figuration by Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland, and Spenser might well operate as the basis of narrative allegory. Because these authors handle the trope in elaborately selfreflexive and metafictional ways, their creative methods are crucial to the kind of genuine allegory described in current literary theory.5 Although the object of this study is to establish a formal poetics of personification based in part on the readings of four canonical Western authors, I end with a sketch of plausible theoretical models, not yet established, of the essential or ontological status of the trope as a master or key trope, a "metafigure." In this sketch, I consider personification as the trope or figure of several principles — from narration to characterization, from figuration itself to Derrida's concept of relever as a possible concomitant of the process he calls "metaphorization." Many of these ideas I develop as proposals or prospectuses for future directions in a total theory of personification. Chief among these proposals is the potential historical materialist implication of a long-range historical survey of literary personification. Such a historical program could explore how, when, and why, certain of the major features of personification figuration and fabulation arise when they do. For instance, what characteristics of the ideological

The poetics of personification superstructure of late Rome inform the advent of literary paysage moralise or the helium intestinuml What characteristics of medieval ideology inform the debate or the pageant-procession topos? What, aside from grammatical gender, was responsible for the fact that all personification figures prior to the sixth century A.D. were exclusively and necessarily female? The primary aim of these concluding propositions is to show that a formal poetics is still far from being exhaustively descriptive of the nature of literary personification, one of the most curious and compelling effects in Western art and literature. One more foundational assumption that underlies the interests of this study needs clarification at the outset. In examining personification figures that appear in Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland, and Spenser, I shall avoid those fantastic characters who are termed "gods." The Olympian deities of Homer's Iliad or Hesiod's Theogony indeed seem to be embodied abstract concepts named in Greek that were adopted as the objects of ancient Achaean veneration. However, describing the historical origin of the gods who constitute an animistic or totemistic pantheon is an anthropological problem, not a literary or poetic one. At the close of his brilliant study of allegory and personification, Jon Whitman aptly identifies this special scholarly project: In short, it is necessary to distinguish two meanings of the term " personification." One refers to the practice of giving an actual personality to an abstraction. This practice has its origins in animism and ancient religion, and is called "personification" by modern theorists of religion and anthropology. U71) For instance, when Joseph Campbell, in any one of his popular books on mythology, calls Isis a "personification" of procreative energy, he invokes this anthropological understanding of the term.6 Whitman goes on to distinguish this understanding from its more proper and familiar literary and rhetorical use: The other meaning of "personification," the one used throughout this study, is the historical sense of prosopopoeia. This refers to the practice of giving a consciouslyfictionalpersonality to an abstraction, "impersonating" it. This rhetorical practice requires a separation between the literary pretense of a personality, and the actual state of affairs. Thus, we cannot properly speak of literary "personification" when Homer calls "fire" by the name of "Hephaestus" ... who is also described as a personal god. (271-72) Even with this formal distinction in mind, Whitman still attends (14—20) to the appearance of deific, embodied abstractions in the Iliad,

Introduction

perhaps because his study is structured as a historical genealogy of personification allegories that must have a chronological starting place. The present study closely adheres at least to Whitman's theoretical distinction. The move forecloses the need to look at preChristian literary texts that contain fantastic characters and embodiments that are most likely animistic entities. (Consequently, chapter 1 of this book bypasses theoretical discussions like Vico's analysis in The New Science [120 ff.] of the animistic and "personificational" origins of the gods.) It also forecloses the need to become absorbed in the gods or other mythical characters who frequently inhabit the works of Chaucer or Spenser. This is not to say that the study ignores a character like Venus in Chaucer's The House of Fame. Rather, she is examined only in structural relation to genuine personification characters - to those "embodied abstractions'' which, as Whitman notes, had only a "fictional" and never an "actual" basis in reality. Characters designated as "gods," incidentally, might be more properly considered "numinous" figures. These constitute a category which I attempt, in chapter 2, to define in comparison to true personifications. Still, the distinctions among gods, ghosts, genii, fantastic creatures, and personification characters were not always clear even to the principal theorists of classical, medieval, or Renaissance rhetoric. The historical discussion that follows will bear this out. It will also provide this study with a minimum currency of taxonomic insights and methodological departure points.

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I The sensible starting place for a theoretical investigation into personification would be a comprehensive historical survey of writings that discuss the trope. The modern critical voices placed in the Introduction of. this study are, for the most part, theoretical devaluations of personification. These voices also represent the major positions in a critical dialogue that has emerged mainly in the service of the theoretical "rescue" of allegory as a privileged, superior, mysterious narrative mode. But a coordinate critical dialogue that treats personification as a valuable and sophisticated commodity must also be articulated as a history. This dialogue also has its inception in the rhetorical treatises of antiquity, and culminates in a collection of occasionally offbeat documents produced by a handful of contemporary literary and rhetorical theorists. Ideally, mapping this second dialogue would entail treating every recorded mention of the trope personification, however brief or matter-of-fact, from the era of Aristotle's Rhetoric and forward through the history of Western grammatical and. rhetorical theory. But such a compendious historical survey would not really serve to elucidate the true nature of personification; it might, on the contrary, support the theoretical camps that devalue the trope. This is because we would be faced with a mountain of summary, formulaic, aphoristic utterances about prosopopeia and its relatives. The uniformity and sheer mass of these utterances would defuse the ostensibly delicate and powerful virtue of the trope. Most "histories" of what is commonly conceived of as "rhetoric" themselves suffer from just such an obsession with the pathology of the compendium. The conception of rhetoric as a mountain of data that involves the sheer naming and identification of all conceivable tropes, schemes, figures, and topics of invention is the degenerative legacy of classical

History of personification theory

logic and rhetoric in the Middle Ages and after. As Richard McKeon explains: The history of rhetoric as it has been written since the Renaissance is ... in part the distressing record of the obtuseness of writers who failed to study the classics and to apply rhetoric to literature, and in part the monotonous enumeration of doctrines, or preferably sentences, repeated from Cicero or commentators on Cicero. (260) In the Middle Ages, rhetoric failed to hold as its primary interest the discovery, invention, and implication of topics and arguments; rather, it pursued the taxonomic obsession best suited to the compilatio or the scholia formats of treatise composition. Medieval, Renaissance, and Neoclassical rhetorics provided collections of sentences and terse passages that named any conceivable number of tropes and figures. These collections were supplemented with literary examples originally conceived by Cicero or Quintilian. The two great Roman rhetoricians, in fact, are the seminal sources for medieval rhetoricians. McKeon continues: Scholarly labors have reconstructed only a brief and equivocal history for rhetoric during the Middle Ages. The development consists of slight and original increments of erudition in the compendia composed from the fourth to the ninth century - derived largely from the De Inventione of Cicero and the Ad Herennium — and in later commentaries and treatises to the elaboration of coherent and complex doctrines in the twelfth century based on Quintilian and the later rhetorical works of Cicero, the Orator, the De oratore, and the Topica.

(260)

Most of the entries, then, in a tentative history of the trope personification would repeat the original musings of Demetrius, Cicero, the Rhetorica ad Herennium author, and Quintilian. Only after " rhetoric disappears when knowledge of it is at a maximum " (McKeon 260), would we find the possibility of entirely fresh and original theoretical considerations of personification. Historically, this point of maximization is located by Paul Ricoeur and Tzvetan Todorov in the writings of the "last rhetorician in Europe," Pierre Fontanier (Rule 4; Symbol 69-70). The rigorously formal and aesthetic appraisal of tropes and figures is coterminous only with the rise of modern literary criticism. (Earlier, of course, the description and appraisal of tropes was often deferred from rhetoric to grammar; see Copeland 13-17.) Nonetheless, a selective historical survey of theories and ideas about

The poetics of personification personification should prove illuminating. The project, however, requires acknowledgement of some problems involved in writing any kind of history, whether of forms, ideas, topoi, or texts. Writing a history of the trope personification might automatically assume the tactic of literary history as it has been conceived during much of the twentieth century. Tropes and figures, as discreet formal entities, can be likened to texts. The temptation to see them as precursors or successors in a lengthy chronological chain is always present. We could fall prey to the impulse of seeing the history of a given trope as a genetic order in which earlier, literary implementations or theoretical conceptions of the trope evolve into richer, more complex and mature, later versions — versions made possible by the more highly evolved temperaments of creative men and women in chronologically later periods. A genetic history of tropes would parallel the genetic or organic history of literary texts of the kind criticized by R. S. Crane {History 32—33). Yet, in abandoning the organic models of literary history offered by, say, Taine or Cazamian, Crane inadvertently articulates the design of a history of figures which valorizes the function of the formally internal properties of texts. He indeed understands an evolution, through history, of modes, genres, forms, and by extension, formal figures and tropes (Sprinker 126—33, 145). In fact, Crane specifically mentions the chronological evolution of figures: "We may thus say theoretically ... that there is a tendency in the literary arts to move from ... simple metaphors to complex and difficult ones" {History 33). Even though Crane admits that "in any given situation in history the [evolutionary] order may be reversed," he has programmed his history of forms and figures as a genealogy. Crane's genealogy, directed to a perfective telos and self-generating, is not unlike the pervasive phylogenetic image of history identified by de Man, in "Literary History and Literary Modernity," as a "temporal hierarchy that resembles a parental structure" {Blindness 164). But the advents and implementations of tropes like personification, through history, hardly conform to a phylogenetic model. Not only are individual figures resistant to an evolutionary model, so are any historically successive conceptions of figuration in general. The successive and historically determined statuses of figuration or tropology are impossible to calculate according to a linear calendar of Western intellectual history. That is, the ethical and axiological valorization of figures that are conceived either as poetic forms or as affective vehicles cannot be made parallel to sequentially successive

History of personification theory

chronological periods. It is common knowledge that figuration, as a constituent part of literary discourse, was appreciated as a positive, ornamental, and pleasing commodity in the Horatian tradition.1 The sentiment is upheld by Sidney in his A Defense of Poetry (28—29) and echoed by his Renaissance contemporaries. According to Henry Peacham, the notorious figure allegory " serveth most likely to ingrave the lively images of things" on the human mind, "wherein wit and iudgement take pleasure'' (29). But paradoxically, the figure allegory as it was described by Demetrius eighteen centuries earlier was seen to cause unease, fear, and displeasure in readers (11.100). A widespread notion in the Middle Ages, most emphatically voiced by the rhetorician and dogmatist John Balbus of Genoa, held that all figuration was a negative and evil commodity (Murphy 186).2 How can we systematically account for the rise and fall in value of figuration throughout history? We can attempt to map the prevailing social, religious, economic, and political climates of each successive period in Western history, and this will show at best that there is no evolutionary and genetic pattern to the chronologically changing status of figuration in general and of individual tropes, schemes, and figures in particular. To return momentarily to the metaphor of phylogeny, we realize that a popular logical fallacy in the metaphorics of history writing is confounding phylogenesis with ontogenesis confounding the maturation of the species with the maturation of an individual of that species. Just as there can be no teleologically ordered model of rhetoric (as collective species) through the ages, so there can be no teleologically ordered model of a given trope through time.

II Although Aristotle's Rhetoric might seem to be the chronological starting place to look for pronouncements on the trope personification or prosopopeia, we find in it few identifications of individual tropes, figures, or schemes by name. Aristotle's primary interest in the Rhetoric is to discover and arrange arguments. Consequently, the " unitary quantity" of interest is not the figure, as it is in all subsequent rhetorical treatises, but the enthymeme (Rhetoric 1396a—1400b). In his theoretical excursion into style, Aristotle at most names and describes "metaphor" and "simile," and provides numerous examples of the varieties of each. In his subordinate discussion on "proportional

The poetics of personification metaphors/' Aristotle does indeed describe " Homer's common practice of giving metaphorical life to lifeless things" (i4iib.25-35). 3 The virtue of this variety of metaphor is the vivid sense of " activity " it imparts to a passage. Yet, Aristotle does not employ the term "prosopopeia" to name this metaphorical effect. I suggest that the unor post-Aristotelian fashion, in rhetorical theory, of naming and taxonomizing tropes is at the root of the compendium tradition in medieval rhetoric. A proclivity towards the rhetorical compendium is already apparent in Demetrius of Phalerum's third-century B.C. treatise On Style (Peri Ermeneias). It is here that we find the first description in Western rhetorical theory of the trope personification as it is definitively indicated by the term "prosopopeia." Demetrius' definition is concise yet inclusive of potential varieties of the trope. He writes: "Another figure of thought - the so-called 'prosopopoeia' - may be employed to produce energy of style, as in the words: 'Imagine that your ancestors, or Hellas, or your native land, assuming a woman's form, should address such and such reproaches to you'" (461, 63). Evidently, the term "prosopopeia" represents several subordinate figural conceptions that we will see variously described in later rhetorical treatises. For Demetrius, prosopopeia can be the apostrophic "making present" of a dead ancestor as well as the anthropomorphizing and lending of speech to a conceptually abstract, geopolitical entity. A syntactical ambiguity in W. Rhys Roberts' translation, however, designates that the "ancestors" are assuming the prosopoetic form of the woman. The summoning of ancestors is an elementary kind of "apostrophic" pfosopopeia, and it requires no actual "invention" or materialization of a character which has never before possessed a human form. Unlike an abstraction or a piece of land, the ancestor has indeed enjoyed human form. He is only currently "removed" in a temporal sense, not an ontological sense. The syntax of the sentence, therefore, inappropriately suggests that the ancestor can be assigned to " a woman's form " (gynaikos schema). It should be clear that as early as Demetrius' entry on personification, the theoretical distinction among potential kinds of prosopopeia is already tainted by confusion in expository discourse. Shortly, we will see how the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium handles the idea of trans-temporal, apostrophic personification in conjunction with the idea of lending human form and speech to a geographical locus. Before proceeding with this survey, we should note that the general 12

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notion of prosopopeia as a method of character invention has an allied source in Greek drama and the philosophical dialogue. At the openings of Plato's dialogues or of the plays of Euripides, we often find a rubric called prosopa ("faces'' or "masks"), meaning dramatis personae. As the entry for "prosopopeia" in Liddell and Scott's Greek Dictionary indicates, the term denotes the creation of any kind of dramatic character in a mimetic text (Haworth 45—46). The character or prosopon need not be an abstraction given human form. It could be any historical or mythical human personage re-presented in the text. It could be Socrates or Gorgias in a Platonic dialogue; or it could be Admetus and Alcestis - and not necessarily Thanatos ("Death") - in Euripides' Alcestis. The word "prosopopeia" seems to have indicated a means of mimetic character invention before it described a mode of rhetorical ornamentation.4 The next major treatment of the trope personification comes in the anonymous Rhetorica Ad Herennium. Among the two or three most popular and influential rhetorical treatises in the ancient world, the book was attributed after the time of St. Jerome to Cicero, and later, to someone named Cornificius (Herennium viii-ix). The most original and striking feature of the plan of the Rhetorica as a whole is the author's election to use translative Latin names for the tropes and figures rather than the original Greek ones. (Quintilian is counted among the Roman rhetoricians who, in the learned convention of their day, directly imported the Greek names of the figures by writing them in Greek lettering.) Thus, the Rhetorica author names the trope which we call "personification" by the label conformatio. In Book iv's discussion of "figures of thought," we find a succinct paragraph headed by the definition of conformatio, followed by numerous examples from contemporaneous political discourse. Like Demetrius, the Rhetorica author's definition begins with a statement about what I have called the "apostrophic" variety of personification, and proceeds to a more inclusive description: Conformatio est cum aliqua quae non adest persona confingitur quasi adsit, aut cum res muta aut informis fit eloquens, et forma ei et oratio adtribuitur ad dignitatem adcommodata aut actio quaedam... Haec conformatio licet in plures res, in mutas atque inanimas transferatur. Proficit plurimum in amplificationis partibus et commiseratione. (Personification consists in representing an absent person as present, or in making a mute thing or one lacking form articulate, and attributing to it a definite form and a language of certain behavior appropriate to its character

The poetics of personification ... Personification may be applied to a variety of things, mute and inanimate. It is most useful in the divisions under Amplification and in Appeal to Pity.) (iv.66) Let us dwell upon this rich passage, for it provides, albeit in fustian style, most of the connotations and subordinate varieties of personification to which rhetoricians after the Latin Golden Age attend. The first stated condition, the figure's power to "make present" a person who is absent, is a generalized description of personification as a device for transcending spatiality: he or she who is physically or spatially remote is brought into the proximity of the speaker. This invokes a specific figural seme — which we can call " the annihilation of space " — that is translated, in the author's example of the great Lucius Brutus "come to life again" (revivescat), into its corollary seme, "the annihilation of time." This is so because, like Demetrius' foremost example of the trope, personification often involves the figural "reviving" of a person or persons (for Demetrius, progonous, " ancestors ") who are long dead, persons who are temporally removed from the speaker. True, none of the classical rhetoricians "read" the trope personification as a figural mechanism for manipulating time and space (cf. the tropes anachronism and anachorism). But the programmatic moves wherein Demetrius and the Rhetorica ad Herennium author begin their definitions of personification with images of restoring, spatially or temporally, a non-present human being further underscores the role of the trope as (A) a variation on apostrophe, and (B) a means of dramatic character invention or presentation. This underscoring on the part of the Rhetorica author overrides the secondary value of personification, which is its role as a device for making articulate (fit eloquens) that which is mute. Here, however, the Rhetorica collapses two subordinate (or really, coordinate) tropes of personification. Lending speech to mute things (animals or objects) can be seen as a figural maneuver distinct from lending "a definite form" to something without physical contour, something insubstantial (say, an ideational abstraction; in chapter 2 of this study, I will undertake a modern taxonomy based in part on the terms of these translative effects). But the Rhetorica author's initial sentence involves syntactical confusion which blocks ready discernment of the potentially subordinate varieties of personification. Returning to the second and third clauses of the sentence, we see that the writer's regular use of the conjunction aut ("or") confounds a clear and ready lining up of direct objects and their indirect objects. Does

History of personification theory

the "attributing" (adtribuitur) of "definite form" (forma) and "a language" (oratio) in clause three apply to the "mute thing" (res muta) or to the thing "lacking form" (res... informis), both in clause two? Furthermore, does the "certain behavior" (actio) that should be "appropriate to its [italics mine] character" (ad dignitatem adcommodata) refer to the mute thing or to the formless thing? For a treatise so concerned with the correct and clear creation of syntax and grammar, the Rhetorica at this point provides tangled syntax. It therefore confronts us with an anomaly. The compendium or scholium format of Book iv seems explicitly designed to make immediately evident the natures, along with exemplary implementations, of the major figures of thought and diction. (A perusal of the entries relegated to the remaining figures in Book iv bears this out.)5 The economy of the compendium is subverted by this brief but oblique discourse on personification. In the history of Western rhetorical treatises, the Book iv personification passage inaugurates discursive confusion about what should be an easily definable figure of thought. As early as the Rhetorica ad Herennium, we see a theoretical difficulty in talking about personification and its subordinate or coordinate tropes. If the modern devaluers of personification (whom I addressed in the Introduction to this study) believe that a definitive and simplistic explanation of the trope is adducible from an inaugural text like the Rhetorica, they are clearly mistaken. If Demetrius' On Style and the Rhetorica ad Herennium initiate a less than clear cut understanding of personification, the writings of Cicero provide a straightforward and unconfused conception of the trope. It is possible, for that matter, that the devaluation and demystification of personification is traceable to the De oratore, the De inventione, and the Orator — the written manifestos of the greatest voice in the Roman traditions of rhetoric and legal advocacy. Cicero does not even mention prosopopeia or conformatio in the De inventione, and his treatments of the trope in the other two treatises are made mainly in passing. Cicero describes, but like Aristotle does not name, the figure prosopopeia in the De oratore: Quo item in genere et virtutes et vitia pro ipsis in quibus ilia sunt appellantur: "Luxuries quam in domum irrupit," et "quo avaritia penetravit," aut "fides valuit," "iusticia confecit/' (And also in the same class is the use of the names of the virtues and vices to stand for the people who possess them-"The dwelling whereinto Ex-

The poetics of personification travagance / Hath forced an entry" - and "where avarice has found its way," or "loyalty has prevailed," "justice has achieved.") (3.42.168) The "same class" Cicero speaks of is "substitution or metonymy" {tradudio atque immutatio, 3.42.167), the figural superset of personification. Later in the De oratore (3.53.205), Cicero includes in a long list of oratorical ornaments a device through which the speaker effects personarumfictainductio, the "impersonation of people." But the terse mention of this effect at this point does not link it definitively to personification; "personation" could simply be the representation of regular human characters, a discursive method not necessarily motivated by a figural operator. In the Orator, Cicero mentions the process of personification (again leaving the trope unnamed) as a figure of speech to be used sparingly or avoided altogether as a means of enlivening discourse. Among a litany of devices a speaker may use to "brighten his style" (ilia sententiarum lumina), Cicero advises "Nonfaciet rem publicam loauentem nee ab infernis mortuos excitabit..." ("He will not represent the State as speaking or call the dead from the lower world..."). The themes of prosopopeia mentioned in this caveat were first conceived, we saw above, by Demetrius: giving speech to a geopolitical entity, and annihilating or eliding time by the "making present" a dead person. Both the De oratore and the Orator treatments of the trope are highly paraphrastic. Like Aristotle, Cicero is interested in the discovery of logical tactics and topical bases. He is not a compiler and namer of figures. Cicero, thus, does not fit into the pedigree of taxonomyobsessed rhetoricians. Yet his primary authority through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was indisputable. Next in this history of personification theory comes Quintilian. The Institutio Oratoria clearly did not enjoy the popularity of Cicero's treatises in the Middle Ages. Yet its form and its drift place it squarely in the tradition of the rhetorical compendium. Quintilian's treatise was a rhetorical opus magnum in which the author attempted a scope far greater than that of any of his predecessors. Its expanded format of twelve books allowed the author to indulge in an extensive taxonomy of tropes. His description of personification, therefore, is the most thorough and complete up to the middle of the first century A. D. Quintilian's understanding of the trope, in fact, goes beyond the conventional notion of an abstraction given voice. Taking the cue from Cicero's passing comment on character "personation," Quintilian 16

History of personification theory

places under the rubric of prosopopeia (which he names at the outset in Greek, 9.2.29) the invention of a hypothetical voice for a client in a court of law. The examples Quintilian provides regarding this mode of personation demonstrate that he conceives of prosopopeia specifically as a means in legal and juridical discourse, rather than as a general-purpose way of enlivening or varying any kind of public speech. Quintilian's method of discussing the trope is more sophisticated than that of his predecessors for two main reasons. First, he takes into account other theoretical positions on the matter of prosopopeia: Ac sunt quidam, qui has demum prosopopoiias dicant, in quibus et corpora et verba fingimus; sermones hominum adsimulatos dicere dialogous malunt, quod Latinorum quidam dixerunt sermocinationem. (9.2.31) (There are some authorities who restrict the term impersonation to cases where both persons and words are fictitious, and prefer to call imaginary conversations between men by the Greek name of dialogue, which some translate by the Latin sermocinatio.) Second, he explores the possibility of the trope's formal relationship to other tropes in bold ways. That is, whereas Cicero at best saw personification as a variety of metonymy, Quintilian proposes the trope's contingent and periodic similarity to many figural relatives. As we saw, he (1) likens prosopopeia to dialogue-, but also, (2) he sees it as a kind of parode ("parody," 9.2.35); (3) he understands it in the conventional way as the substantialization of an abstraction (formas quoque fingimus saepe, Q.2.36); (4) it is also the speaker's or writer's introduction of "some imaginary person" without a nominational identification into his discourse (Est et incertae personae ficta oratio, 36); (5) it can also be a hybrid figure coupled with "ellipse" (9.2.37); and (6) it can be a narrative method of creating oblique adlocutiones ("indirect speeches," 37). Speaking of obliquity, Quintilian's battery of formal variations compiled from fits 35 through 37 promotes its own conceptual confusion. One has the sense that this tally of variations on prosopopeia, even though it is the lengthiest of its kind when compared to other discussions of the trope up to the first century, could go on still further. Quintilian's theoretical assimilations of prosopopeia to other tropes, along with his selection of exemplary instances of the trope in literature and history writing (he uses sources ranging from Vergil to Xenophon), are experimental and cautious at best. He seems overwhelmed by the discursive possibilities that prosopopeia allows. 17

The poetics of personification

This feature of the Institutio separates it cleanly from Cicero's treatises. For the author of the De oratore, personification is a trope of questionable value best approached with trepidation and suspicion; for the author of the Institutio, personification cannot always be clearly and apodictically defined, but is a fertile means of discursive invention. At times it resembles other tropes, and it can be regularly combined with them as a mode of narrative invention. Yet, it can also be a mechanism of strictly juridical discourse, a fact that should promise a theoretically apodictic handling in the Institutio but which in fact creates a striking semiotic ambiguity regarding the " directionality " of a standard juridical prosopopeia: ... prosopopoeiae, id est fictae alienarum personarum orationes, quales litigatorum ore dicit patronus ... Non enim audire iudex videtur aliena mala deflentis, sed sensum ac vocem auribus accipere miserorum, quorum etiam mutus aspectus lacrimas movet. (6.1.25-26) (... by impersonations I mean fictitious speeches supposed to be uttered, such as an advocate puts into the mouth of his client... then the judge seems no longer to be listening to a voice bewailing another's ills, but to hear the voice and feelings of the unhappy victims, men whose appearance alone would call forth tears even though they uttered never a word.) Given the dual sense of the term itself (prosopopeia = prosopon -\-poein, "to make a face"), Quintilian's example leaves us uncertain about who the prosopon is. Is the prosopon the advocate who speaks "in behalf" of his client — saying what the client would say if the latter could think and speak like a skilled advocate? (In modern American slang, a lawyer is called a "mouthpiece," a "locutionary prosthesis," a "mask.") Or is the prosopon the legal client — the passive, shell-like creature who sits like a dummy (mutus) while the advocate sends a verbal message through him? In Jakobson's terms, the "addresser" or source of the message is confused with the "code" or formal means of the message (Hawkes 83). Put another way, Quintilian's juridical passage implicitly proposes the semiotic question, "In a personification figure, exactly what gets converted into or personifed as whom"? Quintilian's final pronouncement on personification in the Institutio displays this semiotic crux in terms more sociologically loaded for poetics in the 1990s: Denique non modo quot in causa totidem in prosopopeia sunt varietates, sed hoc etiam plures, quod in his puerorum, feminarum, populorum, mutarum 18

History of personification theory etiam rerum assimulamus adfectus, quibus omnibus debetur suus decor. (11.1.41)

(Further, it is not merely true that the variety required in impersonation will be in proportion to the variety presented by the case, for impersonation demands even greater variety, since it involves the portrayal of the emotions of children, women, nations, and even of voiceless things, all of which require to be represented in character.) If women and children are already persons, why must they be given speech according to the same fictional and figural mechanism that governs the " impersonation," or personification, of a nation or of inanimate and voiceless objects? I will explore the semiotic conditions of this formulation in the next chapter. For now, it is important that we fully appreciate Quintilian's unsurpassed but problematic formalization of the trope's complexity and his expanded understanding of its utility. Not until after the Renaissance would the tradition of European rhetoric boast so rich a theoretical treatment of personification. Many rhetoricians and grammarians in the later Roman periods present the trope with Ciceronian brevity. Chirius Fortunatianus, the famous fifthcentury author of Artis rhetoricae libris tres, gives prosopopeia and apostrophe a one-sentence description in which he asks how the trope might be used in narration (Halm 112). Julius Ruh'nus, also of the fifth century, provides only two brief lines on personification.6 However, as the format of his compendium dictates, he provides curious Latin translations for the Greek word: in this case, he eschews the traditional term conformatio, and instead translates "prosopopeia" as deformatio and effiguratio. Equally curious is the schematic treatment of personification offered by Rufinus' contemporary, Emporius the Great. Emporius devotes an entire treatise to what Joseph M. Miller translates as "impersonation"-naming it De ethopoeia. The fifth-century rhetorician parrots more Ciceronian pronouncements (Miller, Prosser, Benson 35), and he subordinates prosopopeia as a fourth variety of ethopoeia, the "making of a character." He thus repeats a taxonomic move made by his fourth-century predecessor Aphthonius of Antioch, who also delineated prosopopeia as one of fourteen practical "exercises" for schoolboys in his Progymnasma (Kennedy 64). The grammarian Priscian devotes a full page to "impersonation," contrasting "prosopopeia," which is exemplified when "Cicero gives speech to the fatherland," with the concept "eidolopeia," which involves all modes of narrative character invention (Miller, Prosser,

The poetics of personification Benson 64). A century later, Isidore's treatment of personification in the Etymologiae is confined to a scant two lines which, again, invoke Cicero, this time by making reference directly to the oration In Catillinam (Miller, Prosser, Benson 94). We could readily extend this tally of Latin rhetoricians who treat personification by including well-known writers as varied as Rutilius Lupus or Aelius Donatus.7 It is more practical, however, to draw at least two conclusions regarding their theoretical treatments of prosopopeia. First, as I have suggested all along, a Ciceronian brevity along with actual Ciceronian examples (the fatherland or a dead ancestor speaking) characterize the style and content of all major discussions of personification. Second, many rhetoricians - either through peculiar tendencies in translation, or in methods of taxonomic subordination — have indeed glimpsed in their writings the complexities inherent in formalizing so unusual, but at first seemingly transparent, a trope as personification. This general condition seems to maintain itself through the sixth century A.D. AS an exception, Bede's De schematibus et tropis tries to restake a semiotic reformulation of the conceptual terms that inhabit the structures of specific tropes and figures (Irvine). Like Aristotle in The Rhetoric, Bede does not name "prosopopeia" or "conformatio" as a specific and independent trope. Rather, he begins his section "De Tropis" with a logical decomposition, reminiscent of a similar table written by Quinfilian (8.6.0-13), of the translative terms that constitute the trope metafora: Metafora est rerum verborumque translatio. Haec fit modis quattor: ab animali ad animali, ab inanimale ad inanimale, ab animale ad inanimale, ab inanimale ad animale. (Halm 611) (Metaphor is a translation among things and words, accomplished four ways: from a living creature to another living creature; from a non-living thing to another non-living thing; from a living creature to a non-living thing; from a non-living thing to a living creature.) Following this concise logical scheme are more than a dozen examples, mainly from scripture, that demonstrate each translational or transformational equation. Through a precise set of structural relations governed by the semes "living" and "non-living," Bede's grid exhausts the entire set of transformations that had been unsystematically addressed through the sets of examples employed by preceding rhetoricians to describe "varieties" of prosopopeia: Demetrius' dead 20

History of personification theory

ancestor made to speak (transformation 2), Quintilian's hypothetical client mouthing the words of his advocate (transformation 1), and so on. Moreover, the grid describes the sets of transformations that constitute many other tropes. The whole operation, of course, is taken from the Institutio Oratoria which, in fact, ramified it further: the four transformational axes divide among the translation of "rational" and "irrational" beings (8.6.13). But in an era less than familiar with Quintilian, Bede's appropriation of such a structural system founded on the binary logic of categorical opposition reaffirmed that prosopopeia, as a suspiciously unnamed structural subordinate of metaphor, revealed its dialectically complex nature as well as its key, privileged role as a figure always telling something about figuration itself. Although the major theorists of medieval rhetoric following Bede describe personification in no more detail than the terse entries characteristic of the late antique compendia,8 the sense of the trope as a latent but powerful force - as a figure telling something about figuration — does unconsciously creep into theoretical poetics. That is, putatively apodictic, instructional treatises on poetic tropology contain descriptions of grammatical values and relations, figures, and tropes figured as prosopopeias. For example, Geoffrey of Vinsaufs influential Poetria Nova provides no more than a single, scholium-styled line on conformatio as an "easy" ornament of style: "Conformatio. Again, adorning the subject with a different kind of freshness, at one time I fashion a new person by giving the power of speech where nature has denied it" (Preminger, Hardison, and Kerrane 400). The sentence is finished with a personification of nature that is syntactically and epistemologically balanced and on par with the referential claim made by the speaking " I " who has deliberately "fashioned" an artificial character. Furthermore, Nature in this phrase is rhetorically characterized as a "denier" of speech in the "new person." A figural reciprocity exists between the self-important speaker who creates characters and the inadvertently personified Nature who has the power to deny, and by implication, give speech; she is a personification capable of personifying. The passage provides a brief staging of some of the semiotic properties contained in personification that surface unexpectedly in an expectedly non-literary and rational discourse. The lexicon-like forms of Geoffrey's entries on tropes, figures, and means of invention mark the Poetria Nova as a prime representative of the condition Richard McKeon ascribes to the exhausted medieval

The poetics of personification rhetorical tradition. Yet, Geoffrey's scholia function as poetically charged micronarratives. And even when other tropes are the subjects of discussion, these micronarratives contain personification as a latent matrix. In general terms, Alexandre Leupin calls this quality a "discursive blending of theory with its corroborative examples" (124) - a tactic Geoffrey employs, often humorously, for dozens of trope definitions. In a discussion of the thematic " specularity " of Geoffrey's declarations, Leupin matter-of-factly cites a passage on transsumptio (metalepsis) and its subordinate collatio (comparison): No such telltale signs occur in the covert Comparison, which does not show its own face but wears a mask, as if no Comparison were actually taking place there but rather a sort of new changeover, marvelously engrafted. (PN 247-50, qtd. in Leupin 139) The sentence is perhaps the most striking definition in the Poetria that figures a trope ("comparison") as a prosopopeia - in fact, as the prosopopeia of a prosopopeia, for the real "face" is as figurally invented a "facade" as the adopted "mask." There may be an overt source for this kind of metafigural, personificational pervasion. Geoffrey had, of course, employed the vague medieval topos about how grammatical structuration and syntactical arrangement amount to an essential, formal act that gives "forms" and "faces" to individually isolatable words. By themselves, words (lexical or semantic "units") are like the hyle or "prime matter" of chaos that do not yet have real meaning (Nims 215). In arguing that words take on significational form only in precise structural relation to other words (the formulation looks forward to the modern, structural-linguistic valorization of syntactical syntagm over semantic paradigm), Geoffrey invokes the classical, form/substance, container/content topos called holomorphism, or hylozoism. Furthermore, Geoffrey even distinguishes between the "minds" of words, that is, their semantic signifieds, and their "faces" or audial, phenomenal natures (PN 739-40; cited in Nims 215). In the Poetria, words themselves have the potential as independent personification figures when they are part of a "community" of other words. Geoffrey's latent narratives of prosopopeia find similar expression not until much later in Western rhetorical theory; the work of Bernard Lamy in the late seventeenth century, for instance, presents a similar metafigural effect in supposedly "theoretical" discourse. The Renaissance, however, provides little relief from the economical tendency in rhetorical compilation that had marked the Middle Ages.

History of personification theory

The most exemplary treatise of the late fifteenth century, Erasmus' De ultraque verborum ac rerum copia, is in large measure a rewriting of the exemplary sentences found in Quintilian, Cicero, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium (W. Crane 99). In the De copia, Erasmus confines his definition of prosopopeia to the "description of persons/' He admits that the trope is very similar to, and at times conceptually interchangeable with, prosopographia - the figure whereby the physical characteristics of a human personage are delineated (Erasmus 50-51). Compared with all the rhetorical treatises that had preceded it, however, the De copia is the first to provide an extended tally, occupying several lines, of personified abstract virtues which appear in the works of Lucian, Ausonius, Horace, Moschus, Aristophanes, Chrysippus, and Boethius. Furthermore, Erasmus assimilates mythical beings — vampires, sphinxes, furies, and graces — to the ontic domain of the personification figure (51). Along with Petrus Mosellanus' Tabulae de schematibus et tropis, Erasmus' De copia became the seminal study of tropes and figures throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Slavish imitation of these two Northern masters is evident in the rhetorical tradition of Elizabethan England. Wholesale copying of figure and trope tables is apparent even to the casual reader of the major texts in the English tradition - Leonard Cox's The Arte and Crafte of Rhetoryke, Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique, Abraham Fraunce's The Arkadian Rhetorique, George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie, and so forth.9 A review of two of the major texts in this Elizabethan tradition will demonstrate its spareness and its dependence upon the work of the earlier Dutch theorists. Richard Sherry's A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), the first widely read English rhetorical treatise, was no more than an encyclopedia of tropes accompanied by a sparse tally of examples. Precisely like Erasmus, Sherry indiscriminately combines mythical creatures with instances of true personification figuration. Concerning "prosopopey," he declares that it is that forme ... wherein we fayne perso[ns], communicacions, or affects of a man or of a beast, to a dumme thynge, or that hath no bodye, or to a dead man: as to the harpies, furies, devils, slepe, hunger, envie, fame, vertue, iustice, and such lyke. (67) Sherry's entry on prosopopeia is indeed terse. It is virtually a direct plagiarism of Erasmus' version, although the Dutch thinker had considered the trope to be a subspecies of "amplification," while

The poetics of personification Sherry subordinated it as the fifth variety of energeia. But it returns us to the syntactical confusion that characterized Demetrius' declarations: the feigning of the "affects of a man" to a "dumme thynge" or to that which "hath no bodye" is indeed personification. But what of the attribution of the "affects" of a beast to a "dumme thynge"? In his drive to be concise, Sherry confounds a number of figural transformations - all of which can be accounted for in Bede's grid of translational relations, and all of which could be further identified and named with a specific example from a fictional text.10 Sherry's definition of prosopopeia begs for a far more complete formalization of the trope. The second exemplary rhetorical treatise from the English Renaissance is the better-known The Garden of Eloquence by Henry Peacham. This text, first published in 1577 and expanded in 1593, provides an apodictic definition of prosopopeia that is as brief as Sherry's entry, but completely devoid of the conceptual confusion. (Instead, Peacham supplies a battery of hypothetical literary examples excluded by Sherry.) Peacham prescribes only one "direction" of figural transformation: " . . . hence it is that poets and orators do attribute to things which are without life, not only life, but also reason and affection, and sometime speech" (136). There is only one direction of transformation because Peacham posits the ameliorative transformation (which moves "up" the ontic scale) of a lifeless thing first into a living thing, then into a sentient creature, then into a speaking human being. Sherry's jumbled set of terms includes the ontic status of formless, or nonsubstantial things as well as lifeless and living things; his terms mark transformational movement in a reverse direction as well as a forward one. The attribution of the affects of a beast to a dead man - as the syntax of the line dictates — is figurally different from animizing an abstract idea in the form of a beast. Terse as these discussions of the trope personification are, they are part of a trend in rhetorical theory that reveals conceptual slippage along with richness, a slippage that theorists of tropes and figures in the precision-oriented works of the eighteenth century tried to avoid. Between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, many texts attempt conceptual precision by avoiding the formal problem of tropes, and by attending to the expressive and psychological grounds that led to the authors' employment of such tropes. An example of such an interim text is Bernard Lamy's De 11 Art de Parler (1675). In this manual for orators and poets, the author tries for 24

History of personification theory

greater completeness regarding a model of personification, but because of his elaborate definition of what a "figure" is, he engages in a specular display of the latent powers of the trope. Regarding prosopopeia by itself, Lamy writes: When a passion is violent, it renders them mad in some measure that are possess'd with it. In that case, we entertain our selves with Rocks, and with dead Men, as if they were living, and make them speak as if they had Souls. (-234) Lamy follows with a lengthy example about a "Carkass" that is asked to speak. In the definition, Lamy ignores the notion of prosopopeia as a means for animating abstract and insubstantial concepts. He also locates the power and structure of the trope in an interior, psychological motion of the speaker's mind - a standard idea in theories of the creation of art that began to gain momentum, according to M. H. Abrams's famous argument, around the end of the seventeenth century (21-26, 47-99). Lamy, of course, had laid out this expressive theory of figural production at the outset of his discussion of figures. In short, the "peculiar language" of the passions are the figures. Curiously, the analogy Lamy uses to explain the structural relationship between passions and figures is the programmatic image of the mind/face, specifically the mind of a person who is disturbed or passionate: "So our words answer to our thoughts ... as the Face of a Man ... when he is angry, [or] his Face when he is quiet and serene" (224). For Lamy, then, figuration is encompassed by the concept of prosopopeia (the "making of faces"), a putative subset of figuration. This peculiar and ironic feature of Lamy's discussion looks forward to similar identifications that will be made by the French structuralists concerning models of figuration. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that a conceptual discourse of any kind should adopt the semiotic vocabulary of faces and minds, bodies and souls, insides and outsides, once that discourse positions itself as a fundamentally expressive or expressionistic one. This fundamental position in fact dominates much of European rhetorical theory during the whole eighteenth century. Returning to England for a moment, we come across the major theorist of figures and tropes of the century. 11 Henry Home, Lord Kames, composed his Elements of Criticism as a manual for both critical readers (that is, aesthetic evaluators) and writers of literary texts. Kames devotes thirteen pages to a discussion of personification, taking

The poetics of personification it up in chapter xx of his book as the first of the "figures" of literary discourse. As it had been for Lamy, the important feature of the figure is its genesis in the mind of the speaker or writer: highly passionate feelings move the speaker to personify things (347). The greater percentage of Kames's discussion of the trope is a tally of examples culled from the plays of Shakespeare or Vergil. Kames's major contribution, however, to a theory of the trope is his division of it into two types. "Passionate" personification involves the invention of characters in a discourse; it is "superior" because it arises out of genuine and sincere, agitated passions. "Descriptive" personification is mere rhetorical ornament; it is almost universally inappropriate in poetic discourse. Kames's overall position on personification of either variety is stern. He advises against allowing the figure, with its generally "ridiculous appearance" (359), to command too much space in speech or writing. No doubt, the Elements of Criticism was one of the major early theoretical texts in English that brought about the demotion of personification as something crude, silly, and, to use Kames's evaluative adjective regarding Vergil's frequent use of the trope, "insufferable" (359). If the English rhetorical tradition is best exemplified in Kames's expressivist project, the French tradition - characterized by far more formal rigor in the work of thinkers ranging from Condillac to Du Marsais - is best exemplified by one who is perhaps its final and greatest spokesman: Pierre Fontanier. Fontanier's Les Figures du Discours provided the most systematic taxonomy of tropes and figures of all similar projects through the close of the eighteenth century, and his taxonomic distinctions concerning personification are no exception.12 Fontanier's treatment of the trope involves a completely novel distinction: what Fontanier calls personnification is a "trope" completely different from the figure de pensee he calls prosopopee. The former is the trope for substantializing and lending speech to abstract entities; the latter is a device used to give voice to the dead - the device, as we have seen, that attracted far more theoretical consideration throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Thus, Fontanier's concise definition of personification: La personnification consiste a faire d'un etre inanime, insensible, ou d'un etre abstrait et purement ideal, une espece d'etre reel et physique, doue de sentiment et de vie, enfin ce qu'on appelle une personne; et cela, par simple faqon de parler, ou par une fiction toute verbale, s'il faut le dire. Elle a lieu par metonymie, par synecdoque, ou par metaphore. (111) 26

History of personification theory

With this brief set of formulations, Fontanier has exhausted all the ontic categories whose members can be figurally transferred among each category: life or non-life, sentience, abstract formlessness, substantial form, the power of speech, etc. Another major achievement of Fontanier was the structural subordination of all tropes to three tropological supersets: metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Personification could operate as a "variant" of any three of these major operators. Fontanier fills the next four pages of his discussion of the trope with literary examples that show how personification varies according to the programs of the three super-tropes. For example, addressing the citizens of Sparta as a single entity "Sparta" is personification "through metonymy"; calling a man who is "humble and virtuous" the "Virtue Humbleness" is personification "through synecdoche"; and attributing human feelings to mountains, oceans, rivers, and so forth, is personification "through metaphor." Fontanier takes up prosopopee much later in his treatise, and he begins by insisting on its theoretical division from personification and apostrophe, its two very close relatives: La Prosopopee, qu'il ne faut confondre ni avec la Personnification, ni avec TApostrophe, ni le Dialogisme, qui l'accompagnent presque toujours, consiste a mettre en quelque sorte en scene, les absens, les morts, les etres surnaturels, ou meme les etres inanimes; a les faire agir, parler, repondre, ainsi qu'on 1'entend; ou tout au moins a les prendre pour confidens, pour temoins, pour garans, pour accusateurs, por vengeurs, pour juges, etc.; et cela, ou par feinte, ou serieusement, suivant qu'on est ou qu'on n'est pas le maitre de son imagination. (404) In sum, prosopopee — the figure whereby the dead, the absent, supernatural beings, the non-living, etc, can be given form, life, and speech - might at first seem identical to any of the three modes of personnification. But the examples cited by Fontanier reveal that it is, like Kames's notion of the trope, a product of extreme internal passion in a speaker. Moreover, it is a device for inventing and "placing characters in some sort of scene," rather than the disposition of local rhetorical ornament. We might also add that Fontanier's division of personnification /prosopopee is approximately equivalent to Kames's division between passionate/descriptive personification. The primary difference between the two, however, rests on Fontanier's constant obsession with defining figures and tropes in relation to other figures

The poetics of personification and tropes. In conjunction with his examples of prosopopee, the French rhetorician provides contrastive descriptions of I'apostrophe and dialogisme (what rhetoricians of antiquity at times called sermocinatio); that is, he defines prosopopee by what it is not. Certainly unlike Kames, Fontanier describes tropes as relative quantities. Each trope exists as a variant, a relative, or an inversion of every other trope. It is therefore no coincidence that Fontanier became such a favorite of the French structuralists — specifically Todorov, Genette, Ricoeur, DuBois and the Group Mu — in their own theoretical discussions of figuration and rhetoric. Fontanier's project is indeed the first"modern" and genuinely scientific taxonomy of tropes in the history of Western rhetoric and poetics. If we agree with Todorov and Ricoeur that Fontanier was the last rhetorician in Europe, we would expect a lull in the theoretical activity concerning tropes and figures. On the whole, the nineteenth century sees the expansion of the expressivist model of figuration; it is, after all, the foundation of one of the most powerful strands in the theory of Romantic poetics. Personification comes under fire, as it had at the hands of Lord Kames, as an aesthetically weak and inappropriate form. Coleridge, of course, paid the greatest theoretical attention to the poetic problems of personification tabulation. His disapproval of the trope has been amply discussed (Knapp 7-50; and passim). However, it is sufficient for us to recognize one formal contribution on his part - t h e distinction between "narrative allegory," as he called it, and "unmixed" allegory that was equivalent, at times, to the simple "poetic diction" of local rhetorical ornament (Knapp 12). After Coleridge, few English theorists addressed the problem of personification. One interesting approach to the trope can be found in the aesthetic inquiries of John Ruskin. But like others before him - no less than Aristotle and Bede - Ruskin avoids using the words "prosopopeia" or "personification" to describe the substantializing, animation, and endowing with sentience and speech of a non-human entity. Ruskin uses two terms, "grotesque idealism" and the "pathetic fallacy," to convey this concept. Both terms are elaborately deployed in Modern Painters, Ruskin's aesthetic opus magnum. In his thorough discussion of the significational richness abounding in the Envy episode of The Faerie Queene i.iv.30, Ruskin discloses the literally "grotesque" or serpentine complexity of which personification figuration is capable (Ruskin 60—61). The "pathetic fallacy" is so named in order to reveal Ruskin's conceptual basis for the device: 28

History of personification theory

The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy is ... that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the emotion that has induced it. (66) The idea is familiar. Like the Romantics, and like Lord Kames and Bernard Lamy, Ruskin sees the trope as a verbal extemalization of an intensified interior state. Indeed, most of his literary examples of it reveal a fictional speaker whose "reason is unhinged by grief" (63). Later in Modern Painters, however, Ruskin extends the conceptual field of pathetic fallacy to the fictional creation of moralized landscapes (Ruskin 77-78), a prime but problematical move in Romantic poetics (de Man, Blindness, 206). This critical development helped establish one of the central topoi in theoretical discussions of Romantic literature. (In fact, in the popular lexicon of today, "pathetic fallacy" is often thought of solely as the fictional extemalization of a poetic speaker's interior atmosphere - like the condition of Keats's forlorn lover in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci.") But the critical term "pathetic fallacy," I believe, is also a symptom of the nineteenth-century dislike for the terms personification and prosopopeia. During the mid-1800s, as I pointed out in the Introduction to this study, the word "allegory" also takes over as the exclusive nominational title for personification fabulation. And correspondingly, a critical absorption in the Viconian model of primitive anthropomorphism occurs; such is the case regarding Walter Pater's writings on the animistic provenance of the classical gods. After Ruskin, however, direct theoretical interest in personification wanes and is not truly revived until after World War II. Ill Personification theory in the twentieth century presents us with a special problem. Most critical observations on the trope, especially those before mid-century, have been made by scholars in the fields of art history and philology. Two of the greatest figures in the former field, Rudolf Wittkower and Erwin Panofsky, along with two of the greatest practitioners of the latter, E. R. Curtius and Erich Auerbach, follow the general nineteenth-century trend by using the term "allegory" to indicate works of art or literature that contain personification figures. The four great German scholars show that personification can indeed operate in the service of polysemy and mystical significance (Wittkower gS-106; Curtius 101-02; Auerbach, 29

The poetics of personification Scenes, 94—98); but, as I noted above in my Introduction, they also indiscriminately refer to any moment of personification in a visual or verbal text, however simple, as an instance of allegory.13 It is therefore theoretically necessary that we pick up the thread of personification theory with those literary critics who maintain that there is a difference between sheer, simple personification and genuine allegory. 14 Such critics, fully aware of the abuses of allegorical interpretation as well as the potential powers of religious symbolism and allegory in scripture and in secular medieval literature, are the first to engage in scrupulous formal investigations of the trope personification. Morton W. Bloomfield was one of the first modern literary critics to attempt a coherent formalization of personification. His essay, "A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory," begins with an attempt at taxonomic differentiation. Bloomfield differentiates " shorthand" named characters (Fondlove or Thwackum) from "formal personification," or "emblematic" figures (the Slough of Despond) from genuine personification (164). Bloomfield's division follows the earlier distinction between personification as local, rhetorical ornament and personification as a mode of character invention. The former he calls the "animation of proper nouns," or the "animate metaphor" (Bloomfield would later call such formal effects "personification metaphors"). Bloomfield's system of formalization is purely grammatical : it accounts for personification as a violation of grammatical rules which, especially in English, suggest the animation of a noun that is abstract. This can be accomplished, in a very elementary way, through the elision of a definite article. Changing "the truth" to "Truth" involves what Bloomfield calls the "deictification" of the term — changing the word from a source noun to a proper noun (164-65). A summary definition of Bloomfield's grammatical system runs as follows: Personification allegory combines the non-metaphoric subject with metaphoric predicate and yokes together the concrete and the metaphoric in the presentation of generality. It attempts to gain the advantages of both the general and the concrete at the same time without sacrificing one for the other. (169) Although Bloomfield is concerned with personification as a mode of character invention, his system is better suited to the description of localized, animate metaphors, or of characterological personification in

History of personification theory

which little action occurs. (It is no wonder that he concludes his essay mainly with a discussion of personification in painting and sculpture.) The grammatical system fails to account for the complexities that arise when personification figures are combined with other kinds of fictional characters — historical human beings, mythological beings, and so forth. Nevertheless, Bloomfield's is among the first of palpable formal systems concerning the trope, and it promoted at least two strong theoretical legacies. First, Bloomfield's position continues in the work of the American transformational grammarians. Dorothy Mack, in accounting for the deep-structural transformations that are at work in metaphor, abandons the familiar terms for tropes of substantialization handed down in rhetorical theory. She renames personification as agent promotion and reification or "objectification" as predicate incorporation (78). Second, the formal rigor of Bloomfield's grammatical method invites further speculation along the lines of the aesthetic or phenomenological domain of predicative metaphorical nouns in discourse. This phenomenological approach to the grammatical aspect of personification anchors Samuel R. Levin's original contribution to a formal poetics of the trope. For Levin, personification involves the attribution of species-specific predicates to the members of a different species. "The rock was merry," Levin demonstrates, involves the attribution of a human affective state to an entity that may possess other states. The rock is personified. However, reading the predicate as an approximation in rocks of the human state called "merriness" effects what Levin calls a "dispersonification" of the utterance ("Allegorical" 29—30). The conceptual shift wherein we try to imagine what merriness is like for rocks amounts to what Levin calls "radical dispersonification." Levin connects this concept to Wordsworth's notion of "seeing into the life of things" ("Allegorical" 31), a process which no doubt involves a peculiar variety of phenomenological mysticism. Levin's project, which finds its fullest expression in his Metaphoric Worlds, has its basis in a number of formal and aesthetic ideals that confront both the creator of personification figures and the reader of them in literary texts. Always built into a moment of personification is an aesthetic modulation present between text and reader. Although the formal rigor of the grammatical approaches applied by Bloomfield and Levin reveal a great deal about the operation of

The poetics of personification personification, the majority of investigations into the trope's functional or operational nature in the past two decades have followed a thematic model. Like Thomas Maresca, John Steadman argued insistently for the division of allegory from prosopopeia {75). Yet, his study takes up the thematic complexities possible, mainly in Spenser's poetry, through the bold manipulation of personification figures (71-105). Carolynn Van Dyke's brilliant The Fiction of Truth similarly accounts for the philosophical and theological values of the personified characters in Prudentius, Langland, the Middle English morality plays, and in Spenser. The thematic appraisal of the "meanings" of individual personification figures is undoubtedly an inexhaustible avenue of inquiry in the field of medieval allegory studies. In Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, Stephen Barney provides an incisive study of the doctrinal and ideological dimensions of the personified characters in Prudentius, Langland, and Spenser, but he also offers some astute and highly useful formal distinctions among the varieties of allegory. Although Barney is cognizant of the classical distinction between prosopopeia and allegoria, he opens his study by claiming that personification "is the most trustworthy signal of allegory." That is, Barney is interested in the narrative implications of the "labeling of a figure with an abstract name... and not the attribution of human qualities to an object" (20). Personification, considered strictly as a mode of character invention and coupled with emblematic or typological characterization, is the foundation for allegory. Furthermore, Barney distinguishes between the two basic tropes that constitute the mode allegory: "typological allegory" and "reification allegory" (30). Barney uses the term "reification" to denote the most fundamental figural maneuver entailed in the personification of an abstract concept: first, the non-substantial essence must take on substance; thus, the employment of the neo-latin word that describes the making of a res, of "matter" or a "thing." In formalizing the properties of reification allegory, Barney begins not with passages from Prudentius or Langland, but with a character from the popular American cinema-Walt Disney's Pinocchio.15 The curious, though entertaining, explanation of the cartoon character shows how the figural scheme of ideas-turned-to-substance can be rich and complex. Overall, Barney is one of the few theorists of personification to attend to the translative or transformational "directions" among personified or dispersonified entities in the medieval, Renaissance, and modern literary works he scrutinizes. The

History of personification theory

entire first chapter of his book stands by itself as an autonomous, resilient and powerful theoretical treatise on the poetics of personification. If Stephen Barney's interest in personification theory rests in the formal description of figurally invented characters who can exist in a narrative, the majority of contemporary poststructuralist formalizations of the trope are concerned with rigorous analyses of what many of the critics in this survey have been recognizing as localized, rhetorical personification — that is, the " animate metaphors" of Bloomfield's studies. The most intriguing formal descriptions of personification, particularly those offered by Paul de Man and his various critics, seem to arise out of literary studies conducted on postEnlightenment texts. Barney and Bloomfield are students of medieval and Renaissance allegorical literature; it is necessary that they confront the problem of the ubiquitous personified abstraction. De Man handles Romantic, early modern, and symbolist poems, in which much of the "personification" is of the localized, rhetorical variety. For de Man, the theorization of prosopopeia involves the ever-active bridging between localized animate metaphors and the cognitive generalization that all linguistic activity involves diffusive and latent personification. Still, de Man's observations prove invaluable in the formalization of genuine character personification. De Man's primary contributions to a formal theory of personification can be found in four important essays. " Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" attempts a distinct definition of the general term "anthropomorphism" as something like a trope. It is a special figural device - more fundamental than prosopopeia. De Man writes: But "anthropomorphism" is not just a trope but an identification on the level of substance. It takes one entity for another and thus implies the constitution of specific entities prior to their confusion, the taking of something for something else that can then be assumed to be given. Anthropomorphism freezes the infinite chain of tropological transformations and propositions into one single assertion or essence which, as such, excludes all others. {Rhetoric 241)

This provocative set of statements — which has become one of the many classic de Manian " formulas " — uncovers a cognitive operation that necessarily precedes all figural translations that involve character invention while calling them into question.16 "Hypogram and Inscription," "Reading and History," and "Autobiography as De-Facement," each provide a careful reflection on the 33

The poetics of personification figural relationship between literalized imagery of "faces" {prosopa) and the semiotic capacity of the trope prosopopeia. In each essay, de Man demonstrates how various poets - Wordsworth, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarme - construct a symbolic narrative of the interdependent, cognitive relationship between the perceiving, poetic ego and the external, phenomenal world.17 I shall reserve particular resummary and application of the fundamentals provided in these three articles for later on. For now, suffice it to say that de Man's explication of prosopopeia — the "master trope of poetic discourse" (Resistance 48) - is unexcelled to date as a formalization of the trope. The preceding three major projects reviewed in this survey - de Man's, Barney's, and Bloomfield's - demonstrate the drive for finer taxonomic distinction regarding varieties of personification. The task is needed not only as a preliminary operation in the ongoing project of defining "allegory," but also as a project of discovery in its own right. Conversely, J. Hillis Miller's recent book, titled Versions of Pygmalion, eschews fine taxonomic distinction and in a sense repeats the pre-Hellenic move to call any kind of narratorial character invention "prosopopeia" or "personification." Indeed, Hillis Miller's various essay-length studies on prosopopeia in authors ranging from Thomas Hardy to Wallace Stevens follow the expansive conception of the trope endemic to deconstruction. On the level of personification as local ornament, Hillis Miller often reads certain lyrical passages as showcases for what I would be inclined to call a kind of "pseudopersonification. " That is, he uncovers and explicates occluded figures of prosopopeia.18 Moreover, Hillis Miller addresses the temporal quality latent in prosopopeia: all prosopopeias somehow evoke a melancholy of loss, thereby trying to figurally bridge a temporal gap. This figural act, though, always advertizes the failure of the figure to reunify the long past or the disparate present (Pygmalion 47—48, 214—15, 238). Hillis Miller's final observations on the trope, in turn, provide a thoroughgoing semiotic analysis of the programmatic imagery of temporal passage, absence and presence, dismemberment, and effacement — conceptual elements that will operate as descriptive topoi in later chapters of this book. Along with such contemporary analytical strategy, however, the general (and ancient) problems of trope distinction and logical categorization so far charted form the basis for the taxonomies that follow.

34

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Towards a taxonomy of tropes ^X^ •

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From the survey of theories about personification presented in the last chapter, we can readily see the need for a more inclusive and extensive taxonomy of personification and its coordinate tropes. The classification of figural characters, especially those in complex works such as P/ers Plowman, is very difficult, as Lavinia Griffiths remarks, because contemporary theory has not yet been able to settle on a universal, working definition of the figure (4).1 Critics still labor under the legacy of at least two kinds of personification, both of which had been identified and studied, as chapter 1 revealed, by Morton Bloomfield, Coleridge, Lord Kames, and Fontanier. The distinction between a figure that exists strictly in speech and a figure that gets extended into an actual story probably shared origins with the allegoria in verbis/in facto commonplace first proposed by Augustine and later promoted by Bede. Since this study takes as a focal interest the formal role of narrative in a theory of personification, the terms "personification figure'' and "personification character" provide a handy taxonomical minimum with which to begin. Personification figures constitute a set that includes but is not exhausted by the subset of personification characters. The former set comprises all implementings of the trope personification in narrative, in the short lyric, in drama, in non-verbal arts, in rhetorically ornamental fictional dialogue, or in everyday speech. A personification figure, in simplest terms, must at least be a local rhetorical ornament. Personification characterization refers specifically to employment of the trope in the narratorial invention of actual characters, objects, or places that occupy the material space-time of the fabular, or " story " level of a narrative text. To paraphrase Hillis Miller ("The Two Allegories" 355), there are two personifications. The first is for the most part self-contained in a phrase or line. The second is an extension of the first into a complete narrative world. According to a strong critical tradition, incidentally, personification projected into a 35

The poetics of personification

narrative dimension has been understood as a constitutive component feature of " allegory" (Dawson 6). This is not simply to say that a personification figure which has been " extended" from one local site in a text entails fabular characterization. A memorable example of elementary personification figuration that occupies more textual space than one local site but is not necessarily fabular is found in the Old Testament meditation upon the female figure Wisdom: Therefore I prayed, and prudence was given me; I pleaded and the spirit of Wisdom came to me. For in her is a spirit intelligent holy, unique, Manifold, subtle, agile, clear, unstained, certain, Not baneful, loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kindly ...

(Wisdom 7.7,22-24)

Apart from the initially localized "coming" of Wisdom, this passage presents sheer notaiio, or the delineation of abstract behavioral tendency in Wisdom's character. Collections of aphoristic phrases in this vein continue through Wisdom 8, in which the speaker adds further descriptions of how he worked to acquire Wisdom's favors. He also provides a litany of narrative summaries that recount, in a generalized manner, her divine actions: She preserved the first-formed father of the world when he alone had been created; And she raised him up from his fall, and gave him power to rule all things. But when the unjust man withdrew from her in anger, he perished through his fratricidal wrath. When on his account the earth was flooded, Wisdom again saved it, piloting the just man on frailest wood. (Wisdom 10.1-4)

This passage is a paraphrastic summary of the Genesis narrative that deals with Adam, Cain, and Noah. (The summary continues through Abraham, Moses, and up to the Prophets — characters all typologically 36

Towards a taxonomy of tropes

linked to wisdom.) As a personification character, Wisdom is central to the action in each summarized episode. She determines the outcomes of each capsulized Old Testament story. Her actantial role, however, is narratologically different from, say, the roles of the personification characters in the Psychomachia. In that poem, we see a moment-by-moment mimetic reconstruction of the characters' actions and utterances on the battlefield. The formal difference between the narrative presentation of the Old Testament figure Wisdom and that of Prudentius' figures Faith or Avarice is one of " narrative speed/' According to Gerard Genette, narrative speed is the relationship between narrated time and the time of narration.2 Narrative speed divides into four "tempos": ellipsis, summary, scene, and pause. "Scene" is the tempo in which narrated time is equivalent to the time of narration. "Ellipsis" and "summary" are tempos in which narrated time is greater than time of narration; "pause" is a tempo in which narrated time is less than narration time. The sites in Wisdom 8-10 that present us with the divine figure's generalized actions are governed by the narrative speed called "summary." The formal effect of all narrative sequences governed by ellipsis and summary is that of pseudo-narrative: the narrator of the Wisdom text falls short of mimetic fabular invention of the kind intrinsic to traditional personification narratives. That is, he creates a text more closely akin to description or illustration - the discursive modes that bring the narrative "to a temporary halt" while arraying a sequence of semantically and thematically "predictable" ideas (Hamon 170). It is true that the tempo called narrative "pause" is most appropriate to description — but description concomitant with the sensory representation of a character's phenomenal appearance (what classical rhetoricians called effidio). Instead, description in Wisdom 7 involves the more abstract concept notatio, the concept of the portrayal of actantial tendencies rather than mimetically realized actional engagements. (This is why summary usually requires employment of the perfect, imperfect, and pluperfect verbal tenses.) Narratives governed exclusively by speeds other than "scene" cannot constitute an adequately mimetic text. They cannot "set before us" characters by having them speak (as in dialogue), move about, produce gestures, or physically act upon the actantial "objects" of the narrative worlds that contain them.3 In sum, personification that remains sheerly descriptive or paraphrastic is not mimetic or fabular. The subordination of tabulation to 37

The poetics of personification figuration, and the concomitant distinctions among descriptive personification, paraphrastic narrative personification, and fabular narrative personification, underline the importance of narrative duration and character activity in a formal taxonomy of figural character invention. This aspect of the trope's potential will come into play later, when we begin to consider how personification figures and coordinate figural effects can be classified according to genera and species. The concepts of "genera" and "species" seem naturally applicable when we consider characterological types in personification narratives. In the realm of rhetoric and poetics, however, the metaphorical terms "species" and "genera" pose further problems that need preliminary clarification. Regarding the relation between "allegory" and "personification, " I sketched a critical attitude that held the two tropes to be absolutely distinct and, probably, mutually exclusive. One reason for this surgical division among figures or tropes is an epistemically natured conception of the human act of classification. Kenneth Haworth's declaration that "there is no necessary connection between the rhetorical figure personification and allegory" (51) is prompted by a species-specific comparison of one trope with the other. Allegory, irony, personification, metaphor, metonymy, and so on, are each different " species" of figure. Specific instances of each figure are like different living creatures, often morphologically similar, but genetically distinct. The institution of this global episteme is traceable to the Linnaean paradigm of organism taxonomy based on the Swedish botanist's principle of binomial nomenclature. In The Order of Things (125—65) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (56—63), Michel Foucault

deftly elaborates the epistemic hegemony of Linnaeus' intellectual model of classification. It is no coincidence that Gerard Genette called Fontanier "the Linnaeus of rhetoric" (Intro. Fontanier 13) for the intellectual arenas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were dominated by a conception of taxonomy that was founded upon the paradigm of genera and their respective subordinate species. Rhetoric was not excluded from these arenas. Fontanier, as chapter 1 of this study shows, was the first to classify tropes and figures with a "scientific" rigor. The legacy of his project can be seen in modern rhetorical or poetic taxonomy programs as varied as that of Roman Jakobson, who considers metaphor and metonymy as the superordinate genera for all figures (Hawkes 77-80), or those of the French Mu Group. (More rigorously and extensively than in poetics or

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rhetoric, the institution of the Linnaean episteme of taxonomy has signaled the birth of modern historical linguistics: the current classificational system of Indo-European languages devised by Bopp, Grimm, Schleicher, and others in the early nineteenth century is a monumental example.)4 In comparison to such taxonomic attention, ancient and medieval rhetoricians worked with a more comfortable scale of figure differentiation. They operated under the perhaps unconscious assumption that taxonomic rigor could go only so far. Then, a conception of figures that fitted loosely into a network of sliding scales seemed more reasonable. In the remainder of this chapter, I will try to fit the personification figure and its coordinate tropes into logically determined classificational scales that may at times appear to slide, even while they approach a rigor of superordination and subordination. I will also attempt to articulate the formal limits of these scales — scales and paradigms founded upon the structural logics of genera-species categorization, the binary opposition, and the structural relationships of actants and objects. In explaining the unavoidable historical confusion of allegory with personification, Jon Whitman takes recourse to the lexical values of "prosopopeia" and the conceptual precursor of the term "allegory/ 7 called hyponoia. Whitman writes: The sense of a front or a facade affects the whole history of the word [prosopopeia] and its derivatives, and accounts in part for the rhetorical consensus that "personification" is a verbal front, a literary facade masking something else underneath. (269) The term hyponoia was probably confused with prosopopeia because the two terms invoke the same structure of semes. The prosopon ("face" or "mask") is a surface, an external set of material contours. Under it lies the true entity or essense. The Greek preposition hypo("under") denotes a substrate, an internal substance or essence. The two Hellenic concepts are ordered according to one of the classic and ubiquitous binary oppositions: substrate/surface, inside/outside, contained/container. The identical opposition hypo/prosopon, then, makes hyponoia and prosopopeia into versions of each other. Both figures are identically dichotomous semic compounds. The personification figure is the material translation of one quantity (often ideational or abstract) into another (usually a person). But the abstract ontological status of "translation" is figured in terms of a strong material metaphor: containment. Given this conception, we can see that the hierarchical inner/outer form of the personification 39

The poetics of personification figure resembles that of the sign understood by structuralists. For, say, Saussure or Jakobson, the sign consists of two components, the signifier and the signified. The former is the material (phonic or graphic) agent by which the latter (conceptual) is given expression or contained. When schematically represented, the personification figure has the same structure: personification "figure" =

personifier personified As we will see later, the " personifier" conforms to a standardized narrative actant: s/he is a mobile and active human being, endowed with speech, and representative of a specific psychological, physiological, and ideological constitution. The "personified" can be found among a range of abstract essences, inanimate objects, animals, etc. (This point will be made clearer during our discussion of the apologue.) It is figurally translated into the personifier. The personification figure is thus a compound entity. It originated in an era of human history when everything was thought to be contrived of forms and their essences, containers and their contents. But the compound or duplex nature of personification is more evident when we consider the semiotic structure of the fabular personification character. The "second personification" is really a figural modification of the first. For example, the expression "Poverty walked in, and Love flew out the window" is an aphoristic, localized, rhetorical figure. Such utterances occur in everyday language, and in the spoken discourses of an endless tally of dramatic or fictional characters in Western literature. To materialize the concepts of love and poverty as characters in a narrative world (making them walk and fly through actual doors and windows) means to literalize what is already rhetorical figure. Since such literalization (really a synonym for "substantialization," or "materialization") is itself a figure, the invention of a personified character as an agent in a narrative world involves the figure of a figure. Literalization, however, passes itself off as an act of " defiguralization." But this act is emblematically figural because it tacitly stages the tension between the putatively exclusive, oppositional domains "figural" and non-figural or "referential." Such figuring of figure, in turn, involves Lessing's understanding of a cofigural "metalepsis" in Laocoon. Although Lessing does not use the classical term,5 he describes the process as the fundamental figural maneuver essential to the creation of what he calls " allegory." In the 40

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classical rhetorical tradition, a metalepsis, or transsumptio, is the adding, combining, or compounding of two different rhetorical figures.6 Such metaleptical allegory consists, Lessing notes, in the literalizing or substantializing of a metaphor. An oxymoron underwrites Lessing's example: contemporary painters create an allegory when they try to visualize (that is, substantialize) as a dense cloud or nimbus Homer's representation of invisibility in The Iliad. This /y invisibility," however, is already a Homeric metaphor of the supersensible velocity with which gods or goddesses depart from the Phrygian battlefields (67-69). The "second personification'' is just such a bold but naive attempt to pictorialize the supersensible or abstract. Moreover, Lessing's combinatorial allegory that keys on cofigural metalepsis performs a curious resuscitation of the old axiomatic association between allegory and personification: the trope metalepsis amounts to a rhetorical algebra that organizes both Lessing's scheme for allegory and my scheme, laid out in the preceding paragraph, for the two personifications. The appropriation of the classical term metalepsis, however, presents defiguralization as a resolutely willed act. But figure can be construed as "error," as James Murphy (186), E. R. Curtius (44) or Paul Ricoeur (Rule 20) have shown. Error itself, in this case, might signify anything from forgetting to ontological blundering - two plausible performances made when the narratorial inventor of a character treats that character as viable and literal when its basis is merely rhetorical. The errors of forgetting (that something was part of rhetorical discourse) or blunder (about the ontological statuses of the "real" and the "imaginary") involve not just an isolated figure here or there compounded by another. Rather, they apply to whole domains of textuality. That is, they are errors made in distinguishing what narratologists term discourse and story. Discourse, the narratorial level that is the verbal stuff constituting the whole text, and story, the narrated level of phenomenal events within the text, make up another traditional hierarchically structured duplex. Most contemporary narratologists maintain in some form the old " two-level," sjuzet/fabula or "plot"/"story" paradigm of the Russian Formalists (Chatman 15—42; Genette, Narrative, 25—32; Bal, Narratology, 3—10). When the components of this duplex are confused, error of a curiously inventive nature arises. A fabular personification character, therefore, not only exists as an erroneous story-level misplacement of a discourse-level entity, it signifies the epistemological imperfection itself that is

The poetics of personification represented by the erroneous confusion of narratorial discourse with narrated story. It functions as a (meta)sign for the potential selfdissolution of narratological formalization. Returning to the more preliminary task of trope grouping, the previous description of literalization invites us to subordinate personification under the figural genus known as "substantialization" - the more inclusive trope whereby any non-substantial quantity (including figuration, or more generally, human language) is given a material form. This definition recalls the old theological concept of "hypostasization" which should in turn bring to mind the standard rhetorical conception of another coordinate trope of personification "reification." The term reification is a nineteenth-century neolatinism (made popular by Marxist discourse in the form of its German equivalents: Versachlichung or Verdinglichung) that did not exist in antiquity or in the Renaissance. But its principle was expressed, as we saw in chapter 1, through the rhetorical term pragmapeia, that is, the "making of a thing.'' 7 Substantialization subsumes all figural maneuvers wherein a literary text presents the translation of incorporeal abstractions into the corporeal members of several ontological categories: sentient human beings, geographical places, inanimate objects, deities, or animals. It leaves unanswered, however, the question about the translation of members among the categories of ontological status I have enumerated in the preceding sentence. This foregrounds the problem I introduced with the duplex structural division of the personification figure into personifier/ personified: in fabular "personification" characterization, exactly what is figurally converted or translated into what? I prefer to use the term "translate" because not all the figural metamorphoses we can identify involve making a person. Metamorphic translation, in fact, can occur among all categories. A generalized glossary of tropes that constitute these figural translations exhausts the relationships possible among ontological categories: — substantialization, materialization, hypostasization, or the figural translation of any non-corporeal quantity into a physical, corporeal one. — anthropomorphism, or the figural translation of any non-human quantity into a character that has human form. — personification (prosopopeia), or the translation of any non-human quantity into a sentient human capable of thought and language, possessing voice and face. 42

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These definitions themselves break down into subsets that can operate separately or combine as figural hybrids: — animification, or the figural translation of (1) a human agent into an animal, or of (2) an abstraction or inanimate object into an animal. (The basis of the animal apologue or beast fable.) — reification (pragmapeia), or, if you will, "dispersonification" — the translation of a human agent into an inanimate thing. (Donne's famous lovers presented as compass needles are a fine example.) Thematically, these two tropes are related to: — ideation, or the translation of a thing or human agent into an abstract idea, essence, spirit, or rarefied form. (" Rarefication," in fact, often fits as a good synonym.) — topification, or the translation of an abstraction into a geographical locus. This tally of definitions still does not exhaust the grid of relationships possible among the major ontological categories. These categories comprise the potential sum of actants and objects in any given narrative world. All actants and objects can be categorized according to the six ontological domains I have enumerated: human, non-human life form (plant or animal), inanimate object, place, abstract idea, deity. (The cue for this categorical framework comes, of course, from Quintilian 8.6.9-13.) A member of any one of these six categories can be figurally translated into a member of any other. The seven tropes of substantialization defined here account for a great variety of figural-narrative techniques. Paysage moralise, or " moralized landscape," has as its figural operator the trope topification. The figure of the Body Politic (ubiquitous in political propaganda and nicely represented by Menenius Agrippa's vision of Rome in Coriolanus i.i) involves the personification of an abstract idea (" society ") as a human individual. Conversely, the figuration of a human body as a geography of districts or landscapes (as in the Syracusan Dromio's description of his enormous lover Nell in A Comedy of Errors 111.ii.116—44) involves not only topification, but reification. The genre we call the " apologue " is constituted by talking animals; it therefore involves personification. The whole range of antique fictional techniques that I have only begun to list here is made possible by the pre-modern notion of a Great Chain of Being. The ontological categories of the divine, human, animal, inanimate, and so on, are expressed in the logic of medieval Scholastic method. The great Neoplatonist John the Scot Eriugena, in fact, employs a Logic Square based upon the conditions of (A) created 43

The poetics of personification status and (B) creative potential to exhaust the categorizing possibilities for all conceivable life-forms.8 His categories coincide with the divine, the human, the animal or inanimate, and the abstract or materially nonexistent. The so-named figurational enactments of these categories, however, provide an approximate minimum from which to begin the thinking needed for a formal taxonomy. On closer inspection, they can be seen to override each other's boundaries. The "rarefication" characteristic of literary ideation involves a sort of dehumanization and thus reification or pragmapeia. The trope topification likewise can blur into ideation in the guise of the Body Politic figure, especially when the Body Politic is conceived as the state personified as a single monarch. As Ernst Kantorowicz has shown, the "Body Politic" of the medieval or Renaissance king - the second of "two bodies" he possessesexists coevally with the ideally everlasting geopolitical entity he reigns over (7-S). He thus exists in an ideated or angelified way; as a figural entity or persona ficta he is human, "noetic" (rationally or ideationally invented), transhuman (pseudo-deific or angelic), and "geomorphic." The problem of blurring is accompanied by the problem of discovering names or labels for figurational categories. Even though we can readily find generic labels for antique fictional techniques like the apologue,, certain antique techniques founded upon figural invention lacked any nominational identity at all. Like Aristotle facing prosopopeia, many medieval rhetoricians never thought to label curious devices or figural effects. Rather, they named them incorrectly, given even their own often fanatical propensity for logical decomposition and categorization. To repeat, the faculty of human intelligence coupled with the power of speech indicates that we have a real personification character. The substantialized abstractions Vergil places at the mouth of the Underworld in Book vi of The Aeneid are often treated (as in the Introduction to this book and by conventional criticism) as seminal models of formal personification. But they are utterly mute, and produce no physical actions. There is no sense of them as parts of a social aggregate: Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus, Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas, Terribiles visu formae, Letumque Labosque; 44

Towards a taxonomy of tropes Turn consanguineus Leti Sopor, et mala mentis Gaudia, mortiferumque adverso in limine Bellum, Ferreique Eumenidum thalami, et Discordia demens, Vipereum crinem vittis innexa cruentis. (Before the entrance, at the jaws of Orcus, both Grief and goading Care have set their couches; there Pale Diseases dwell, and sad Old Age, and Fear and Hunger, that worst counselor, and ugly Poverty - shapes terrible to see - and Death and Trials; Death's brother Sleep, and all the evil Pleasures of the mind; And War, whose fruits are death; and facing these, the Furies' iron chambers; and mad Strife, her serpent hair bound up with bloody garlands.)

(273-81)

The germinal site in The Aeneid affords no prosopopeia because the figures possess no human voices, and therefore, no prosopa or " faces/' The entities are enumerated and described. The textual effect closely resembles that of the passage in Wisdom 7, demonstrating that the figural operator is anthropomorphism. In the terms of the list of categories above, the anthropomorphism is " ontogenetically prior" to the personification character. That is, in classical and medieval physics, substance precedes form (or "accident") which in turn precedes viability and sentience. Put schematically: substantialization -> anthropomorphism —• personification. The ontogenetic progression, once again, equates to a hierarchy because each trope is "founded" on or made possible by a prior trope. The medieval philosophical analogue for this logical progression was probably the renowned "Tree of Porphyry" articulated and analyzed especially by Duns Scotus. As Constantino Marmo notes, the Tree, which charts two tandem classificational hierarchies (substantia /'corporeitas / animalitas and corporalitas/sensibilitas/rationalitas),

illustrates the per-

fective and additive (or cumulative) progressions of "ontological density" (155) - a conceptual scheme central to medieval scholastic thought. This hierarchy, however, undoes itself when overwritten by logics aside from the purely additive one of ontogenesis. Paul de Man, for example, takes recourse to a phenomenological ground when he conflates substantialization and "anthropomorphism," meanwhile proclaiming that the latter is not a trope "but an identification on the level of substance" (Rhetoric 244). For de Man, anthropomorphism is 45

The poetics of personification more like the "second personification" described in this study. It is a cognitive commodity that tries to escape figuration, a self-priorizing function that "freezes the infinite chain of tropological transformations and propositions into one single assertion or essence which, as such, excludes all others" (Rhetoric 244). Strangely, such "non-tropological realness" does seem to accompany other literary appearances of anthropomorphism characters or mute personifications. Through a theological reading of Dante's Poverty in the Paradiso, Erich Auerbach reached a similar conclusion (Scenes 94—95). Anthropomorphism might at first seem mechanical, but it is a complex coordinate trope of personification that looks at the same time simpler (anthropomorphisms seem to be little more than animated words) and more uncanny (its seeming power to "freeze" or escape tropology). Another example of a seemingly simple but provocative trope that went unlabeled by medieval rhetoricians determines the title of and organizes the great Middle English morality play Everyman. The trope looks like standard personification characterization but carries shifted structural axes. Because the collection of human beings called "humanity" is really an abstraction, the character Everyman is of course the personifier that represents the abstract personified known as humanity.9 Yet, Everyman is ontologically identical to any single member of the collective group humanity. Unlike a genuinely abstract personified (an emotion, faculty, vice or virtue) that is qualitatively different from its personifier, humanity is only quantitatively different from its personifier, "Everyman." At first glance, the figural operator in Everyman would seem to be synecdoche. The figure synecdoche (the mechanism whereby a text assigns "parts for wholes, and wholes for parts"), however, really involves the translation between fragments and the physically connective whole of which they are components, rather than the translation between members and the conceptually collective whole to which they belong. Everyman is not an organ in a Body Politic. He is the representative of a greater number of entities ontologically identical to himself. The same can be said for the hero of another memorable Middle English morality, Mankind. In the discipline of modern statistics, this method of symbolic representation is called "isotyping." An isotype is a convenient shorthand figure for a quantity difficult to grasp, in a comparative context, with the senses. In a pictorial display, a historian may represent two thousand casualties from one army in a battle as two human figures, while she represents the ten thousand killed from the 46

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opposing army as ten figures. The method possesses iconographic power and simplicity. Yet it is structurally different from both personification and synecdoche. A formal articulation of the isotype could promise, in fact, to be a powerful tool for describing the figural character invention at work in many traditional medieval and Renaissance allegories. The personification figure Death could indeed be an isotype of all dead persons, since his physical features are not always those of a cosmetically idealized abstract personifier (say, a figure shrouded in black or perhaps black and amorphous - like Milton's Death in Paradise Lost or Spenser's Death in the Mutabilitie Cantos), but of a realistic corpse or skeleton (Holbein's Death in the Totentanz woodcuts). Death is a unique personification character in that, as a sign, he does not always point clearly to an incontestable personified. Does he signify the dead or the process of dying? Once again, we are brought back to the problematic structural relation between the personifier and the personified. This relation is often complicated by the engagement of the trope personification in certain conventional antique genres and sub-genres. Earlier, I mentioned the apologue. In the form of the beast fable, the apologue seems to prescribe a simple relationship between the personifiers (intelligent entities that speak — these are the prosopa) and the personifieds (the naturally aphasic and non-intelligent animals). The anonymous Dialogues of the Creatures Moralised, discussed by Rosemond Tuve (Allegorical 4-25), is a pedestrian example. The creatures of Aesop's Fables exist according to a similarly simple relation of personifier and personified in the trope personification. Often, animal apologues will present an entire society, identical to that of humans, but comprised of animals as the individual members. These societies may have commerce, education, and, like the birds in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls or the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm, government. Their societies are often specular images of Western human civilization, a point that has always made the animal apologue an especially appropriate vehicle for satire. Animals are ontologically different from humans, so the figural translation that operates as the motor of such apologue fabulation is strikingly visible. But what of apological fictions in which the "personifiers" are more than animals or objects who occupy societal domains approximate to, but somehow inversional of, our own? What are we to make of the narrative world in which the totality of individuals in the fictional society is composed of members from one class or variety of human 47

The poetics of personification individuals (one social level, profession, sex, age, race, etc.) from our own real society? Sebastian Brandt's Das Narrenschiff portrays the medieval tradition of the ship-of-state apologue about a "society" comprised entirely of fools. (The ship-of-state topos is itself a sign of apologue: in John Skelton's The Bowge of Court, all the voyagers on the ship of court are personified abstractions; even the first-person narrator is, strangely, a personification.) Conversely, Part m of Gullivers Travels gives us the society of Laputa, a place exclusively made up of absent-minded scholars. Much earlier, classical historians and fabulists (Diodorus and Hyginus are prime examples) depicted Amazonian societies composed solely of women (Lempriere 36-37). The fictional enterprise of the all-female society had its greatest literary expressions in Christine de Pisan's medieval allegory The Book of the City of Ladies, and in Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century romance, The Academy for Women. For Cavendish, the "males" in her Blazing World are actual beasts who occupy the forests outside the cosmopolitan Academy. More timely and comprehensible as examples of the kind of apologue I am describing are several entries from modern popular culture. Alan Parker's 1976 film, Bugsy Malone, presents an entire culture — specifically America of the Roaring Twenties — inhabited only by children. (A more extreme form of the idea organizes a recent diaper commercial for television that portrays infants as the sole inhabitants of an entire downtown American city.) Marc Connelly's 1939 film version of the Bible, The Green Pastures (based on his 1929 play of this title), cast all the characters of the Old Testament as jazzage, African-American men and women. A short-lived television situation comedy created by Norman Lear in the late 1970s, called All That Glitters, revived the Amazon topos, presenting a modern America in which the social and occupational roles of men and women were entirely reversed. Each of these modern examples contrives a fictional world in which our modern society is somehow the template of an apologic narrative. The characters who fill these worlds are "not quite" the correct constituent members of the true, template world. The children in Bugsy Malone are "personified" as American adults according to the same figural mechanism that governs the traditional animal fable. Yet, the children are humans. They are sentient, intelligent, capable of speech. Is "personification" — or some as yet unnamed figural operator akin to it - the correct term to apply to so global a figural effect in that film? The fictional or figural translation of 48

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the standard roles of women and children into the standard roles of adult men resembles a feature of prosopopeia recognized, as I noted in the last chapter, by Quintilian: Further, it is not merely true that the variety required in impersonation will be in proportion to the variety presented by the case, for impersonation demands even greater variety, since it involves the portrayal of the emotions of children, women, nations, and even of voiceless things, all of which require to be represented in character. (11.1.41) Clearly the sense of Quintilian's sentence assimilates women, children, and "voiceless things'' into one ontic category - a category apart from that of adult males who can be represented in a fictional text according to other means of characterization (ethopeia or adlocutio). Roman legal theory, in fact, designated any being — corporate or individual — that was not a " sane, adult, and natural person," as part of a category in need of "curatorial" representation (Kantorowicz 374). Thus, children, mad persons, and cities required figurational processing in order to enjoy legal voice or social presence. This avenue of inquiry reveals one pitfall of designating personification or its related tropes as prime figural operators in imaginative works of literature or popular culture. The cinematic examples cited above, along with Quintilian's statement, demonstrate that part of the formal nature of the trope personification rests in a social continuum of which the personified, or apologic, character(s) might be part. A parliament of birds is clearly personificational, as is a single owl speaking to a single nightingale. A complete society of infants or small children is plausible only through literary apologue. But two small children, dressed in tuxedos and speaking to one another, does not necessarily indicate the inception of any figural modus operandi. As Bakhtin demonstrated sixty years ago, verbal utterances produced at a given time and place must be considered as shaped by an overriding, though often not immediately discernible social or sociological " context." Like verbal utterances, characters in apologues are figurally invented entities; they are fabricated counters of rhetorical or poetic self-reference. In the apologue, we seem to have a literalized version of Bakhtin's early concept of socialized discourse, because the apologue characters' ontological statuses are determined by a social or societal framework. This brief tally of apologue and personification narratives prompts a lateral extension among the number of terms associated with the 49

The poetics of personification concept of the "personified" in the initial structural division schematized at the outset of this chapter. Along with abstractions, animals, and objects that can be translated into a personifier, we find suppressed in the domain of the personified all categories of Otherness: infants and children, women, the aged, the feeble-minded, insane, or infirm, and members of ethnic, religious, occupational, or racial minorities. In pursuing this line of inquiry, this investigation is being diverted from its promise of a formal or poetic description of personification and its related tropes and fictional effects. But a sociocritical tactic at this moment narrows a semiotic concept of the personifier while it extends a concept of the personified. Implicit in the concept of the personifier are capacities not only of human physiology, sentience, intelligence, and language in general, but also maleness, adulthood (but not old age), bourgeois financial and social standing (including standard bourgeois-level education), membership in the white race — in short, all the properties that constitute the valorized facets of the ideological superstructure of the complete "society" depicted in the Western personification apologue of the modern Christian era. The apologue engenders, in its semiotic structure, a hidden critique of the structure of Western culture. This detour from the project of a formal poetics of personification is necessary because it demonstrates, once again, how seemingly symmetrical and sharply defined taxonomies experience slippage once we have articulated the layers of hidden and suppressed values that underlie their terms. Even the most basic assumptions of taxonomic trope relationship, according to which we have been proceeding, avoid simple formulation. The short glossary of terms and definitions I sketched above suggests a number of fundamental, logical principles of relationship among the substantialistic tropes. Because personification is the " figural translation of a non-human quantity into a human being," and reification is " the figural translation of a human agent into a non-human one," we might be compelled to designate the two complementary tropes as binary oppositions. But in true poststructuralist fashion, each of the two complementary tropes is seen to be contained in the other's structure, especially when they are reinscribed in a third and coordinate generic scheme, the Body Politic. The Body Politic topos involves, as noted above, the frequent personification of the land and society as the sublime "body" of the king. When over-literalized, this "non-personal" body or person takes on particularized features: subordinate "organs," "limbs," "faculties."

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This is the case in Elizabethan juridical theory where the "mystical'' or "politic" body of the monarch undergoes allegorical anatomization: the "natural" body of the king as individual becomes the "head" of the Body Politic; the king's subjects become "members" (Kantorowicz 13-14). As such, the Body Politic idea has instigated the rhetorical and ideological opportunity for great mischief throughout history. From the political propaganda issued by Menenius Agrippa in prerepublican Rome, to the lies of the Nazis, the Body Politic has keyed on the synecdochal relationship between parts (which are either rightly functioning or ill-functioning) and a whole that is directed by a single, righteous "heart" or "mind." The function of the personification/reification opposition takes on great ethical significance when we review the classic German social principle of the Volkskorper as it worked in the rhetoric of the Nazis. In his study of experimental German medicine in the early 1940s, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton uses the testimony of Dr. Fritz Klein, a low level SS physician, as exemplary of the Nazi sensibility regarding the conceptual relationships among human society, the Jews, and a physician's role as an upholder of the Hippocratic Oath. Klein says, "Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind" (16).10 The statement is a numbing reminder of how verbal figuration can turn to poison when it is put in the service of misdirected patriotism. But more to our point, the statement reveals the structural interdependence of the tropes reification and personification as they are circumscribed by the scheme of the Body Politic. In translating society, a conceptual abstraction, into a living human body, the discursive field of the statement automatically dispersonifies the concrete and living components that make up that conceptual abstraction. The human individuals who constitute society are reified into organs, limbs, tissues. We see the propagandistic value of the Body Politic figure at this point, for only when human beings have been rhetorically made into objects and things can they be conceptually treated like things — they can be "removed" or excised, rather than murdered. Putting the (needed) ethical aspect of this discussion aside for the moment, we see that a ready formalization of the coordinate tropes personification and reification into binary opposites dismantles itself, because each trope constitutes the latent structure of the other.

The poetics of personification The mutual and latent image of personification and reification in one another compels more complete charting in an exhaustive semiotic grid containing tropological relatives. De Man has observed, for example, that a rhetorical apostrophe engenders a prosopopeia because the linguistic structure of the apostrophic utterance assumes or predicates a responsive human consciousness in inanimate objects (Rhetoric 75-76). Hillis Miller declares that "A prosopopeia is usually at least implicitly an apostrophe, an invocation, an attempt to bring back something that was presumably present but no longer is present" (Pygmalion 238). Yet apostrophe is intimately linked to reification, for the phenomenological stakes of addressing speech towards that which is non-human presumes an imaginary, ontically different state of affairs in which non-human things could have "language," however alien. (Such thinking follows Samuel Levin's logic of "radical dispersonification"; see below, chapter 4.) The move thus assimilates the apostrophizer to the apostrophized, engendering the reification of the human speaker as well as the personification of the apostrophized thing. This explanation clarifies de Man's cryptic pronouncement that prosopopoetic apostrophe "strikes dumb" the speaker (Rhetoric 78). As Cynthia Chase explains, "Prosopopeia, or the giving of face, is defacement ... insofar as if face is given by an act of language it is 'only' figure" ($5). Embedded in a Greimas Square, the three tropes reveal a neat geometry of relations. Prosopopeia and reification are contraries which frame an axis of diminishing as well as increasing figural speech inception. Apostrophe is the contradictory of prosopopeia. In the logic of the Greimas Square, apostrophe is corollary to but not an inversion of prosopopeia. Moreover, it signifies the essence of the axis plotted by prosopopeia/reification - that is, the essence of the potential range of "voicedness," the gamut from figural voice to figural voicelessness. Put another way, apostrophe is both prosopopeia and reification. Its homograph, or iconic physical sign, is the telltale " O " that initiates the syntagms of all apostrophic utterances. As Jonathan Culler has shown, the " O " is the sign of voice itself (Pursuit 142). A synecdoche of an apostrophe, the " O " is the figure of voicedness, the axial range of the tropes prosopopeia and reification. The triplex scheme prosopopeia/reification/apostrophe, however, leaves empty a fourth potential vertex in the Square. Logically, the fourth trope would be the subcontrary of apostrophe and the complementary of prosopopeia. It would, in effect, appear as a non-

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trope - as a value outside of the system comprising poles of voice figuration. This "figure," called dialogism or sermocinatio ("dialogue"), is amply treated in the rhetorics and is the fictional motor of direct speech between two human characters. The grid exhausts two oppositions plotted by ontic categories and directionality of message -human/non-human and speaker/listener or addresser/addressee: PROSOPOPEIA
APOSTROPHE

The idealized set of relations in this Greimas Square, however, functions minimally when the "prosopopeia" that anchors and powers up the grid is the "first personification" — the prosopopeia of local, rhetorical ornament. (The Conclusion of this book rewrites this square as a syntactical hierarchy of modified "meta-personifications," each representable by schematic calculi.) It is curious that contemporary poetic investigations into medieval characterization often use "voice," the phenomenal core of all fictional or figural character invention, as the phenomenal node for sermocinatio alone. For instance, Leonard Michael Koff argues that The Pardoners Tale and The Knight's Tale respectively exemplify a strictly binarized set of alternatives. There is: a storytelling continuum in Chaucer that includes tales usually seen as pure voiced performances (as species of drama, with varying degrees of deep or rounded characterization) and tales usually seen as purely voiceless juxtapositions of style or idiom (as species of narrative, with allegorical or emblematic, flat or idealized characters). (156; italics mine) In other words, figurally voiced character is figured as unvoiced; mimetic and "real" fictional character is figured as voiced. The old round/flat, dramatic/narrative valorizational dichotomy at the heart of this declaration commands an ontic distribution among characterizational sermocinatio, ethopeia, eidolopeia, and prosopopeia that markedly differs from the distribution used in this book. What one critic identifies as figural and emblematic, another identifies as authentic, human, and real. Apart from the aesthetic or ideological strands running through this evaluational division, sheer structural identification of personification 53

The poetics of personification and reiflcation in ready and quick terms can sometimes be difficult — a truth that threatens to shut down the preliminary (and admittedly) positivistic maneuvers needed in a formalization of tropes. The preceding semiotic analysis of four coordinate tropes represents an idealized set of relations permitted by abstracting the tropes out of a literary text. Ready identification of personification or reiflcation is especially problematic when we are confronted with figural character invention that is patterned by a unique diegetic structure in which the invention takes part. (I will discuss diegetic registers and personification more thoroughly in chapters 3 and 4.) An elementary example of the dilemma of identifying a driving inventional trope arises during the play-within-a-play "Pyramus and Thisbe," put on by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the domain of the mimetic line of plot that constitutes the circumscribing action of Shakespeare's whole play, the characters Flute, Snout, and Starveling are figurally transformed into non-human entities. Flute is animified as a Lion, while Snout and Starveling are reified as a Wall and Moonshine, respectively. These figural translations are executed through dramatic role-playing by figures who are already characters in the dramatic text A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the encapsulated or embedded domain of the inner play " Pyramus and Thisbe/' however, the non-human entities Lion, Wall, and Moonshine are personified as sentient, speaking beings. On the mimetic level of Shakespeare's play, the figural operator is reification; in the encapsulated level of play-withina-play, the operator is personification. As we saw above, these two tropes should be mutually exclusive. The narrative structure of Shakespeare's text prohibits binary opposition between personification and reification. It defers opportunity to readily name the tropes via the standard Saussurean tactic of definition by negative affirmation. A particularized narrative structure (like the play-within-a-play) can generate identificational confusion not only between personification and its figural binary opposite, but between personification as a figural means of characterization in general, and the descriptive presentation of something fictional but not personificational. Spenser's River catalogue in The Faerie Queene iv.xi involves such a confusion between trope and non-trope, between a narratorially presented personifier (the figurally invented character we see in narrative) and a descriptively presented personified (the actual, non-human thing in real life). Throughout the canto, certain programmatic words indicate that the narrator is recounting a pageant-procession (a discrete, embedded, 54

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performative genre or form) of humanoid figures. Stanza 11 begins, "First came great Neptune..." The "first came/next came" formula continues through the next forty stanzas, and the entities that move in the procession appear in order according to ontological categorization : first gods (iv.xi.o), then semi-divine or heroic humans (stanza 13), then the personified rivers (20), and finally aquatic nymphs (48). (The categorical segregation gauged by the segmenting of the linear procession resembles a variety of "diegetic quarantining" of figural characters that will receive further attention in chapter 3.) Catalogues of any sort, like the tally of trees in the first canto of Book 1, often signal Spenser's devotion to epic convention for its own sake (Braden 26). But Spenser's River catalogue presents a narratorial opportunity for the critique of the procession and of the "literary list." According to Stephen Barney, the latter is another discrete, embedded generic form which, somewhat like the procession, is (metaphorically) ordered by an image of linear motion and is controlled by adverbial markers like the "first/next" formula ("Lists" 205-06). The procession of iv.xi, because it is constituted by "personified" rivers, involves narrative language promoting formal confusion between procession and list. This is because every stanza begins with a "next came" or "there came" formula, while the descriptions of the individual rivers focus on the velocities of their currents: There was the speedy Tamar, which devides The Cornish and the Devonish.confines; Through both whose borders swiftly downe it glides, And, meeting Plim, to Plimmouth thence declines: And Dart, nigh chockt with sands of tinny mines, But Avon marched in more stately path, Proud of his Adamants with which he shines And glisters wide, as als of wondrous Bath, And Bristow faire, which on his waves he builded hath. (1v.xi.31) In addition, programmatic verbs like "marched" or "went" maintain that the passage is the narrative recounting of a train of human figures walking in linear sequence - in a ritualized procession. Because "marching" can also be a metaphor for "flowing," thus making it impossible for us to adjudicate between the two senses of the verb in context, we cannot decisively tell rivers from Rivers. The phrase "First came marching..." can mean, "First in my static description of actual, geographically locatable rivers in Britain, river x flows along speedily." The phrase can also mean, "Appearing at the 55

The poetics of personification head of the procession presented in my dynamic narrative tally of personification characters, River x walks speedily forward." This systematic ambiguity is by no means confined to stanza 31; it marks nearly every stanza in which the text introduces new rivers/Rivers in the catalogue. Such ambiguity of dual-reference incorporates other actional verbs apart from those of forward motion: But Thame was stronger, and of better stay; Yet seem'd full aged by his outward sight, With head all hoary, and his beard all gray, Deawed with silver drops that trickled downe alway. And eke he somwhat seem'd to stoupe afore With bowed backe, by reason of the lode And ancient heavy burden which he bore Of that faire City, wherein make abode So many learned impes, that shoot abrode, And with their braunches spread all Britany, No lesse then do her elder sisters broods. Joy to you both, ye double noursery Of Arts! But, Oxford, thine doth Thames most glorify. (iv.xi.35-36) The dewy, gray beard is a stock iconographic image of personified Rivers in Renaissance pictorial tradition. (One recalls the "crisp head" of the personified River Severn that appears in a speech by Hotspur, 1 Henry 4, i.iii. 104-06.) But the fact that Thames stoops, "With bowed backe, by reason of the lode / And auncient heavy burden" which he bears, promotes further ambiguity concerning the speaker's descriptive discourse about big river towns and his simultaneous narratorial attention to another stock iconographic trait: the heavy urns personified Rivers are often seen, in pictorial art, bearing on their backs (Hall 316). It is curious, though, that River Thames's physically heavy load is a literalization of the metaphorical "burden" of reputation the river Thames carries for the two university towns. The Thames segment of the catalogue expresses less effectively the force personification narrative can exert to distort the conventional structural boundaries between the two forms we call description and narration. But on the whole, the River episode presents not only the identificational difficulty of distinguishing tropological characters from real, nontropological things, it also deconstructs the figural/literal rhetoric of 56

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temporality that makes possible the distinction, charted by Phillipe Hamon (147-48, 162-70), between narrative and description. This textual effect, I contend, represents another codifiable, poetic feature of personification once the trope is combined with a range of generic forms or topoi. Spenser's Rivers, nonetheless, are anthropomorphisms like Vergil's creatures at the gate of the Underworld. But prosopopoetic characters still stand at the heart of this taxonomic chapter. The category of those anthropomorphic beings who enjoy the power of speech further divides into a variety of subsets. Evidently, the kinds of speech produced by prosopopoetic or personification characters bears structural and thematic significance for the text in which the being appears. Prosopopoetic characters in medieval allegory, for instance, often produce only one kind of discourse. Stephen Hawes's tutelary personifications Grammar (lines 519-609), Rhetoric (652-959), and Logic (610-51), in The Pastime of Pleasure, for instance, open their mouths to produce nothing more than dry, textbook jargon taken from the disciplines of Aristotelian rhetoric and logic. Tutelary personifications in medieval allegory are often mere mouthpieces for technical or doctrinal information. They function as prosopa for their real and opinionated author as much as they do for abstract concepts in the text. Many of the tutelary personifications in Piers Plowman provide a more extensive example. In fact, criticism has long recognized the uniform nature of the continuum of doctrinal discourse poured out on Will the dreamer each time he converses with a newly met figure of instruction (Study, Learning, Nature, the Graces, etc.). Many critics have even been amused that Will never really assimilates and learns from the pure doctrine he has been receiving throughout Langland's poem. All of the long educative speeches in Piers Plowman are comprised of highly orthodox theological and philosophical reflections, formulations, doxologies, and proof-texts from scripture. We need not delve into the contents of such speeches at the moment (reserving commentary for chapter 5); we need only to recognize their discursive structures here. Overall, the tutelary speeches tendered upon Will all have the same discursive structure. Like the utterances of Hawes's Logic and Rhetoric, Langland's tutelary personifications produce a uniform discourse that is devoid of narrative moments (with the possible exception of the highly summarized scriptural prooftexts) or rhetorically colorful figuration. They produce largely what 57

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Locke would have considered "pure" discursive language, language that avoids or reduces figural play, as well as any propensity towards fictional or fabular motion (146). The discourse of Langland's tutelary figures can be described as "monological," in the way that Bakhtin uses the term in The Dialogic Imagination (246). Indeed, the discursive "voice" of all the tutelary personifications in Piers Plowman conforms to one monological mode. The potential dialogical nature of Langland's whole work arises out of the communication between this doctrinally thematic, monological stratum and other strata coextending within the narrative dimensions of the poem. Narration is, quite clearly, a discursive mode formally distinct from other modes of discourse, i.e., exposition, description, or persuasion. Narration comprises yet another category of speech that is possible among prosopopoetic characters. The figural invention of a character who can produce her own narrations operates as a reflexive move on the part of the circumscribing poetic text. An author such as Prudentius has made a text in which purely figural characters have the power to make their own texts — their own narratives. (In the following chapter, we will see the significance of this effect for personification theory.) Therefore, a figural subset of prosopopeia is a tangential trope through which the narrative text figurally makes further makers of narrative texts. Another taxonomic point regarding the identification of personification characters concerns what might at first seem to be the simplest question of all: the topic of names they bear. In defining the scope of this study, I at first chose to avoid figural characters who bore names, or lexical labels, that did not denote a readily and commonly identifiable abstract concept — a faculty of the mind, a human institution or agency, a natural force or essence. Quantities such as justice, mercy, the holy church, mankind, pride, or rhetoric are all readily and commonly identifiable abstract concepts. Presented in a literary text, and named or labeled using the proper language of the author of the text — say, a medieval English author — they can become the personification characters Justice, Mercy, Holy Church, Mankind, and so on. A plausible but highly restrictive taxonomic foundation for personification based on names written in the proper language of the author would exclude characters bearing foreign names, neologistic names, nonce-word names, or idioglossic names. A text such as Prudentius' Psychomachia provides only this kind of elementarily labeled personification character. But clearly other great works of 58

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personification tabulation, such as Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queene, are heavily populated with characters named according to nonelementary principles. Spenser's personification figures grow into their names after complex symbolic trials; or, their names ironically or multivalently fit their characters. For personification theory, the topic of naming broaches what I call "the dilemma of nomination/' Again, a brief glossary of nominational varieties will be of service: 1 Personifications bearing single-word names formed in the language of the text's author (Langland's "Kynde" or "Conscience" in Piers Plowman; Milton's Sin and Death in Paradise Lost). 2 Personifications bearing compound or multi-word names formed in the author's language (Messers "Save-All," "Money-Love," and "By-Ends" in Bunyan's The Pilgrims Progress; Prudentius' Vice "Fidem Veterum Cultura Deorum." I will elaborate upon the semiotic value of this category for Piers Plowman in chapter 5.) 3 Personifications bearing either single or compound word names in a language foreign to the author's proper vernacular (Langland's "Anima" or "Activa Vita"; Spenser's "Orgoglio" in The Faerie Queene). The articulation of category three for Piers Plowman is crucial, since Langland creates so many personifications named in Latin, and because there is a regular frequency of Latin that punctuates, at times in something like macaronic fashion, the conventional Middle English language stock of the poem's entire discourse. But the taxonomic distinction between category one and category three, a distinction based on the slippery concept of the author's "vernacular," runs into problems when the entire text of a personification narrative is written by a vernacular author in a non-vernacular, hieratic language like Latin. Milton's early mini-epic, In auintum Novembris, Anno aetatis 17 ("On the Fifth of November, at Age Seventeen"), is an imaginative personification fable peopled with figures, all naturally named in Latin, such as Fama, Discordia, Calumnia, Timor, and Horror. But among his demonic pantheon of evils and vices (lines 130-54) which follows the tradition of Aeneid vi.2 73-81, Milton also includes a figure named Phonos, which Douglas Bush and Merritt Hughes both translate, quite accurately, as "Murder." It is peculiar that Milton, writing his little epic in the hieratic Latin, names this character in Greek. Why does he not name the concept "murder" by employing the proper Latin labels, say, Caedes, Nex, or Homicidiuml I do not intend to fully articulate the aesthetic reasons for Milton's nominational tactic. There is a need 59

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mainly to point out that the question of foreign/vernacular language nomination is central to the categorization of figural beings because medieval and Renaissance thinking held that there was a hierarchy of created things that had to be named. There was also a hierarchy of languages. The pervasive translatio imperii topos, for example, ranked Greek, Latin, and English in a valuational order: the more chronologically prior the language, the more hieratic its status. Thus, Milton's Phonos may be so named to indicate the concept's originary status as a crime or sin (the biblical idea of murder, first committed by Cain, as an originary sin was a conventional enough one) - a crime or sin prior to "discord," "fear," or "horror." In a continuing tentative glossary of nominational tactics, domains of character invention that are not based upon personification proper come into focus. Completing the three categories listed above is a further tally of nominational modes that begin to fall outside of this study's purview: 4 The " ticket-name " or " tag-name " character. This numerous class includes medieval examples (Dante's Malebranche devils "Ciriato," "Barbariccia," "Cagnazzo"), many English Renaissance, Restoration, and Georgian examples (Shakespeare's Bottom the Weaver; Marlowe's Lightborne in Edward II; Wycherley's Pinchwife, Horner, or Fidget in The Country Wife; Sheridan's Surface or Snake in A School for Scandal), and numerous examples from modern literature (Beckett's Clov and Hamm in Endgame; Thomas Pynchon's Benny Profane in V and Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49). 5 The nonce-word character. These figural characters' names are contrived from the vocabulary of an author's vernacular language, as well as from the vocabulary of a language foreign to the author. Like ticket-named characters, these are far too numerous in allegorical literature to represent here in a fair and full light. (Spenser's characters "Amoret," "Scudamour," and "Belamour" are all obvious lexical regenerations of the Latin amor, or of the French I'amour. The orthographic cast Spenser gives any figural name always possesses centrifugal thematic value.)11 6 Another major category of personification-like figural character nomination, traditionally termed " typification," has been long recognized as distinct by theorists of medieval allegory, particularly by Robert Worth Frank (245). I call this the category of "exemplary property characters," and structurally the mechanism of their figural invention is really a variation on isotyping. These are characters in 60

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whom an abstract quality is not necessarily personified. Rather, they are characters who exemplify the abstract qualities reflected in their names. Grammatically, their names are not abstract nouns or mass nouns, but adjectives and count nouns. (Bunyan's "Hopeful" and "Faithful/' and Jean de Meun's Ami or "Friend," are among the most notable examples.) These figures are a variety of isotype because exemplification makes them individual representatives of classes of human beings who are hopeful, faithful, friendly, etc. In the terminology of conventional art history, these characters are at times called exempla. 7 The final category of figural character nomination, which quite properly belongs outside the domain of pure personification, is that class of figural-looking beings who remain unnamed in a literary text. Often, this nominational tactic will take the form of a figure who bears specific iconographic attributes, or who seems to fit as part of a larger, apologic group, but does not bear a name or lexical label. Examples include the "sevene grete geaunts" who assail the building Unity at the close of Piers Plowman (B.xx.215), or the second, unnamed old man in a triad with Eumnestes and Phantastes, in The Faerie Queene (ii.ix.53-54). If we entertain the idea that Chaucer's House of Fame is deliberately unfinished, perhaps we can see the " man of gret auctorite " who appears at the end of the poem (lines 2155—58) as an unnamed figural character. This is structurally possible because of the characterological design of the poem: except for the dreamer Geffrey, the companies of beings that fill Fame's temple and the House of Rumor are really personified verbal utterances (rumors, complaints, petitions, praises). They have ascended from the earth below. The hierarchically elevated and central characters in the House of Fame are Fame and Aeolus; they too are personification figures. It is possible, therefore, that the Man of Authority whom the Dreamer sees is similarly elevated above the lesser, personified rumors who fill the wicker building. As a character of superior status in the House of Rumor, he structurally complements the other two chief personification figures we see: Fame and Aeolus. Perhaps he is the figure Rumor. In the end, however, this speculation is vain because of the unfinished condition of the poem, and because Chaucer does not name him. It is possible for us to think of Langland's seven giants, the second sage in Alma's House of Temperance, and the Man of Authority in Chaucer's poem, as "personification figures" because of the semiotic and structural matrices that contain them, but we still cannot make 61

The poetics of personification final nominational conclusions regarding them. The seven giants may seem to be, axiomatically and without doubt, the Seven Deadly Sins. Here, we have only a numerological value to go on. But the case of the sage is more problematic: what complementary property — to Memory and Imagination - of mind does he personify? Nor is ready structural equation and conceptual appreciation plausible in regard to the Man of Authority. The effect of this kind of non-naming, in fact, creates an open space in the literary text which may initiate the aporia of allegory as de Man described it in Allegories of Reading. In the pages that follow, we will see how the thematic, structural, semiotic, and narratological matrices in the Psychomachia, Piers Plowman, and The Faerie Queene program personification characters who are named in a variety of ways. The taxonomy charted in this chapter can effectively describe figural characterization in the majority of ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern literary works. Yet it may be modified or disrupted as it is more extensively applied in the three works the remainder of this study seeks to account for. The taxonomy provides a foundational model or a map from which the textual realization of its categories will necessarily diverge, producing at times further moments of conceptual and terminological slippage.

62

Narrative level, personification, and character ontology in Prudentius' Psychomachia As the first major work in the history of Western personification literature, the Psychomachia of Prudentius has had a paradoxical status. In the modern critical arena, it is recognized as the most influential source for later medieval allegories that are built upon the central notion of spiritual conflict. At the same time it is considered something of an embarrassment, because of its simple plot structure, the seeming lack of literary grace in its language, and its frequently artless purveying of doctrine. It works more like a piece of theological propaganda than a poem in the epic tradition. More precisely, the Psychomachia has been traditionally appraised as a poetic or formal failure but as a thematic staple in Western thought. The first modern critic to pay close attention to the Psychomachia was C. S. Lewis, who relegated it to the great heap of zealous, popular doctrinal staples of the late Patristic period. For Lewis, "an anticlimax has to be faced when we reach... the Psychomachia of Prudentius. It is unworthy of the great utterances which lead up to it and explain its existence" (66). Lewis appreciates the poem from the perspective of genetic literary history: the primary value of the Psychomachia is its location as the first entry in a vertically ascending scale of allegorical works that reaches, through time, toward greater and greater aesthetic perfection. H. R. Jauss more thoroughly examined the poem's germinal influence on the new psychological apparatus of the great twelfth-century allegorical and humanistic renaissance ("Form")/ while Maurice Lavarenne saw the Psychomachia as the symbolic expression of the crucial historical moments when paganism gave way to Christianity (9-10). In canonical critical accounts of the poem, the trope personification is understood as unsophisticated or banal. This view is no doubt promoted by the poem's simple structure of binarily organized 63

The poetics of personification combats between readily named, definable Virtues and Vices. There seems to be no mystery to the identities of the combative figures, and the staging of the fights is seen as altogether routine. In fact, Prudentius' structure is so predictably methodical, it amounts to a mechanical expression of the concept of plot "conflict" itself: six Virtues slay, in choreographic sequence, six respectively oppositional Vices. Jean Batany's summary of the structure of the Psychomachia as a routine and predictable battle "in which certain individual combats receive particular notice" (32) accurately conveys what seems to be a striking actantial simplicity. Indeed, the economical structure of the Psychomachia constitutes what Viktor Shklovskij might have called an "algebrized" narrative design (11-12), because the predictably sequential pageant of combats parallels and underscores the temporally sequential procession of events in everyday life, rather than the reconfigured and "defamiliarized" collection of events that belong to the genuine "poetic" text. The plot of the Psychomachia exemplifies insured lectorial expectation. In sum, the Psychomachia, because of its algebraic character, seems allied to the simple and "equational" moralization Tuve assigns to "bad allegorization." Its structure also evokes the cumulative character of the equational litanies that punctuate Fulgentius' Continentia Vergiliana, another seminal early medieval allegorical text in which the narrator learns from his magister, the spirit of Vergil, the formulaically derivable "meanings" of all the characters, incidents, and places included in The Aeneia1.1 This algebraic character of the Psychomachia has also furthered the general critical conception of personification the most outstanding formal feature of Prudentius' poem — as a simplistic, algebraic, and inelastic poetic device. Prudentius' personification of virtues and vices, along with his routine deployment of the battle topos, have resulted in a generally unfavorable reception of the poem as an aesthetic entity. More damaging to this already devalued estimation of personification in the poem is the alternative critical opinion that Prudentius does not employ real personification at all The chief recent exponent of this position in Prudentius criticism is Kenneth R. Haworth, in Deified Virtues, Demonic Vices, and Descriptive Allegory in Prudentius

"Psychomachia".2 According to Haworth, the Vices and Virtues in the poem are not personified faculties of the human mind or tendencies of the human spirit. The Vices are "nether spirits," and the Virtues are something akin to angels or minor heavenly deities. This conception 64

Prudentius Psychomachia is approximately conveyed in E. H. Gombrich's description of the urban tyche, the local genii once believed to preside over Roman cities, as actual divine spirits (Symbolic 128). Haworth's project, then, considers the poem as a mimetic narrative that recounts "battles" between good and evil spirits for the human soul. It does not consider the poem primarily as a text that is heavily invested in its own figurality. The argument of Haworth's book is often convincing, mainly because of his keen observations on late Roman religion. But in effect, the foundation of his critical method can be construed as a modified version of the old anthropological approach. This is because Haworth concludes that the divinities and nether spirits of Prudentius' poetic war are vestigial images of gods and goddesses worshiped by the Latin peoples in prehistoric Italy. This general thesis is contradicted by the fact that the first combat described in Prudentius' narrative is between Fides ("Faith") and Fidem Veterum Cultura Deorum ("Faith-inthe-gods-of-antiquity"). The latter might more easily be translated as "Paganism." This necessarily creates a paradox in Prudentius' text, because if all the characters are vestigial, "faded deities" from the religion of pre-Christian, prehistoric Italy, an initial combat in which the paragon of faded deities is destroyed becomes absurd. It is unlikely that Prudentius' Virtues and Vices are vestigial gods and goddesses. Moreover, as we will see, there is strong formal evidence in the Psychomachia which proves that personification is a self-reflexively developed property of the poem. Despite the general devaluing of mimetic narrative structure in the Psychomachia, recent criticism has elaborated Prudentius' sophisticated handling of thematic and theological subjects. Stephen Barney has examined the role of biblical typology in the poem, concluding that Prudentius deftly situates exemplary moments from the Old Testament in regard to the allegorical "outer space" of the battlefield and a psychological "inner space" of the human mind (Allegories 67-68). Carolynn Van Dyke has provided a highly detailed and sensitive investigation into the lexical and thematic properties of all the Virtues' and Vices' names in relation to surrounding narrative contexts. Often, Van Dyke takes to task the problem of translating the Latin words for the Virtues and Vices into English. For example, " Operatio," in the narrative context of her combat with Avaritia, implies a range of theological and social concepts that are restricted by H. J. Thomson's phrase "Good Works" (Van Dyke, Fiction, 56). This critical tactic, also 65

The poetics of personification strongly represented by S. Georgia Nugent's concurrent book on the Psychomachia, attends to the "personifieds" that make up part of the personification figure. However, Van Dyke also elaborates the poem's systematic but significant confusion between typology proper and primary allegorical action. For example, she understands the claim of Pudicitia ("Chastity") - that the Virtues were "prefigured" by Judith — not as a flaw in the distinction between modes of discourse (the typological and the personificational) on Prudentius' part, but as a reflexive manipulation of narrative codes. Prudentius' text selfconsciously mixes the then current conceptions of what Van Dyke calls conventional "literary allegory," or "the set of genres based on the synthesis of... generic codes," and "pure allegory," or "Realistic narrative ... whose agents are universals" (39-41). The actants of Prudentius' poem are, for Van Dyke, abstract universals contained in a narrative continuum. The allegorical power of the poem lies in its lexical and thematic fissures along with larger generic confusions, rather than in any basic assumptions the poem makes about the trope personification itself. For Van Dyke, personification is one of the stable givens of the Psychomachia from which we proceed to more complex formal matters. This at first seems to be an appropriate critical response, because the Psychomachia provides, as I noted in chapter 2, characters that are labeled in the poet's proper language with words that indicate comprehensible, albeit abstract conceptions: faith, greed, discord, lust, and so on. Van Dyke and Barney, like all commentators on Prudentius' poem, make little of the concrete, physical action of the battle that constitutes the poem's primary and mimetic narrative moments. This is disappointing, because the most memorable details of Prudentius' descriptive discourse are the moments of graphic demolition that befall the Vices at the hands of their conquerors. The grisly descriptions of bloody decapitation, dismemberment, and the mutilation of faces have been decisively traced to the Vergilian descriptive tradition of epic battle. Sister M. Clement Eagan associates the gory aspects of the Psychomachia with key sites in The Aeneid (82)? More recently, Martha Malamud has discussed the martyrological common ground of Prudentius' Peristephanon and the Psychomachia; quite importantly, her reading of Claudian's In Rufinum explores the topos of dismemberment in the arena (48—54). But even as versions of Vergilian battle topoi or martyrological parody, the grisly sites in Prudentius' poem seem awkwardly excessive. After all, they conflict 66

Prudentius Psychomachia with the "ideational" properties of characters that are supposedly abstract universals. Macklin Smith explains that Prudentius' engagement of Vergilian themes and battle topoi is strictly ironic: Prudentius contrasts noble pagan action in battle with that of ideal Christian action in battle (144). The excessive quality of the fleshy demolition of Vices could be an ironic commentary on a traditional battle ethos. Carolynn Van Dyke agrees with the general idea that Prudentius employs, either ironically or straightforwardly, epic battle conventions. Concerning Prudentius' graphic details, she writes: We can safely conclude that these details are 'epic convention' and declare that no allegorical image can correspond perfectly to thematic meanings. Still, we may wish that the image had been more appropriate or more sensitively handled. (32) I have been dwelling upon the topic of the graphic gore in the Psychomachia because it is the only expressly physical detail with which Prudentius invests his personification characters. True, he provides general descriptions of the warriors' clothing and hair, but nothing on the order of the iconographic elaboration that characterizes the figures who inhabit later medieval allegories. In the handful of critical perspectives just reviewed, the graphic gore is appreciated as a physically "realistic" element in Prudentius' poem about non-corporeal conceptual or ideational quantities. Yet, certain of the descriptions part from realistic representation, and attain a greatly exaggerated quality - a kind of "visual hyperbole." An example is the death of Fidem Veterum Cultura Deorum, which concludes the poem's first combat. Here, Faith hostile caput phalerataque tempora vitiis altior insurgens labefactat, et ora cruore de pecudum satiata solo adplicat et pede calcat elisos in morte oculos, animamque malignam fracta intercepti commercia gutturis artant, difficilemque obitum suspiria longa fatigant. (rising higher, smites her foe's head down, with its fillet-decked brows, lays in the dust that mouth that was sated with the blood of beasts, and tramples the eyes under foot, squeezing them out in death. The throat is choked and the scant breath confined by the stopping of its passage, and long gasps make a hard and agonising death.) (30-35) Van Dyke maintains that to "allegorize in detail" such a graphic passage would "betray the absurdity of the procedure" (32). True, the search for the symbolic value of eyes, mouth, and breath in an iconographic system outside of the text could become exegetically 67

The poetics of personification strained and cumbersome. But the precise details Prudentius provides in this passage - the destruction of eyes, mouth, and throat - are repeated again and again in the Psychomachia. Witness the destruction of Luxuria (" Indulgence") at the hands of her opponent Sobrietas ("Soberness"), who smashes a stone into the Vice's mouth: casus agit saxum, medii spiramen ut oris frangeret, et recavo misceret labra palato. dentibus introrsum resolutis lingua resectam dilaniata gulam frustis cum sanguinis inplet. insolitis dapibus crudescit guttur, et ossa conliquefacta vorans re vomit quas hauserat off as. (chance drives the stone to smash the breath-passage in the midst of the face and beat the lips into the arched mouth. The teeth within are loosened the gullet cut, and the mangled tongue fills it with bloody fragments. Her gorge rises at the strange meal; gulping down the pulped bones she spews up again (421—26) the lumps she swallowed.) Earlier in the poem, Pudicitia inflicts a similar, fatal laryngeal wound on Libido ("Lust"): tune exarmatae iugulum meretricis adacto transfigit gladio; calidos vomit ilia vapores sanguine concretos caenoso; spiritus inde sordidus exhalans vicinas polluit auras. (Then with a sword-thrust she pierces the disarmed harlot's throat, and she spews out hot fumes with clots of foul blood, and the unclean breath defiles (40-52) the air near by.) And again, after the conclusion of the "war proper/' when DiscordiaHeresis enters the camp of the Virtues, we have nearly the same image: non tulit ulterius capti blasphemia monstri Virtutum regina Fides, sed verba loquentis inpedit et vocis claudit spiramina pilo, pollutam rigida transfigens cuspide linguam. (No further did Faith, the Virtues' queen, bear with the outrageous prisoner's blasphemies, but stopped the passage of her voice with a javelin, driving its hard point through the foul tongue.) (715-18) Each of these passages no doubt has an analogue in Homeric or Vergilian battle convention; mouths and faces are commonly smashed in the epic battle. But here, Prudentius' lingering on the precise demolition of oculi, and of dentis and linguae seems to bear crucial semiotic force. Teeth and the tongue are the internal bodily components for making speech. They constitute, along with the lips (labii — the external components for making speech), the mouth. The mouth (along with the larynx which modulates the breath) is the seat 68

Prudentius Psychomachia of the power of language. As organs, the mouth and the eyes constitute a sign of the face. And the face (prosopon) thematized is the signature of prosopopeia. Paul de Man understands the semiotic engagement of eyes, mouth (voice-speech), and the face as the central chain of figural images in Wordsworth's Essays Upon Epitaphs: We can identify the figure ... of prosopopeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased,, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter's reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope's name, prosopon poein, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon).

(Rhetoric j6)

Prudentius' focus upon the imagery of the destruction of the face, therefore, is a literalized reverse of prosopopeia. It is the symbolic dismantling of the trope by which the text invents the figural characters who inhabit its actantial narrative. Prosopopeia is selfreflexively thematized as a central topical ground in the Psychomachia. The final dismemberment of Discordia furthers the significance of this structure. At this moment, Prudentius thematizes the coordinate trope anthropomorphism by instantiating its literalized inversion: carpitur innumeris feralis bestia dextris... discissum foedis animalibus omne cadaver dividitur (Countless hands tear the deadly beast in pieces... The whole corpse is torn asunder and parcelled out to unclean creatures.) (7*9/ The graphic rending of limbs from trunk and part from part no doubt ironically reveals Discord's symbolic condition in life. But the image is also a potent figural reversal of the trope wherein the human form (arms, legs, head, trunk) is poetically and figurally "assembled" as a characterological entity. The graphic demolition of the Vices at the hands of the Virtues has created a critical dilemma regarding the ostensible ethics of "Virtues" (Clifford; Nuttall). We must remember, however, that the Virtues in Prudentius' poem are reflexively realized figural entities. At times, their main semiotic function (as opposed to their obvious thematic role) is to reflect not the ethically abstract offices of virtuehood, but rather the self-reflexive figural armature of the entire Psychomachia. This "armature" is the self-conscious omnipresence of the text's foundational figural operator, personification. The argument I have outlined here therefore pushes back, beyond the advent of the allegorical poetry of the High Middle Ages (The Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman), the inception of self-reflexive personification fabu69

The poetics of personification lation. Through what at first seems to be the pedestrian implementation of hackneyed conventions, the Psychomachia provides a critique of the primary subordinate tropes of substantialization — prosopopeia and anthropomorphism. The simple structure and cliche actions of the poem bespeak a sophisticated process of reader involvement: we expect an inelastic, embarrassingly naive and predictable apologue; but we get an implicit theoretical document on the modes and problems of figural character invention. Even if we insist that dismemberment and defacement in the Psychomachia can be best explained in terms of martyrological or epic sources, the aforementioned semiotic state of affairs can be seen to inform even those sources. Martha Malamud's excellent examination of the connections between Claudian's In Rufinum and Prudentius' Psychomachia reveal the programmatic figural imagery of encasement, defacement, and dismemberment. The tearing apart of Rufinus in the arena involves a kind of "metamorphosis/ 7 a figurative depiction of the bestially attacking soldiers encased in "statue-like," non-human looking shells (in lamina —a semiotic "oxymoron" that both dehumanizes the soldiers, as Malamud notes in the boustrophedon of the word, animal, while depicting them as metal prosopa) that strangely "breathe" while rending Rufinus into pieces (51-53). As a literary source, the Claudianic text presages the latent mimesis of the tropes prosopopeia and pragmapeia that characterizes Prudentius' text. So far, we have dealt exclusively with the physical details of mimetic action that involve the actants of Prudentius' text. We have not, though, addressed the verbal discourse produced by these actants. We have seen how Prudentius, in general, thematizes prosopopeia. But he also provides a reflexive figural examination of that hypothetical subset of prosopopeia mentioned above in chapter 2: the Psychomachia presents poetically crafted figural characters who make their own poetic texts. In light of the earlier, reductive tradition of figural characterization in Aeneid vi, Prudentius' creation of personification figures who speak and narrate is an inaugural moment in Western letters. Before fully articulating this concept, however, we must pursue the "kinds" of allegorical operation evident in the Psychomachia. This question has been broached by Stephen Barney, who, as we saw in chapter 1, understands two varieties of allegory at work in Prudentius' poem: "reification allegory" and "typological allegory." The distinction arises out of the thematic and semiotic tension generated between the "historical," biblical matters spoken of

Prudentius Psychomachia by the Virtues and Vices, and the encapsulating continuum of the battle action (Barney, Allegories, 63; Van Dyke, Fiction, 34-35). Exactly what is the structural relationship between the biblical or typological dimension of the poem, and the actantial or personificational one? A theoretical review of typology, personification, and their significance in the province of traditional medieval allegoresis frames this question. In most discussions of allegory theory since the 1950s, the four-fold method of medieval allegorical exegesis has come under strong attack. Morton Bloomfield was the first critic to point out that, along with what is called the "literal" level, "typological" (often called "allegorical"), "tropological," and "anagogical" valences of meaning arise, at best, only out of successive and different moments of a literary narrative. Rarely do all four senses apply to a single, isolable site (either in scripture or in secular literature), except in the case of "a few hackneyed phrases like Jerusalem" ("Symbolism" 76). The popular understanding that four senses or levels of meaning are engendered in every phrase, image, or episode of an allegorical text is traceable to Dante's " Letter to Can Grande," in which the poet offers as exemplary of the four-fold exegetical paradigm an analysis of the famous passage from Psalm 114, 1-2 (Adams 122). Looking from Dante to Bloomfield, we might say that there is little or no current interest in the four-fold scheme as a serious and useful topic of inquiry in modern allegory theory. It is perhaps instructive that modern allegory theorists generally pay no attention to the scheme, while some medievalists, like V. A. Kolve, still see it as a viable hermeneutic tool in decoding complex works like Chaucer's Man of Laws Tale (297-358). A formal redefinition of the four levels that tries to account for the genuine function of the trope personification, however, could provide foundation for a new argument. I would like to propose that a narratological program — that is, a descriptive taxonomy that accounts for the formal operation of narrative levels and codes in a literary text - could revive the notion of significational senses or "levels" in texts that are traditionally accepted as "allegorical." By seeing how personification relates to the four levels and then examining the levels in terms of narrative or diegetic patterns as they are arranged in the Psychomachia, we can better understand the widespread medieval conception of literary texts that are significationally " layered." And we will further see how Prudentius foregrounds and examines the semiotic value of the trope personification. Our first task is to see how personification, as a narrative trope of

The poetics of personification character invention, is related in its essence to the four levels of literal and extra-literal significance. When we trace the four-fold scheme backward from Dante (ignoring for the moment other major exponents of it, such as Isidore of Seville) we come first to Augustine, who expounded a similar four-level significational configuration in scripture. Augustine's " senses," however, do not correspond precisely to Dante's. They are the "historical," the "etiological," the "anagogical," and the "allegorical" levels of meaning (Rogers and McKim 32). Nearer to the elements of Dante's scheme are the three levels prescribed by Origen. His "literal," "moral," and "anagogical" levels prefigure Dante's senses, and they reflect, approximately, the soma, psyche, and pneuma of a human being (Rogers and McKim 15). Going back still further, we come to Philo of Alexandria, whose still more compact two-fold paradigm of signification was the first to account for registers of scriptural polysemy (Grant 58). For Philo, scripture engendered a "physical" level and an "ethical" level of understanding. If we rewrite the popular four-fold scheme in the terms of Philo's paradigm, we are left with only two levels of significance. The eschatological-anagogical sense chronologically involves the final moments of real human history - the "end-time," or parousia of the "literal," temporal sequence of human history. This sequence is represented concretely in the narration of actual events and living persons that constitute the subjects of the Bible - the record, for orthodox medieval Christians, of divinely guided salvation-history. What are traditionally the first and the fourth levels of the four-fold paradigm — the literal and the eschatological — therefore collapse into one. Although Revelations, the scriptural account of the parousia, is itself highly charged with symbolic images and allegorical resonances, the domain of reference for this apocalyptic text are beings (angels, devils, humans) who have actually existed or will enjoy existence. In line with the notion suggested in chapter 2 of this study, collapsing the eschatological level into the literal level initiates the assimilation of two sets of phenomenologically similar ontological "entities" — historical humans. Similarly, the second or so-called " allegorical" level of significance is simply a register of the entire grid of typological configurations possible among the corpus of scripture. Since Abel as type and Christ as antitype are genuine salvation-historical figures, they belong, ontologically and formally, to the same taxonomic category. The Mountain Horeb where Moses receives the Ten Commandments is

Prudentius Psychomachia the prefigurative type of the Mount of Olives where Jesus ascends to heaven; both mountains are actual, geographic places locatable in the space and time of human history. Abel and Christ, Horeb and the Mount of Olives clearly belong, like the characters and places that would inhabit the historical parousia, to a physical or historical plane of significance. The only level of the traditional four-fold scheme of allegoresis that cannot be collapsed into the historical plane of ontology designated by real, physical persons is the " tropological" (in the pre-modern sense of the word) or moral level. This level presents the ethical ventures of the archetypal human soul struggling along the course toward individual salvation. As such, the areas of reference or "pretexts" (to borrow Quilligan's term, Allegory g?-i55) for tropological fabulation are ethics, axiology, and moral philosophy. This is because these disciplines systematically consider the individual person's dilemma of making morally or ethically informed decisions throughout life. Since scriptural tropology and ethics contain the same objects and telos, the former might be thought of as a less systematic version of the latter. Given all this, we can understand that the subjects of tropological fabulation must be moral or ethical abstract values: they are vices, virtues, feelings and thoughts, impulses, faculties, and by extension, institutions, disciplines, bodies or fields of knowledge, and so on.4 In line with the formal need of narration or fabulation for substantialized, concrete, spatio-temporal actants, the phenomenal or ontic world of the tropological plane must necessarily be peopled by and distributed with personification figures, reification objects, and moralized paysages. In short, the " characters " or " objects" found in this ontological domain amount to what Husserl called the eidetic realm in his phenomenological program. Eidetic entities exist only in mental or psychic terms and never in "real" or hyletic ones (more about the phenomenological bases of "personificational worlds" in the next chapter). It should therefore be evident that Philo's scheme is at once rich and simple in providing the framework for a taxonomy of character invention. It should also be clear that the narrative worlds generated out of this framework inscribe a binary opposition of character morphology: real human vs. personification figure. The implementation of this framework among a tentative set of narratological codes for the Psychomachia can now be undertaken. But before we can turn to the promise of such codes to sort out the formal operations of personification figures and real human characters in the 73

The poetics of personification poem, we must first select and review the narratological system that promises the greatest rigor and utility. The categories proposed by Gerard Genette in Narrative Discourse (216-62) seem the most clearly articulated and applicable. Genette understands the primary and encompassing narrative field in a literary text to comprise what he calls the "diegesis" of the text. This is story and descriptive commentary supplied directly by the "authorial" voice that circumscribes all the temporal action in the text. Any narrative of a secondary nature that is "embedded," to use Todorov's term for this structural motion (Poetics 70—73), in the primary diegesis Genette calls a "metadiegesis." Much of Genette's theoretical discussion of the complex novels of, say, Fielding or Proust, focuses on the interrelationship among these diegetic levels and on the differentiation, in terms of formal characteristics, between one level and another (Narrative 227—37).

Given the basic terms of Genette's system, we can proceed to ask the questions hitherto prompted: can there be a relationship between the two oppositional, ontologically different kinds of character invention we outlined above (human/personificational), and separate and different levels of diegesis in Prudentius' text? Is it possible that the historical register of narrative significance is somehow coterminous with one distinct diegetic level, while the moral register of narrative significance is coterminous with another distinct, "higher" or "lower" diegetic level? Perhaps more to the point: is there a reason for "quarantining" ontologically different entities, distributing them among the distinct levels of a verticalized spatial structure? I make these connections as part of an unavoidable metafigural inquiry. Genette's scheme and the Philovian or Dantean paradigms are constructed according to the master trope or macrometaphor of vertically ? The systems of Genette, Philo, and Dante posit a valorized, vertical layering of levels or valences, and consider the possible formal and phenomenological-ontological differences among the characteristic actants and objects that inhabit each valence. Uncovering this macrometaphor of verticality leads to attractive possibilities in devising a new tool for reading a good many medieval texts. The idea, however, that there are medieval literary allegories which have personification figures neatly self-contained on one diegetic level while human figures are self-contained on another level, is provocative and revealing but perhaps difficult to demonstrate. In fact, a primary characteristic of medieval personification tabulation is that human 74

Prudentius Psychomachia characters and personification figures interact freely: they converse, argue, fight with, or instruct one another on any given narrative level whether it is a diegesis narrated by the author, or by a character contained in the author's own diegesis. Without such freedom, Piers Plowman or many of Chaucer's works would be impossible. But the Psychomachia provides an empirical instance of the principle of strict diegetic quarantining. As another fountainhead of medieval allegory, Prudentius' poem is sufficiently prior to, and poetically different from, the later allegories to allow for the suspicion that the author's sense of character invention and distribution is radically innovative and distinct. An early and germinal work of personification fabulation, the Psychomachia has a correspondingly compact structure that enables ready dissection. A digest of the poem's simple structure goes as follows. After an initial reflection about the holiness of Abraham, followed by invocation of the martial figure that necessarily precedes moral action in the face of evil, the Prudentian narrator describes in sequence six single combats that constitute the "war" proper between the Virtues and the Vices. Each of the six fights is programmatically simple.6 Shouting boasts and invectives, a Vice usually advances from among her ranks toward a Virtue. Next, the Virtue slays the Vice in a graphically gruesome manner. She then concludes her noble act by breaking into a hortatory set-speech. Immediately evident is an inverse structural parallel between the performance of each Vice and its corresponding Virtue in a binary set: at times, a Vice will provide speech first, physical action second; a Virtue provides physical action first, speech second. No doubt this programmatic move on the narrator's part conveys an orthodox thematic value having to do with the medieval ethical notion of vita activa.7 More importantly, however, Prudentius' poem is narratologically unique because all the personification figures are entirely contained in the primary diegetic field of authorial narration. This is the mimetic line of action and its function is to describe in detail all events that arise during the battle: charges, retreats, slayings, and the advent of illocutions. The set-speeches performed by the personification figures divide into two modes. First, they are boasts, curses (optatives or exclamations, provided mainly by the Vices), or orders (imperatives) ; second, they are fully developed narrations (provided exclusively by the Virtues). This presents us with a narratological distinction in Prudentius' narrative fabric: the stories narrated by the personifications 75

The poetics of personification constitute a second or metadiegetic level of narrative. These are indeed embedded narrations, for nearly each set-speech contains a version of a biblical narrative passage. For example, when Superbia (Pride) crashes from her horse, Spes (Hope) steps forth, promptly beheads the Vice, and recounts the confrontation between David and Goliath: vidimus horrendum membris animisque Goliam invalida cecidisse manu: puerilis in ilium dextera fundali torsit stridore lapillum traiectamque cavo penetravit vulnere frontem. ille minax, rigidus, iactans, truculentus, amarus, dum tumet indomitum, dum formidabile fervet, dum sese ostentat, clipeo dum territat auras, expertus pueri quid possint ludicra parvi subcubuit teneris bellator turbidus annis. (We have seen how Goliath, terrible as he was in body and in valour, fell by a weak hand; it was but a boy's right hand that shot at him a little stone whizzing from his sling, and pierced a hole deep in his forehead. He, for all his stark menace, his boasting and his fierce and bitter speech, in the midst of his ungoverned pride and fearful raging, as he vaunted himself, affrighting the heavens with his shield, found what a little child's toy can do, and wild man of war as he was, fell to a lad of tender years.) (291-99) Similar biblical narrative is provided by the Virtues in the respective contexts of almost all the slayings. A close look at Prudentius' nearly identical structuring of each actantial confrontation and its rhetorical aftermath allows us to isolate at least three narrative proairetic codes: (1) human characters are conspicuously absent from the primary diegetic level; only personification figures are found here; (2) biblical human characters - to the complete exclusion of personification figures — comprise entirely the metadiegetic level; and (3) the historical-biblical topics of each separate metadiegesis are thematically consonant with the particular personification battles in the circumscribing primary diegetic moments, as Van Dyke and Barney have demonstrated. In other words, each metadiegesis presents us with a resonant " typologue" (that is, a discrete configuration of types and corresponding antitypes, countertypes, and allotypes from scripture; Paxson 105-06) that reflects and amplifies the corresponding diegetic moment. The poem is a sequence of typological—tropological correlations. Pudicitia, at the slaying of Libido, discourses upon the Judith and Holofernes episode from the apocryphal Book of Judith (58-65); Sobrietas, at the slaying of Luxuria, tells of Jonathan and the Honeycomb from 1 Samuel (397—400); and so forth. 76

Prudentius Psychomachia In view of the operation of these codes in the Psychomachia, we can conclude that the traditional significational levels of a "two-fold" paradigm correspond to modalities of character invention. This corresponding structure in turn corresponds to diegetic levels or fields of narration which are also vertically ordered by formal distinctions. To repeat, within the confines of the primary diegetic level of the battle-action, no human figures take part and speak, while within the Bible-stories narrated by the Virtues or Vices, only human figures appear. This codified narratological effect might also explain the similar ontological "quarantining7' of apologue discussed above in chapter 2. A narrative world filled entirely with children or fools or talking animals equates to a complete and discrete diegetic level within a larger narrative text. In the movie Bugsy Malone, hypotheticaly "real" American society controlled by adults exists on another ontic plane (outside the text, presumably) from the narrative world containing only children. The worlds of the apologue or of the diegetic level are hermetically sealed. Each functions because its inhabitants are ontologically (and structurally) defined in relation to what they are not — in relation to the inhabitants of an external (or internal and embedded) template world. Genuine apologue, usually of the personificational variety, is known for its ontologically restrictive, non-transgressable borders. The ostensible transgression of a personification figure into the metadiegetic level, or of a human figure into the diegetic level would involve, to borrow further from Genette's taxonomy, a transdiegetic "metalepsis."8 Genette defines a narrative metalepsis as the direct intermingling or collapsing of the elements belonging to two distinct levels of diegesis. A character who emerges from a book or painting within the narrated universe of a particular novel (the novels of RobbeGrillet furnish Genette with his most striking examples) involves one kind of metalepsis. Another kind would involve a narrator, like Tristram Shandy, who urges us (presumably outside or "above" the primary line of diegesis) to produce a direct effect on one of his characters — like closing the door to Walter Shandy's room {Narrative 234—37). The narratological scheme outlined in this chapter suggests that post-Prudentian, medieval personification allegories engage the figure of narrative metalepsis on the scale of entire texts. Beginning with Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, we have a text in which (on the level of primary diegesis) the entire primary action consists of interchange between the narrator and Lady Philosophia. Moving 77

The poetics of personification forward to The Romance of the Rose or the works of Christine de Pisan, in which human characters and personification figures interact regularly and sometimes confusingly, we see that medieval personification tabulation would be drastically altered without metalepsis. Perhaps, then, this metaleptical effect becomes a macrometaphor of personification tabulation itself. If that is the case, the narratological structure of the Psychomachia is a formal exception rather than a rule to the genealogy of "traditional 7 ' Western personification narratives it subsequently suggests. Even as an exception or anomaly the encoded structure of the Psychomachia is strict but not "perfect"; its diegetic levels are not incontestably sealed off from one another. There is one site in the entire poem in which a human figure, albeit inactively and mute, transgresses into the primary diegetic field of narration. Job "appears" beside Patientia, attending her back to the Virtues' battle-phalanx after the suicide of Ira: ... secat medias inpune cohortes egregio comitata viro; nam proximus lob haeserat invictae dura inter bell magistrae, fronte severus adhuc et multo funere anhelus, sed iam clausa truci subridens ulcera vultu (... she makes her way unharmed through the midst of the battalions, escorted by a noble man; for Job had clung close to the side of his invincible mistress throughout the hard battle, hitherto grave of look and panting from the slaughter of many a foe, but now with a smile on his stern face as he thought of his healed sores) (162—66) Curiously, Patience supplies no metadiegetically contained Bible story. Rather, the protagonist from the ideally relevant typologue "emerges" into the primary line of diegesis. In effect, the figure Job functions as a metonymy of the narrative text Job from the Old Testament. (Traditionally, texts in Western literature are metonymically indicated through the use of their authors' names.) More precisely, "Job" can be construed as a personification of Job in much the same way that Swift "personifies" texts in The Battle of the Books. So understood, Job's emergence is not an ontological violation or transgression; he is equivalent to the personified Virtues whom he aids in combat. But viewed as a historical human from the Bible, the appearance of Job on the primary narrative level of the text could be construed as a negation of the proairetic code governing the text. This negation is engineered as a transdiegetic metalepsis. Because he is the only human figure to emerge in the poem, we can conclude that the Book of Job 7S

Prudentius Psychomachia bears unusual thematic significance for Prudentius. What is peculiar about Jobl Compared to the other biblical stories that provide the human characters in other diegeses in the poem, Job is unique in terms of its theme and rhetorical style. Because of its novel use of ironic point and counterpoint and of the rhetorical question on a large scale, the book is unlike any other text in the Old or New Testaments (Greenburg 283—304). Job is also unusual because it centers on a nonJew as an exemplum of moral virtue and righteousness. Also, the cosmic structure of the universe presented in Job is not orthodox: Job is the only book in the Bible in which Satan is depicted not as the adversary of God, but as his functionary - as God's ordained "examiner'' or inspector of humanity (Job 1.6-12). More important than these particular features, however, the book of Job is the first entry in Scripture to "dismantle the calculus of retribution" (Janzen 493). That is, the dialogues between Job and the three visitors Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, fail to account for the unjust and sudden affliction of one who was so fervent and righteous a servant of God. Furthermore, Job is absolutely unique in that it is the only " antitheodicy " to appear in scripture. Instead of humanizing God and making his actions acceptable towards humanity, the book assigns humanity to the function of accident, of inconsequence. Humanity is not the focal object of divine attention as it is in Genesis. This thinking is conveyed through a debate structure (also unique in the Old Testament), the outcome of which is Job's resignation to the positions of his friends, and to the unfathomable will and logic of God. The debate topos is, as Angus Fletcher reminds us, a staple form in medieval allegory and closely linked to the allegorical battle convention (Allegory 157-59). As a formal allegorical pretext of the Psychomachia, the book of Job is a topical mirror of Prudentius' text: both texts provide the plotting of contests from which we expect victory for one faction, defeat for the other. The defeat of evil by virtue in Prudentius' poem is secured; but the programmatic Jobpretext of the Psychomachia, with its abandonment of contention or "combat" and its dismantling of retributional justice, is a centrifugal force that threatens to shut down Prudentius' poem, which concerns itself with the defeat of vice by virtue. Deactivation of the foundational martial topos of the Psychomachia has serious consequences for the ideological framework of late Christian antiquity. In an historical materialist argument, the allegorical war or bellum intestinum would be, to use Bakhtin's and Medvedev's term, an "ideological refraction" of 79

The poetics of personification the collapsing apparatus of late empire (21). As the first entry in the genealogy of all Western personification narratives that deal with symbolic conflict and resolution, the Psychomachia is the literary expression of the militarily grounded imperial consciousness. It is the inaugural literary manifesto of the then ascending theological principle of the bellum justitia, the principle that was universalized as church policy in the early fifth century, and that underwrote the future incidents of crusade and inquisition (Augustine 218-19). This entire ideological superstructure, symbolically summarized by the narrative action of the Psychomachia, is undermined by the thematics of the book of Job. Job's decisive appearance as the only human figure in the action of the Psychomachia cancels, in a grand gesture of irony, the entire poem's raison d'etre. Yet, Job's ontological status as a human being is itself subjected to scrutiny. The primary actants of the Psychomachia are, we agreed, makers of narrative fictions: they are prosopoetic characters who can be further classified as "poiopoetic" ones. Along with their propensity towards physical combat, verbal production is their prime ontological quality. But Job, as we noted above, is entirely mute. Of all the figures that appear in the primary mimetic action of the poem, he alone does not have the power of speech. This at first seems natural, since his sudden and brief appearance in line 163, in the service of his stock role, has the power of a locally engaged, pictorial tableau vivant (another staple convention in the tradition of Western personification and allegorical narrative). At most, Job has "a smile on his face" (subridens vultu, 166). But as we have seen above, the face in the Psychomachia is an important signal-image. And the smile is a reflex-response, an automatic gesture revealing an internal state. It is not necessarily an act of sign-production and transmission; it belongs to that category of signs that may or may not, for the medieval scholastic thinker, function as a moment of linguistic expression (see Eco and Marmo, "Animal Language," 3-20). This explicit thematization of the prosopon in conjunction with a non-verbal pseudo-sign (the smile), demands careful appraisal of Job as the sole exception, or the violation, of the proairetic code that governs the narratological constitution of the poem: inhabitants of the text's primary narrative level alone enjoy the powers of speech and story-telling. Job does not speak or narrate, but the text foregrounds the image of his face cast in a smile. In general, Job's silence or aphasia could simply be the dramatization of the idea, traced in the Old Testament text, about his final eschewing So

Prudentius Psychomachia of polemical dialogue and, in turn, verbal utterance itself. Job accepts the mystery of creation as God presents it in His final speech (Job 38-41). The necessary human response to such acceptance is embracing the ineffable. Thus: silence. The book of Job concludes, according to this perspective, with the engagement of a variation on the " inexpressibility topos," and Job's aphasia in Prudentius' poem is a stylized reflection of this topical engagement. But more in line with the narratological and semiological drift of this chapter, the aphasic condition of a human figure in direct diegetic proximity to a prosopoetic one appears to be a ratio of inverse proportionality. A further property of the auto-thematizing of prosopopeia in the Psychomachia, therefore, is the ironic and paradoxical ratio of personified characters to aphasic and thus "dispersonified," naturally human characters. Where there is an active prospopoetic character, we find humans robbed of their natural power of speech. This formal property bears little theological or ideological significance. It can only be the direct expression of the text's formal and figural self-reflection, for it underwrites, by ironic amplification, the ontic stakes of fictional personification and the corollary dilemma of phenomenological character differentiation. An effect not unlike the unreadability described by de Man in genuine allegory arises in the Psychomachia from the aporetics of character differentiation. When character differentiation gets subverted by an encoded mixing up of the powers and ontic qualities of figural (or eidetic) vs. human entities, creature taxonomy and hierarchization - the central, obsessive interests of ancient and medieval metaphysics — become impossible. The Psychomachia, which seems at first sight to be an embarrassing and wooden apologue on psycho-spiritual conflict, is the literary vehicle par excellence for deconstructing the medieval ontology of created beings.

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I Job's silence in Prudentius' Psychomachia functions as an index of the text's self-conscious ontological relationship between fictional but "historical" human characters and purely figural ones. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, speech and voice exist as reflexive constants in personification tabulation. Anthropomorphized abstractions who enjoy the power of human speech entail the formal engagement of prosopopeia. A silent or aphasic human figure, spatially and temporally proximate to prosopopoetic figures in a single and closed narrative domain, signals the text's adoption of its own characterological critique. Job's role and function in the Psychomachia is strange and novel; but he is still a narratologically "peripheral" character, appearing only in a single, delimited, local site. Far stranger would be a similar treatment of the narrator of the Psychomachia. Prudentius' poem, however, has been placed by tradition squarely into the category of third-person, visionary doctrine-literature. In this kind of literature, the narrator-commentator spins a fabular core that serves to convey directly his doctrinal messages. Naturally, the narrator must adopt a detached third-person stance. This seems to be the case regarding the Psychomachia. Or is it? Near the conclusion of the poem and after the ending of the war proper, the narrator of the Psychomachia tells of the " assault" made by one last enemy intruder: nam pulsa Culparum acie Discordia nostros intrarat cuneos sociam mentita figuram. (For, when the Vices' army was driven off, Discord had entered our ranks wearing the counterfeit shape of a friend) (683—84) The narrator's employment of first-person plural possessive (nostros) to designate the "ranks" {cuneos) could, of course, have a general 82

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meaning: "ranks' 7 refers to the common ethical and moral status shared by the Christian reader, the narrator, and the Virtues. The word used in this sense is highly metaphorical. However, we need not ignore its literal and more immediately obvious sense. The Psychomachia is about an actual battle, and the cuneus is the standard, " wedge-shaped" maniple or phalanx formation into which troops draw themselves during a frontal assault. The narrator refers to himself as part of this battle wedge, "placing himself" on the actantial plane of his supposedly third-person narrative. Moreover, this site marks the only instance in the entire poem in which the narrator speaks in the firstperson plural. What are the stakes of this first-person involvement? Like Job, the narrator has metaleptically "entered" the primary line of narrative in the text, only to remain mute. In the Psychomachia, physical proximity between human figures and personification figures on the same diegetic plane seems to entail the ontological "diminishment" of the human figures. A reverse of this effect seems to obtain in Book vi of The Aeneid: as we noticed in chapter 2, Aeneas only sees the figures at the gates of Hades. As he passes among them, they do not talk to each other or to him. Vergil's figures are "diminished" in the same way that Prudentius' human figures are. The two " diminishment-effects" in the Psychomachia and in The Aeneid may reveal a latent code in certain examples of Roman personification tabulation: within a single diegetic field or plane, human figures that are physically juxtaposed with personification figures cause the prosopopoetic "neutralization" of each other. Never in the personification narratives of late antiquity do we see the two species of characterization freely mixed in terms of their powers and abilities. Such free mixing, as I suggested above, is nonetheless common in medieval literature. As Michel Zink writes, ... in the Songe d'Enfer, Raoul de Houdenc places personifications beside real characters. A little later, Huon de Mery uses the same procedure in the Tournoiment Antechrist... Raoul de Houdenc and especially Huon de Mery ... deal on the same footing with all their characters, allegorical, Biblical, mythological, literary - i.e., borrowed from the contemporary French literature in which Huon was steeped - and they assign to all these characters the same status within the allegorical narrative. (107—08). In discussing narrative "footing" and "status," Zink develops a point he argued a few sentences earlier: the personified abstractions encountered by Aeneas in Hades possess a different narrative and

The poetics of personification ontological status from Vergil's hero. Indeed, they are less substantial, less "real" than Aeneas and his men, for Vergil clearly describes the realm of Dis as vacua and inania (line 358). This kind of phenomenal and narratological quarantining breaks down with the development of medieval vernacular literatures, and the "equal footing" of personifications and humans becomes, as Zink demonstrates, the trademark of allegorical poetry written in the innovative traditions of thirteenthcentury French or Provencal lyric.1 However, exceptions to the equal-footing tactic still persist. In The House of Fame, Chaucer distributes character species among levels of diegesis in a way reminiscent of the Psychomachia. In the first building Geffrey the narrator enters, the story of Aeneas and Dido is presented upon the walls. Geffrey describes what he sees: First sawgh I the destruction Of Troye, thurgh the Grek Synon, And saugh I next, in al thys fere, How Creusa, daun Eneas wif, Which that he lovede as hys lyf, And hir yonge sone Iulo, And eke Askanius also, Fledden eke with drery chere ...

(151-52, 174-79)

It is unclear whether this "story" is an actual verbal text made up of engraved letters or a visual ekphrasis made up of painted images or sculptured bas-relief figures. This is because the verb "sawgh" in this context may denote either reading or the optical inspection of visual shapes and patterns (Sklute 38). In either case, the epic matter comprises a text embedded and inscribed within Chaucer's primary line of diegesis. It constitutes a metadiegesis. All the figures included in the embedded narrative are exclusively human. This treatment suggests a poetic legacy of the diegetic structure of the Psychomachia. However, no figures, human or personificational (aside from the solitary and out-of-place narrator), exist within the architectural space of the temple of Venus itself. The narratological structure created by Prudentius, therefore, is not perfectly replicated in Book 1 of The House of Fame.

In Book in, however, Chaucer's treatment of the characters inhabiting the temple of Fame is more complex than his treatment in Book 1 and more like Prudentius' design in the Psychomachia. All of the figures are personifications - from the goddess Fame and her major84

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domo Eolus (whose Greek name, "the wind/' has its metonymy in the character's two trumpets - reification objects named Clere Laude [line 1575] and Sklaundre [1580, 1625]), to the personified "utterances" that drift upward, from the earth, into Fame's temple. The " ryght gret companye" (1528) seen by Geffrey is the personified collection of "every speche, or noyse, or soun" that "come to Fames Hous" (783, 786), as the eagle tells him at the end of Book 11. Flanking the sides of Fame's court hall, however, are several metal pillars upon which stand the sculptured figures of great historians and poets. Geffrey describes that: Alderfirst, loo, ther I sigh Upon a piler stonde on high, That was of led and yren fyn, Hym of secte saturnyn, The Ebrayk Josephus, the olde, That of Jewes gestes tolde.

(1420-34)

In a subsequent catalogue of figures fixed upon other pillars, Geffrey describes Homer, Statius, Dictys, Dares, Guido of Collona, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vergil, Lucan, Ovid, and others. All of these figures are real, historical humans. Because they are statues — plastic and visual, sculptured works — the narrative passages that contain them invoke the figure ekphrasis. And ekphrastic artifacts are themselves embedded artifacts: they are pictorial registers diegetically contained in the primary, verbal field of narration. Like the human figures in the Psychomachia, Chaucer's human characters are diegetically removed from the active and vociferous personification figures who people the primary field. Even if we reject the proposal that individual sculptures are true "ekphrases," and therefore not truly metadiegetic, we are faced with a peculiar structural relationship between mute, frozen, and lifeless beings who are makers (epic poets) and active, loquacious beings who are made (personified verbal utterances). Whether we consider the enshrined writers as ekphrastic elements narratologically quarantined from the personification figures, or as ontologically diminished human consciousnesses in direct physical proximity to enlivened personifications, we readily apprehend the text's deft and radical ironizing of the problem of literary character differentiation. The makers become the made; the made things gain the power and vitality of human makers. As J. Stephen Russell has argued, The House of Fame is a powerful Chaucerian vehicle for deconstructing the literary 85

The poetics of personification function of sources and auctores, the relationship between common, quotidian language and verbal art, and the utility of the dream vision itself (174-94). But the set of formal and ontological questions raised by the text of The House of Tame are not entirely unique to this poem. Chaucer conducts parallel investigations using these questions in The Parliament of Towls.

In The Parliament of Towls, Chaucer provides another narrator who suffers from artistic and intellectual aridity. The poem begins with a bald paraphrase, supplied by the classically naive waking narrator, of Macrobius' famous Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. This artless paraphrase has traditionally prompted critics to see the central theme in the Parliament as a metapoetic self-inquiry carried out by Chaucer into the problems of making poetry. The narrator's self-doubt about his powers as a poetic maker are amplified by the unusual structural and formal features of the poem. Even though the poem does not contain explicitly embedded verbal narratives of the kind found in the Psychomachia or The House of Tame, it is built around figural images of containment. First, the narrator falls asleep into his dream, wherein he enters a "park walled with grene ston" (line 122). Inside this park, he proceeds into a great brass temple (231). The narrator's physical itinerary charts his penetration into a dreamscape and through a series of literally embedded physical artifacts. This course reveals a number of ontological differences among characters and sites viewed along the way. After the initial synopsis of Macrobius' text, the narrator falls asleep only to meet with Scipio Africanus, who leads him to the park with green walls. Above and on both sides of the gate that opens into the park are two inscriptions. The first reads: "Thorgh me men gon into that blysful place Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure; Thorgh me men gon unto the welle of grace, There grene and lusty May shal evere endure. This is the wey to al good aventure. Be glad, thow redere, and thy sorwe of-caste Al open am I - passe in, and sped thee faste!"

(127-33)

The second inscription provides a contradictory message. Thematically, it works in binary opposition to the first message: " Thorgh me men gon ... Unto the mortal strokes of the spere S6

Phenomenology of personification

Of which Disdayn and Daunger is the gyde, Ther nevere tre shal fruyt ne leves bere. This strem yow ledeth to the sorweful were There as the fish in prysoun is al drye; Th'eschewing is only the remedye!"

(134-40)

As the narrator remarks, the second text is " of ful gret difference " to the first inscription (125). The topos of the gate-with-contrarymessages is a common one in medieval folk literature. As Northrop Frye has argued, the inviting and enclosed place can be the ideal topified image of the demonic and the divine {Fables 6g-Sy). But the first inscription involves an ambiguity that opens a moment of textual self-reflexivity. First, the gate is a part of the wall that circumscribes the entire park and defines it as an architectural unit. The prosopopeias of lines 127 and 134 refer to the gates as well as to the entire park. Because the invitation to a potential " reader" is itself a commonplace which marks the beginnings of many medieval literary texts, the garden becomes a "text" to be entered, a text through which the reader will "speed" (read). The invitation, therefore, refers metaphorically to the narrative section of Chaucer's poem that contains the entire hortus conclusus action. It creates the illusion that the hortus episode is an embedded verbal artifact within the encompassing and primary line of diegesis. It makes the episode a metadiegesis, a narrative text "within" a narrative text. Inside the park, the two men encounter the standard stock of locus amoenus imagery - clear streams, a variety of animals, a tree catalogue, etc. The narrator first sees Cupid (line 212), and then a whole camp of personification figures including Will, Lust, Courtesy, Craft, Delight, and Peace (212-45). Inside the temple of brass the narrator sees Priapus, Venus, and her porter Richesse (253-61). Clearly the precincts of the garden and the temple are peopled exclusively with personification figures or with deities. There are no living, "genuine" humans present. But "ferther in the temple" (280), as the narrator notes, he sees a series of ekphrastic images "peynted overal" (284) on the walls. Exactly as in The House of Fame, the ekphrases are constituted entirely by historical and pseudohistorical or mythical human figures. The narrator sees Calisto and Atalanta on one wall, and Semyramis, Candace, and Hercules, Biblis, Dido, Thisbe, and Pyramus, Tristram, Isaude, Paris, and Achilles, 87

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Eleyne, Cleopatre, and Troylus, Silla, and ek the moder of Romulus: Alle these were peynted on that other syde.

(288-93)

These figures represent classical epic, Arthurian romance, and Roman history. They inhabit a narratological space that excludes personification figures, and includes only putatively historical humans. Because the structural effect of the garden-gate inscription promotes the illusion that the narrative episode of the hortus is a metadiegesis, the ekphrases on the walls of the brass temple constitute what Gerard Genette would call a "meta-metadiegesis." More tenaciously than in the Psychomachia, the structure of Chaucer's poem entails a strict division between humans and figural characters, and it distributes them among a precisely patterned series of nested diegetic registers. Back in the "sote and grene" spaces of the garden outside the temple, the narrator encounters Nature presiding over the congress of peculiar birds (lines 310 ff.). From this point through the poem's conclusion, the narrator recreates no dialogic interchange that he might have taken part in, and he refrains completely from commentary on the events he has beheld. His narration is comprised entirely of the mimetic representation of what Nature and the birds say to each other. The remaining passages are filled with debates, harangues, proclamations, and attempts at mediation made solely by Nature. The parliament, which had centered on the polemical cases mounted by the three tersel eagles for the favors of the formel eagle, ends with Nature's assigning each bird "his make/ By evene acord" (667—68). This gesture is followed by the birds' song of praise to Nature which has as its theme the refrain, "Now welcome, somer." As the song ends, the birds break into "shoutyng" (693), and the dreaming narrator awakens. The poem offers a number of narrative peculiarities focused upon the formal stakes of the trope personification. Whereas the narrator of The House of Fame asked questions and conversed with the golden eagle and with Eolus, the narrator here remains absolutely mute throughout the entire narrative episode that takes place within the garden walls. In a way, when the narrator and Africanus go inside the park, the movement constitutes a kind of metalepsis into an embedded poetic artifact. Once inside, their premier ontological property (the power of speech) is diminished. This effect marks a very peculiar turn in the traditions of the dream vision, because the Scipio Africanus of Macrobius' Commentary, like all genuine dream audores and magistri, is 88

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of necessity highly talkative. How else could he fulfill his function as educative dream instructor? Furthermore, the diminishment of the narrator's and Africanus' prosopopoetic properties develops incrementally as the poem moves toward its conclusion. Outside the garden wall, Africanus speaks. Inside, both men are mute. During the parliament, the narrator even refrains from diegetic commentary. The poem charts a gradual reduction of prosopopoetic powers among the human characters, and a runaway increase of it in the personifications. We should also note, however, that the text makes ontological distinctions among kinds of personifications as well as distinctions between historical humans and figural characters. The groups of personified abstractions viewed by the narrator near and inside the brass temple are entirely silent. Only Nature's speech is recreated for us by the narrator. The collection of abstractions (largely reminiscent of their topical predecessors who inhabit the garden visited by the dreamer at the opening of The Romance of the Rose) function more like the anthropomorphisms seen by Aeneas in Book vi of Vergil's epic. Their presence in the text depends on the economically deictic and nominational acts performed by the narrator. The phenomenal status of these anthropomorphisms seems tenuous. This general sense gets magnified by an isolated effect in the Parliament which recalls the programmatically self-referential defacement suffered by Prudentius' personified Vices. Among the group of personified abstractions in the park, the narrator sees: Craft that can and hath the myght To don by force a wyght to don folye — Disfigurat was she, I nyl nat lye

(220-22)

The de-facement of a character constituted by a faced or embodied essence equates to the dis-figuration of a character created through figural invention. The verb " to disfigure," which looks like a casually chosen adjective in a characterizational effictio, mimes the process of prosopopoetic making and unmaking. That the character involved is " Craft" intensifies the self-reflexive game: the word craft (along with shape) is one of the few native English substantives that translates the concept of the rhetorically charged Latin words forma and figura. Lexically, Chaucer's Craft can be thought of as a figure for figuration, a personification of the impulse and power whereby personifications are manufactured. In addition, her "might" to make one "do folly" ambiguously refers to Craft-as-cunning's propensity to make social 89

The poetics of personification mischief, as well as to Craft-as-figuration's drive toward fancy and fantasy. (Spenser's personification Phantastes in The Faerie Queene embodies the same valuational ideal; see chapter 6 below.) Conventional readings of the passage treat Craft in mild aesthetic terms, as, for instance, "the only truly unpleasant personification in the park" (Sklute 53). Her disfigured condition, however, parallels the aphasia of the human narrator and his guide. The parallel relation proclaims the equally tenuous phenomenal status of fictional human and personified abstraction. The most vigorously prosopopoetic characters in the poem are the birds. Their power of speech marks another self-reflexive anomaly in Chaucer's treatment of the trope personification, for a central theme of the poem is the out-of-control "parliament." The congress of birds evolves, in fact, into a collective Babel of verbal disorder. Nature presides over the colloquy and establishes order momentarily, but the final volley of shouts that wakes the narrator reveals the degenerative evolution in the text of prosopopoetic speech into sheer noise. The poem, therefore, takes us full circle: we begin with the images of aphasic humans (the diegetically quarantined tragic human lovers in the temple ekphrases); we next consider the only human figures in the primary lines of diegesis who are also mute; and we then come to a collection of personified birds in whom are parodied, through runaway loquacity, the figural effect prosopopeia. Finally, this parodic prosopopeia "devolves" or mutates into noise, into a moment of linguistic entropy that signals the dissolution of prosopopeia for the birds. The Parliament of Fowls experiments with the limits of figural and literary character invention by distributing characters among a discrete structure of diegetic levels (and images of containment), and by investing these characters with varying powers of language. The implicit thematic comparison between figurally invented human language and natural animal noise also appears in The Nuns Priest's Tale. In the linguistic systems posited by Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, and Roger Bacon, these two quantities occupied positions tangent with the value of real human language (Eco and Marmo, "Animal Language"). The Nuns Priest's Tale plots such a valuational scheme according to a humorously elaborate concentric structure of embedded narratives. Schematically, the pilgrimage frame of The Canterbury Tales contains the Nun's Priest's story of the nervous rooster Chanticleer. The story containing Chanticleer, Pertelote, and Dan Russell the fox is the primary level of diegesis; it comprises go

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exclusively personified animals as vociferous and clever as the avian debaters in The Parliament of Fowls. Among other narrative acts, Chanticleer tells the story, borrowed from Cicero, of two travellers who separate in search of a night's lodging. The Ciceronian folk tale comprises a metadiegesis that contains only human characters. So far, the pattern repeats the narratological structure of the Psychomachia, maintaining especially the ontological quarantining of humans one diegetic level away from personifications. Chaucer's text complicates the basic Prudentian model, however. Embedded inside the metadiegesis told by Chanticleer are the dreams experienced by one of the lone lodgers. The third dream presents his now murdered friend pleading for justice: I am now slawe. Behold my bloody woundes depe and wyde! Arys up erly in the morwe tyde, And at the west gate of the toun ... A carte ful of dong ther shaltow se, In which my body is hid ful prively; Do thilke carte arresten boldely. (vn.3014-20) The poetic act whereby the dead friend speaks engenders the kind of apostrophic prosopopeia attended to in rhetorical theory since the taxonomies of Demetrius of Phalerum. The dead friend ambiguously exists either as a visiting ghost, in which case the dream is an oraculum, or as a personified figment, making the dream a somnium (Lewis, Image 63-64). In either case, the dead friend is an ontologically different being a numinous one or a figurally invented one. Moreover, the ontologically different fellow traveler is consigned to his own diegetic level contained inside the metadiegetic level of the folk tale. (Chapter 5 explains the rationale behind this narratological conclusion regarding fictionalized dreams.) The corresponding oracular dream in the second Ciceronian folk tale - the story of the two sailors - directly affirms its own doubly embedded diegetic status: the man who stands by the dreaming sailor's "beddes syde" claims, "If thou tomorwe wende,/ Thow shalt be dreynt; my tale is at an ende" (4271-72; italics mine). The Nuns Priest's Tale gathers its comic energy from the way Chaucer combines an array of tales, philosophical arguments, and allusions — all originally made by or about human characters — into the beak of a very learned bird. The narratological structure of the text

The poetics of personification seems to exclude human characters from the primary diegetic level of the animal apologue. But human characters do appear at the climactic ending of the brief interchange between Chanticleer and Russell. As the fox steals off with the rooster on his back, This sely wydwe and eek hir doghtres two Herden thise hennes crie and maken wo, An out at dores stirten they anon, And syen the fox toward the grove gon, And bar upon his bak the cok away, And cry den, "Out! harrow! and weylaway! Ha! ha! the fox!" and after hym they ran, And eek with staves many another man. (vn.33 75-83) The human " proprietors " of the little barnyard world, the world of the animal apologue, utter not one grammatically ordered sentence. With the exception of the single noun "fox," they do not even utter a genuine word. "Out," "harrow," "weylaway," and "ha" are quasiwords. They are really no more than clusters of phonemes - vocal convulsions, essentially - ejaculated at moments of emotional distress. Semantically, they function as variations on the apostrophic " O , " the primal laryngeal act which, devoid of any semantic content, signifies voice itself. These vocal convulsions are liminal utterances lying on the border of language and noise, speech and animal sound. So the "human" inhabitants of Chanticleer's diegetic domain experience a kind of aphasia in diegetic proximity to the personified animals. They lack prosopopoetic motivation. A semiological analysis, in line with the logical apparatus of chapter 2, partially reveals why this reduced or negated motivation happens in personification narratives. In Quintilian's juridical model of prosopopeia (6.1.25-26), we saw a confusion of "tropological directionality." That is, the example from the Institutio left unclear whether the lawyer was the prosopon or proxy for the client, or the client was the proxy for the machinating lawyer. When we take a bird in an animal apologue as the site of a personification, either a natural bird from our real world is the "personified," making the "personifier" a human consciousness, or a human consciousness is the personified masked or faced by a fictional bird. The former proposition has warrant because in apologue thinking and speaking beings serve as the fictional actants; naturally dumb animals must be transformed into those agents. The latter proposition has equal warrant because it replicates the parallel and 02

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germinal structure that makes possible the personification figure in the first place: the homologies of mind/body, psyche/soma, consciousness/sensoria, inside/outside. According to either proposition, the mere combination of a human consciousness (either as personifier or personified) into a duplex homology complemented by an animal entity (again, either as personifier or personified) reduces the concept of human consciousness simply because consciousness can be so combined. The controlling logic is homeopathic, an archaic quasi-rational modality of conceptualization that powers up the manifestly alogical world of rhetoric with all its unnatural configurations and deviations. After all, rhetoric and logic are really 'alien and asymmetrical', as one aphorism of deconstructive thinking reminds us. Because the very concepts of human consciousness and intelligence are reduced via the quasi-rational principle of similarity or homeopathy, the complementary quasi-rational principle of magical contagion or contact impels the grafting of this reduction onto any neighboring human consciousness in the text. Due to spatial or temporal proximity to a semiotically " self-reducing" personification figure, a human actant or narrator experiences the specular or transmitted condition of that reduction. J. G. Frazer's quaint terminological division between "homeopathic magic" and "contagious magic" (14) still provides a viable conceptual framework for describing the hidden forces at work in tropes, as Angus Fletcher has shown regarding metaphor and metonymy (Allegory 188). But as the title of this chapter promises, an extended phenomenological description of the "quarantined domains," "ontological statuses," and phenomenal "proximities" should now prove to be a more thorough explanational tool. In addition to the foregoing and brief semiological explanation of the diminishment-effect, a complex array of phenomenological propositions underlies the poetic aphasia and psychic reduction suffered by Prudentius' Job, the narrators in The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame, and the Nun's Priest's widow.

II Michel Zink maintains that psychic or linguistic diminishment among human personae in medieval personification narratives is perhaps the key issue in allegory theory. In his "The Allegorical Poem as Interior Memoir," Zink tries to identify and articulate the narrative com93

The poetics of personification monplace known as dorveille. As the etymological roots of this French term from medieval psychology suggest, dorveille is a peculiar psychic, physical, and spiritual condition traditionally suffered by the narrator or human protagonist of the allegorical poem. Dorveille can involve the bodily exhaustion that overcomes the narrator at the outset of his text. The classic example is Dante, who, at the opening of Inferno 1, describes himself as pien di sonno — "full of sleep" (line 11). Dorveille can also involve the hypnotic lull and dizziness that overcomes the weary horseman who, as he narrates his poem, suffers from a wandering sense of attention and alertness (French rever). The effect can also include the spiritual or intellectual dryness so common to the narrator of the medieval troubadour or trouvere lyric. Dorveille, Zink argues, is the universal psychological condition experienced by the narrator of the medieval allegory (104). The characterization of the dorveille-stricken human is always found in the proximity of personification fabulation. Early modern theorists grasped this partially. Ruskin anchored the pathetic fallacy in a "mind or body... borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion" ( 6 6 ) - a theoretical move that recalls the psychodynamics of dorveille. The restlessness, vertigo, mental aridity, social withdrawal, reduction of feeling, and indolence that accompanies dorveille should remind us of another common psychological or moral "ailment" commonly expressed in medieval literature and didactic writing. The "sin" known as acedia, or sloth, involves similar psychic deterioration in a human persona. We need not embark upon an analytical history of this concept; the admirable studies written by Morton Bloomfield on sin and Siegfried Wenzel on acedia still provide the richest discussions of the subject. Wenzel's book has provided the foundation for a recent and noteworthy examination of the subject in Middle English literature — John M. Bowers's The Crisis of Will in "Piers Plowman". Much of Bowers's thesis hinges upon a psychobiographical analysis of William Langland as a man afflicted with severe acedia. Despite the dubiousness of this method, Bowers nevertheless provides some useful indications concerning the psychic condition of the narrator in Piers Plowman. Will the dreamer indisputably suffers from mental unrest, dryness, social withdrawal, and above all, a reduction of will, or voluntas. This reduction indicates psychic and social diminishment. Neither Zink's essay nor Bowers's book treats the earlier personification narratives of late antiquity. A short text like the Psychomachia 94

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does not provide enough material to warrant the conclusion that Job or the narrator suffer some kind of mental or spiritual diminishment. But the two characters are indeed mute — a marked contrast in relationship to the vociferous personification figures who engage in battle. Zink and Bowers are thorough and conclusive, however, regarding the traditional fact that major psychic diminishment is suffered by the narrator or prime human actant while he is about to provide narration dealing with the traditional agents of allegorical literature — namely, personification figures. For Zink, as for Bowers, the psychic reduction concomitant upon dorveille or acedia gives rise to the narratorial apprehension, or more accurately, the narratorial invention or generation of personified abstractions, objects, or places. Personification characters enjoy a metaphorical " emergence " from the mind of the diminished actant or narrator. In Paradise Lost, a striking narrativization or literalization of this personificational emergence occurs. Rewriting the imagery of Athena's mythological "birth'' from the forehead of Zeus, Milton configures the narrative scene of Sin's inception as a literal emergence too. The personification tells the story of her origin to her forgetful father: All on a sudden a miserable pain Surprised thee; dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast Threw forth, till on the left side op'ning wide, Likest to thee in shape and count'nance bright, Then shining heav'nly fair, a goddess armed Out of thy head I sprung.

(11.752-58)

Sin's curious prosopogenesis, if you will, involves the major features of psychic diminishment and subsequent figural character generation described above. Milton presents two images to convey the spiritual and psychic self-demolition Satan suffers. The first image suggests the conventional psychological torpor of dorveille: a "miserable pain," dimmed eyes, dizziness and darkness. The second image, one of incineration, implies a violent reduction or destruction of the angel's head. The effect amounts to a pyrotechnic decapitation or defacement, a defacement coeval with or resulting in the physical extrusion or ejection of a phenomenal humanoid body called "Sin." Satan's filial Sin is not just the index of the sin rebellion but of the sin acedia itself; it is the reflexive sign of sin and the sin of (unconscious) sign-making. The proposition discloses a neurotic circular trap. Perhaps we can augment Bloomfield's analysis of the medieval 95

The poetics of personification taxonomy of sins or pathologies of mind and spirit by initially acknowledging a psychoanalytical description of acedia. The condition "sloth'' closely resembles what modern psychologists might call clinical depression. (Angus Fletcher and Paul Piehler have already provided detailed psychoanalytical readings of personification figures as psychic "daemons" - as the literary images of the obsessivecompulsive mind or the manic-depressive consciousness in its manic phase.) Like the clinical depressive, the person suffering from acedia sleeps too much, is listless, uninterested in everything, uncommunicative, and above all, silent. Depression is a mental disorder. It involves a reduction and diminishment of all those powers, attributes, and abilities that mark the human being as vitally human. Clearly a psychoanalytical program of inquiry is distinct from the formal interest of this study, but it does provide some valuable insights. For example, we can begin to write an extension of Fletcher's formula regarding personification characters as images of the manic consciousness. At the heart of much medieval personification tabulation is a corollary between the narratorial consciousness and the personification figures it apprehends. In this structural corollary, speech is the signature of the vital, sentient mind. Its diminishment in the psychically reduced narrator (either through acedia-dorveille, depression, or melancholia) accompanies its proportional increase in proximate, figurally invented beings. As the narrator's or the protagonist's minds dissolve into stasis, the "mind" of the personification is generated. And this new mind can produce the signature of sentience and intelligence: speech. Again, the two human figures in the primary line of narrative in the Psychomachia do not suffer from actual psychic diminishment. But their aphasia rated against the speech of the Virtues and Vices occupies the same structural coordinates as the silence, withdrawal, and "solipsism" of the traditional, medieval allegorical narrator rated against the prosopopoetic qualities of personification figures in his narrative. This foundational postulate - that the diminishment of the fictional human consciousness is inversely proportional to the generation or germination of a fictional figural " consciousness " — necessarily entails phenomenological strategy. Phenomenological literary criticism in general tries to articulate the formal features of a literary text (characterological techniques, tropes, figures, shifts in narrative structure) using the authentic, phenomenal images experienced by the focal or narratorial human consciousness in the work, by the authorial 96

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consciousness that has crafted the work, and by the lectorial consciousness that recepts the work.2 Thus, the unmediated experience of conscious awareness becomes the starting point and telos of all investigations. Quite generally, dorveille, a threshold state of human consciousness (that is, the marginating " / " or stroke in the binary opposition "non-consciousness/consciousness"), serves ideally as the phenomenological experience of how one must "feel" consciousness in a radically empirical and bodily way. Such radically "felt consciousness" holds the spot as phenomenology's paramount theoretical goal and interest. But in more specific terms, such a phenomenology must describe figurally invented characters, such as prosopopoetic ones, as the specular images of the fictional human mind suffering from the privation of speech or voice and, by extension, consciousness. (Recall that voice, according to Paul de Man, is the phenomenal core of the physical human prosopon and of human consciousness or cognition.) As the figurated consciousnesses grow, the figurating consciousness shrinks. Poetic revasse or "daydreaming," a semiconscious act claimed by Gaston Bachelard to be the phenomenological model for all creative literary activities with their attendant figurations, entails the shrinking effect of dorveille: ... our more general philosophical thesis on the essentially augmentative potential of all awareness ... has a corollary: a consciousness which daydreams (revasse) is no longer a consciousness. Reverie puts us on the wrong path, the downhill path. (5-6) Phenomenological shrinkage so understood connotes a minimalization or miniaturization of the figurating conscious template. A personification begins as a germ that grows in and eventually out of the generating consciousness, while the generating consciousness ends up as that germ began — a psychic vestige, a fragment. Such a phenomenological axiom is not too different from Harry Berger's psychoanalytical description of personification figures as "facets" or "fragments" of a whole and complete human mind. In the strictly phenomenological perspective and in the psychoanalytic one proposed by Berger, the invention of personification characters entails a critique of the myth of "holism" attributable to the human consciousness, a critique at the heart of all phenomenology. As Erwin Strauss writes: Only a being which in its temporal existence is incomplete can will, strive, or move itself. The being incomplete in the particularity of the actual moment is the ontological ground of the possibility of a transition from a Here to a 97

The poetics of personification There, from one particularity to another. This being incomplete indeed makes spontaneous motion possible, that is, it makes possible the searching of an animal and the questioning of man. {270)

Physical motion and activity, sentience, understanding, intellectual inquiry, and language, are all made possible and necessitated by human temporality, by Being in time. For phenomenologists like Strauss, Richard Zaner, Edmund Husserl, Georges Poulet, or MerleauPonty, the natural human condition of temporal " incompleteness" translates into the problem of ontological holism. Fletcher's and Berger's characterological descriptions, therefore, are really phenomenological equations wherein personifications, as fragments or facets of an ostensibly "whole" human consciousness, function as synecdochal emblematic images of this superordinate consciousness which is itself incomplete. Our tentative description of complementary characterological ratios also works as a phenomenological formula that contrasts the diminished human narratorial consciousness (an emblem of incompleteness) with the activated figural consciousness of the personification character. In the phenomenological description heretofore presented, however, it is unclear whether the personification ultimately represents ontological "completeness" or "incompleteness." If we understand the personification to be a quantity proportional, in a structural ratio, to a diminished human consciousness with which it contrasts, then it is an emblem of incompleteness. After all, personified abstractions are "never quite human"; they often represent subordinate quantities contained in the human mind. But if we understand personifications as "universals" - as "complete," eternal qualities belonging to a transcendent ontic realm and describable in a Platonic or Thomistic conceptual framework — then they are beyond the confinement of temporality and are anything but emblems of phenomenological incompleteness. (This second proposition creeps toward the doctrines of medieval philosophical Realism, a dubious hypothetical resolution explored below in chapter 5.) Either way, the personification figure still operates as a phenomenological foil to the narratorial human consciousness whose vitality and reality have been eroded by the psychic condition of acedia. In fact, the personified abstraction conceived as a "transcendent universal" stands in starker contrast to the ontologically diminished human character who confronts it. This starker contrast more thoroughly amplifies the incompleteness of the correlated human gS

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consciousness. Medieval narrative allegories regularly begin with a confrontation between the psychically, spiritually, and physically eroded human narrator and a super-human, often divine personification figure. The most memorable examples are Alan of Lille's De planctu Naturae (which features the hieratically scaled goddess Nature), and of course, Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae. The exhausted and reprehensible narrators in Machaut's Dit dou Vergier and in Chaucer's Prologue to The Legend of Good Women both face a greatly magnified, radiant, physically gigantic god of Love who rebukes and instructs them. An earlier and more seminal work in the medieval allegorical tradition provides precisely this contrastive characterological framework — Fulgentius' Continentia Vergiliana. Although the allegorical magister (the historical Vergil) in this text is not a personification character proper, we might construe his appearance at the opening of the poem to be a literalized instantiation of one of the old rhetorical definitions of prosopopeia: as we saw in chapter 1, Demetrius and the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium classify one kind of prosopopeia as the " making present" of a long-dead important historical personage or ancestor. Fulgentius' Vergil is such a person from the past, revived and made by the text to speak. Appropriately, the magnified and highly condescending Vergil refers to the Fulgentian narrator with whom he speaks as homunculus. The term literally means "little man." It also denotes something "not quite human," something reduced, diminished, inferior, perhaps even unnatural and artificial, as late medieval and Renaissance uses of the term, particularly the alchemical writings of Paracelsus or Cornelius Agrippa, seemed to indicate (Florescu 304-11). Prosopopeia and its coordinate trope apostrophe, as they are dramatized in the opening of the Continentia, entail the intellectual and verbal diminishment of the human narrator. A homunculus is conceptually related to the human infant (infans, "no speech"); traditionally, the homunculus was a synonym for the human foetus or the newborn baby. Or, it meant someone who was mute. (Jean Anouilh and Jean Aurenche tap this idea in their famous one-joke play, Humulus The Mute; homullus was a Latin pronunciational variant, collapsed via apheresis, of homunculus.) More important, "homunculus" has come to serve contemporary philosophical theorists of consciousness who seek to describe the collective " slaves," " demons," or " specialists " that collectively constitute the human mind (Dennett 14—15, passim). The discourse provided by Fulgentius' haughty Vergil 99

The poetics of personification reduces the narrator to a non-intelligent, speechless thing. It is an inaugural move characteristic in medieval didactic allegories. (In her allegorical poetry, the tenth-century nun Hrotsvit of Gandersheim uses the correspondingly feminine term of self-diminution: she labels herself muliercula; Ferrante 222.) Indeed, the narrator's knowledge is infantile, we learn, in comparison to the arcane allegorical secrets contained within The Aeneid. The contrast between allegorical magister and the narratorial homo acidiosus stands as a traditional aspect of medieval personification fabulation. This tradition is linked, as I have shown, to the diminishment (aphasia) of the human characters in the Psychomachia. But the tradition rarely presents primary human characters or narrators robbed entirely of speech. The human narrators created by Boethius, Alan of Lille, Fulgentius, or Christine de Pisan all ask questions so that they will be adequately instructed by their allegorical tutors. These human characters are certainly not aphasic. When future occasion permits, it will be instructive for us to search the canon of medieval personification literature for texts that combine the literary device of the diminished homo acidiosus with that of the aphasic human character. This impulse follows from the question implied at the close of chapter 3: what is the full phenomenological warrant for the coded combination of protagonistic or narratorial aphasia, psychic diminishment, and quarantined diegetic distribution in accord with ontological character * differentiation ? A figurative idea in common lies behind the terms "diegetic level," ontological "domain," "state of affairs," and phenomenological "world" or "realm." Samuel Levin summarizes his phenomenological study of "metaphoric worlds" in a passage that can be read as a parable of the semiotic forces underlying narratologically contained figural characters: I have described elsewhere ... what is to be understood by phenomenological construal. Given a deviant utterance like 'The rose is happy', there are fundamentally two interpretive strategies that we may elect to adopt. On the first strategy we try to rationalize its meaning. We interpret the utterance to mean 'The rose is blooming, fragrant' or some such. It is important to recognize that in adopting this strategy we tacitly assume the world as a constant factor; that is, in the incompatibility between what the utterance says and the 'facts' of the world, we assume that the latter are fixed, determined by natural laws and the results of our ordinary experience. On the second strategy we take the language (of the utterance) as fixed. We then must construe the world, construe it in such a way as to admit for it the 100

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possibility that a flower can be happy. A world that admits of such possibilities is a metaphoric world and, in the face of a 'deviant' expression, it is only by the conceiving of such possibilities that a reader can approximate to the insight or vision that the poet has achieved and (imperfectly) expressed. (metaphoric 142) Levin's delineation of two "interpretive strategies" goes beyond, say, de Man's summary of the formal division between poetics and hermeneutics (Jauss, Reception, ix). Levin here identifies an exclusive, discrete, alien state of affairs or "world'' where roses do things like being happy, or sad, or angry, - or, by extension, they do things like touching, thinking, loving, or talking. We can never really know and experience this realm because we cannot "get inside" the experience of a rose. Phenomenological construal thus constitutes a sort of radical game. It is what children do when they playfully "imagine what a rose would say if it could talk." (No wonder that phenomenological construal has been adopted in the last twenty years as a tool in adolescent and juvenile psychotherapy [Gendlin] and in the elementary instruction of writing composition [Perl and Wilson].) The key idea concerning a phenomenologically discrete world is the uniquely governing "state of affairs." This world must be completely imaginational in the sense of phenomenology's classically described "imaginational space." The imaginational space, a space distinct from a represented space or from an imagined space, has as its boundaries and contours the human power of or impulse toward imagination itself (Ingarden 225—29). According to Umberto Eco's more precise terms, it exists as an "inconceivable world," that is, a world inhabited with things and persons that "are in any case beyond our powers of conception, because their alleged individuals or properties violate our logical or epistemological habits," or even as an "impossible world," a world "that the Model Reader is led to conceive of just to understand that it is impossible to do so" (Limits j6). Yet, Ingarden's imagined or represented spaces resemble and reflect imaginational space; Eco's inconceivable worlds prompt or imply more verisimilar "small worlds." 3 A narrative world, bounded by the narrative text actualized in reading, comprises an imagined or represented space. Embedded stories or subordinate diegetic levels within that narrative world comprise further, discrete imagined spaces. But imaginational space exists prior to and excluded from imagined spaces in that it cannot be "entered" or perceived directly. In comparison to imagined spaces, imaginational space is at once alien 101

The poetics of personification and intimately linked to them because the former's " imaginedness" derives from and is made possible by the latter. Furthermore, both Spaces, in sheerly rhetorical terms, are lexically identical. That is, we nominate the two linked though exclusive concepts with the metaphorical word " space/' which in turn implies the potential physical extensionality of mass or matter with their consequent liminational contouring or shape. The subordinate and superordinate diegetic levels of Prudentian and Chaucerian allegorical narratives thus correspond to disparate imaginational worlds intended or created by phenomenological construal. It therefore makes logical sense that personification characters are "quarantined" from putatively real though fictional humans because each ontic category of being perceives and conceives according to, and is governed by, two respectively alien states of affairs. Therefore, the moment a human enters the world of a personification, he or she becomes like (or is figured as) the lifeless abstraction as it exists according to the normal human state of affairs. Simultaneously, the once lifeless abstraction now exists under a state of affairs that admits for the possibility that an abstraction can be happy or sad, can think and talk. The logic of opposing and alien states of affairs dictates that each state exists to the mutual exclusion and negation of the other. A human can act, think, speak in the context of the state of affairs that prompted the evolution of human beings. To operate under or enter into another state of affairs - by bodily invading, through overriding narratorial whim, an alien phenomenological space - entails the cancelling or negation of the natural human state of affairs. Thus, the human forfeits her natural powers. Ideally, she should be rendered lifeless. But poetic license configures this necessitated biological reduction as psychic diminishment in general and as aphasia in particular. The narratorial generation of or actantial encounter with a prosopopeia via apostrophe truly "strikes dumb" the living, as de Man shrewdly observed {Rhetoric 78). The various authorial or "narratorial whims" whereby humans and personifications directly encounter each other are exhibited, as I suggested in chapter 3, as pervasive poetic gestures in medieval allegory. Genette's model of transdiegetic metalepsis instituted on a large scale (an excessive poetic move which thereby defuses or defiguralizes metalepsis) erases and makes forgotten the implicit phenomenological warrant behind the diegetic quarantining of personification characters. Diegetic transgression thus means the 102

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hybridization of two states of affairs into a third, new state of affairs. The hybrid, however, does not signal a colloidal and nostalgic preservation of prior components as such. According to the strict logic of phenomenology, the prior states of affairs are gone as if they never existed; they "unexist," like one of Orwell's unpersons. The transgression or erasure of mutually alien phenomenological states of affairs gets sublimated in medieval personification allegory in other subtle ways. In Book i of The House of Fame, a perfect phenomenological quarantine exists: the human narrator wanders about the Temple of Venus alone reading what appears to be an engraved text narrating the fall of Troy (143—467). The eerily vacant temple, contrastively overstocked with "moo ymages," "moo ryche tabernacles," and "moo curiouse portreytures" (121—25), is as empty and uninhabited as what lies outside. There, Geffrey the narrator sees: ... a large feld, As fer as that I myghte see, Withouten toun, or hous, or tree, Or bush, or grass, or eryd lond; For al the feld nas but of sond As smal as man may se yet lye In the desert of Lybe; Ne no maner creature That ys yformed be Nature Ne sawgh I, me to rede or wisse.

(482—91)

Existence in this narrative world is sheerly inanimate and textual. More specifically, it is inscriptional or ekphrastic. No living humans can be found here. Up until the point of Geffrey's impassioned plea to Christ (492—94), Book 1 presents a phenomenological realm governed by a state of affairs that admits the existence of only one being. It is a phenomenological world of literalized solipsism, one not governed by natural law which has, in our world, permitted and spurred staggering biological diversity and overpopulation. At the moment, the sole being seems to be Geffrey. Then again, the world of non-animation could be the home of "no maner creature/ That ys yformed be Nature." The golden eagle Geffrey sees soaring down at the end of Book 1 turns out to be the only other living entity in this narrative world. Its entry signals an "invasion" into the realm inhabited solely by Geffrey. We have been habitually speaking of the "emergence" or "transgression" into an alien phenomenological world of an ontologically 103

The poetics of personification different being. The figurative sense of the former term suggests motion "upward/ 7 while that of the latter term suggests motion "across/ 7 Chaucer's eagle, first seen by Geffrey the narrator as a distant point on the solar axis (497-99), makes a literalized vertical intrusion downward into the realm that up till now contained only Geffrey. The metallic bird's intrusion, then, constitutes a metalepsis, for the animal turns out, of course, to be a personification. A blatantly artificial and tropological entity, it is indeed "no manner of creature formed by nature." In addition to this metalepsis, the other striking way phenomenological transgression occurs involves the narrative moment when the bird begins to "speak." At the opening of Book 11, Geffrey tells us how: Thus I longe in hys clawes lay, Til at the laste he to me spak In marines vois, and seyde, "Awak! And be not agast so, for shame!" And called me tho by my name, And; for I shulde the bet abreyde, Me mette, "Awak," to me he seyde, Ryght in the same vois and stevene That useth oon I koude nevene; And with that vois, soth for to seyn, My mynde cam to me ageyn, For hyt was goodly seyd to me, So nas hyt never wont to be.

(554—66)

Already asleep and dreaming, Geffrey falls unconscious within his dream when the eagle swoops down to grasp him in his claws. The physical collision of the heretofore phenomenologically isolated man and the creature that turns out to be a personification causes or signals a sudden psychic diminishment in the man: Geffrey tells of how " so astonyed and asweved / Was every vertu in my heved / ... That al my felynge gan to dede" (540-52). The eagle's voice, however, restores the mind of the narrator. The moment in the narrative syntagm when the bird first speaks "in mannes vois" marks the real instantiation of the creature's prosopopoetic powers. But more important, the initial utterance the eagle vocalizes resembles the avian "shoutyng" (693) that concludes The Parliament of Fowls. The utterance awak can ambiguously be taken either as an actual English word or as sheer bird-noise. It is an imperative to Geffrey to "wake up "; and it is a phonemic cluster which represents the sound made by 104

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all natural eagles. According to the former claim, awak is a simple onomatopeia that serves as a fitting verbal refrain for eagles doubling as allegorical magistri. (Hotspur's promise to have a starling "speak / Nothing but 'Mortimer'" into the king's ear [1 Henry 4, i.iii.224—25] represents the same theme; Poe's raven crying "nevermore" is another variation.) As noted earlier, medieval linguistics saw birdnoises fitted into classificational schemes of language. According to Aquinas, the vox animalium can be classified as vocalis significativa et naturaliter (Eco and Marmo, "Animal Language," 9). Robert Edwards discerns another onomatopoetic value for the eagle's awak. In a discussion of Geffrey's dilemma at the opening of Book 11, he writes: And while the dreamer can presumably escape the paradoxes of dream in a waking state, there is no similar disengagement from language. Chaucer makes just this point at the beginning of Geffrey's flight, when the eagle utters a sound "in mannes vois" suitable to bird or man, "Awak!" (556). As a linguistic sign, the sound {vox) disrupts the settled distinction between articulate and inarticulate speech. (108-09) At the liminal moment of the eagle's actuation as a speaking personification, the creature utters something liminal but significant. The bird's onomatopoetic " vox" is the linguistic, orthographic signifier for his figurally invented vox, his "voice." The narrative site semiotically complements the ruckus at the end of The Nuns Priest's Tale. As the widow and her daughters pursue the fox, they shout "out," "harrow," and "ha" -vocalizations equivalent, as we noted above, to the apostrophic " O . " The vocalization " O " signifies the most elementary act of voice: it is the phenomenal icon of a mere vowel, a jet of air expelled through and shaped by the human larynx. If vox signifies the linguistic or graphic signifier of voice (in Latin), " O," along with its graphic variant "ha," signify the phenomenal and physiological signified of the word vox. The correlative Chaucerian scenes stage the phenomenological arrival of ontologically different textual beings (personified animal and human) at their mutual boundaries by marking that common boundary with an emblematic vocal event. The awak-vox-"awaken" pun also erases phenomenological boundaries in a more radical way. In an alien and imaginational (but unimaginable) world of phenomenological construal, the "words" uttered by a bird chattering away in its alien language would be unknowable and unconceivable. If normal human ears could magically 105

The poetics of personification be in proximity to such a bird speaking, the words would be noise, or less: perhaps silence. (If we posit a phenomenologically construed rock "singing" the way a rock would sing //it could, the song might not be acoustic at all; nor might it be metered in a temporal scale natural to human cognition. In The Lord of the Rings, for instance, Tolkien's personified trees, called "Ents," need a whole week to generate their linguistic equivalent of one human phrase.) In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein provided the most memorable comment on this phenomenological quandary when he speculated, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (qtd. in Dennett 447). Still, it is a commonplace, as Aquinas demonstrated, to think of the acoustic emissions made by animals as constituting their own "linguistic" system of signs. (Daniel Dennett, 447, modifies Wittgenstein's point by claiming that if a lion could talk, he would still be speaking a language unknowable even to real lions as well as to humans.) Thus, the sylleptical assimilation of the avian noise awak to the English word "awake" or the Latin word vox causes the destruction of whatever "awak" means in unknowable and unimaginable birdspeak. The move creates a false cognate based upon the warrant of an illusory perception. If I hear a Frenchman say " I'oeuf," I might (as some medieval English tennis aficionado no doubt did) take it as " love" — thereby destroying the authentic semantic content of the utterance in favor of a new content signified by the same phonemic cluster. My move in turn erodes or erases the viability of the whole French language. Such is the overall effect of the illusorily apprehended animal utterance. In a stroke, the Chaucerian pun transgresses or erases the boundary between phenomenologically exclusive worlds.

HI Auditory onomatopoeia, particularly when it is mouthed by a personification character, calls attention to the significant vulnerability aural perception has to illusion. The aural illusion of a cognitively constructed human voice presents another avenue of inquiry into the formal poetics of prosopopeia. It is no coincidence that the perceptual and cognitive effects in which people hear voices in rushing water or in which observers construct or see faces in random and irregular surfaces, textures, and shapes conceptually resembles deliberate poetic prosopopeia. The tropological process of "face-making" can be unconscious and perceptual as readily as it can be conscious, artificial, 106

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poetic, and exclusively textual. In one of his many aphoristic formulations on prosopopeia, de Man hinted at the uncanny cognitive nature of automatically seen faces or forms. "As ... anyone who ever wondered about the legs of a table or ... about the faces or the backs of mountains, knows, prosopopeia is hallucinatory" {Resistance 49). However, in the stricter Gestaltist terminology of contemporary cognitive psychology, the subjective but "real" perceptual phenomenon whereby we see human faces or human and animal forms in natural, random shapes is not quite "hallucinatory." Rather, the effect is more correctly termed "illusory." Such automatic and unconscious optical illusion might appear to be prior yet analogous to conscious poetic prosopopeia. When an observer studies a gnarled tree trunk or a cloud bank or a wall stained with lichens, she automatically sees the semblances of faces and bodies. What seems at first to be an automatic perceptual phenomenon during a moment of casual spectative activity becomes something of a tropological phenomenon underwritten by a gestalt - an optical personification, a perceptual prosopopeia. This rhetorical formulation digests whole careers in Gestalt psychology and in the art-historical study of illusory figures. Wellknown psychologists and perception theorists ranging from Hermann Rorschach and Richard L. Gregory to Gaetano Kanizsa and Rudolf Arnheim have carefully explored the automatic human perception and consequent cognitive construction of hidden faces, anthropomorphic anatomies, zoomorphs, and phantom geometries. Rorschach's principles and methods have become common cultural currency in the latter half of the twentieth century. Everyone is familiar with the human face or form seen or "made" in a random surface contrived of varyingly shaded and contoured shapes - especially when the surface is divided according to bilateral symmetry. Such common and familiar "perceptual prosopopeia," as I prefer to call it, has in turn been conceived as the basis — although not in the rhetorical or tropological terms suggested in this chapter — of all visual cognitions of artificial graphic mimeses. That is to say, the "presence" of a human figure in even the most realistic painting or sculpture is a subjective and illusory cognitive phenomenon, as E. H. Gombrich sought to demonstrate in Art and Illusion.

The analogous relationship between poetic prosopopeia and perceptual prosopopeia is not one of genetic derivation. Poetic or textual prosopopeia does not linearly and chronologically "derive from" or "evolve out of" the initially automatic and unconscious 107

The poetics of personification effect of perceptual prosopopeia. The hypothesis that perception is independent of and prior to representation is precluded in phenomenological inquiry. Although Husserl set out to demonstrate the distinction between perception (or, as he called it, "retention") and representation, his phenomenological enterprise revealed — according to Derrida and the whole deconstructive appropriation of phenomenology-that perception itself is structured like a language. "Perception is always already representation" (Norris, Practice, 48). Prosopopeia, even as a perceptual and putatively unconscious, "pretropological," or pre-linguistic phenomenon, is always-already a trope. (The whole Lacanian pscyhoanalytical apparatus echoes this proposition: everything in the unconscious mind can be described in terms of a mutual system of tropes or figures.) Seeing faces in the clouds constitutes a poetic or textual act even though the experience may seem virtual and unmediated. It is of further interest, therefore, that perceptual prosopopeia has become a narrative theme in fantastic or uncanny Western literature. The locus classicus is Aristophanes' The Clouds, in which Socrates enlightens Strepsiades about the fact that there really are no gods in heaven, only the Clouds who do all the divine things Strepsiades thought the gods did. On close visual inspection, and by order of Socrates, Strepsiades finds it hard to discern any form at all in these white and billowy, so-called "female" entities. He notifies his tutor that they, are "like great packs of wool." The only recognizable features Strepsiades perceives, however, are facial: the Socratic pupil emphasizes that the clouds "have noses." Socrates then launches into a line of observation that has become the topos for narrativized perceptual prosopopeia down through the Renaissance: "Have you not sometimes seen clouds in the sky like a centaur, a leopard, a wolf or a bull"? Strepsiades answers in the affirmative, and Socrates goes on to explain how the varying forms are chosen by the personified (via Socrates' crafty discourse) Clouds themselves: the vaporous entities "imitate" concurrent social and political happenings down on the surface of the earth. For instance, a cloud might assume the shape of a horse on the day a certain corrupt politician is killed while riding. The meteorological effect no doubt works as a general parody of Platonic mimesis: the forms of heaven imitate phenomena on the earth's surface. But more to the point, Socrates' discourse is the source for this causal meteorology. The play contains no supernatural effects, and there is no evidence that the Clouds exist as characterological 108

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functions on the narrative level of story. Personification exists, in The Clouds, only on the level of (Socratic) discourse. Yet this figural discourse finds its suggestive basis in the perceptual experience of Strepsiades or anybody who has ever seen shapes in the clouds over Athens. The text's propositional relation between discourse and perception seems to try and escape or undo the strictly phenomenological correlation between poetic and perceptual prosopopeia. Aristophanes' text thus inscribes an anxiety about figure, a snipe at poetic prosopopeia. Aristophanes' treatment of the topos has its most memorable answers in English Renaissance drama. The whimsical cloud-game between Hamlet and Polonius has become a second locus classicus of dramatized perceptual prosopopeia — or of what might more properly be called "perceptual zoomorphism": HAMLET POLONIUS HAMLET POLONIUS HAMLET

POLONIUS

Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. Me thinks it is like a weasel. It is backed like a weasel. Or like a whale?

Very like a whale.

(ni.iii.380—85)

The humorous interchange above all establishes the effect as a game of willed perceptual modulation. The incorporation of game as a ground in the poetics of personification perhaps suggests the eventual appropriation of the trope into juvenile culture; after all, the most memorable twentieth-century personification narrative was Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (which even won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911), an elaborate kindergarten version of The Pilgrim's Progress. The legacy of Hamlet's game comes alive in another twentieth-century example of perceptual prosopopeia thematized. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the grandmother tries to occupy the two combative children, John Wesley and June Star, with a game about seeing images in the clouds. The ensuing debate about airy cows and automobiles allows for the characteristically amusing though violent theme of domestic life Flannery O'Connor is known for. In Antony and Cleopatra, the topic of shapes in the clouds takes a more serious tone. Antony tells Eros about a great variety of illusory cloud-shapes, some of them less than zoomorphic and more reminiscent of the fata morgana: ANTONY

Sometime we wee a cloud that's dragonish, A vapor sometime, like a bear, or lion, 109

The poetics of personification A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon't, that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air. (iv.xiv. 2-7) In addition to perceptual zoomorphism, Antony's lament contains "perceptual objectifications" and "perceptual substantializations." It should be evident that any of the poetic tropes categorized early in chapter 2 can be rewritten as apparently pre-linguistic cognitive analogues. George Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois more directly links the topos of illusory shapes in clouds to rhetorical personification figuration. Bussy declares to Tamyra: Sin is a coward, madam, and insults But on our weakness, in his truest valour; And so our ignorance tames us, that we let His shadows fright us: and like empty clouds In which our faulty apprehensions forge The forms of dragons, lions, elephants, When they hold no proportion, the sly charms Of the witch, Policy, makes him like a monster Kept only to show men for servile money. That false hag often paints him in her cloth Ten times more monstrous than he is in troth.

(in.i.20—30)

Chapman's deployment of the topos (which he repeats in his comedy Monsieur D'Olive, 11.ii.91f.) anticipates the constructivist or gestaltist proposal that our perceptions or "apprehensions forge/ the forms." The "sly charms/ Of the witch, Policy" (who is a local animate metaphor or an example of the "first personification") magnify Sin into a monster. The text compares this act of charming - of creating a further deceptive appearance or fictional mask for a creature (Sin) who is already a figural entity - to the rudimentary experience of perceptual prosopopeia. The cognitive optical error of perceptual prosopopeia is a simile, a figure, for the " increased personification," to use Barbara Johnson's formulation (108), enacted upon one discourselevel personification by another. The structure of tropological relations moves the materializational or characterizational power of the "third personification" down to the domain of the second personification, while it simultaneously and asymmetrically moves the "empty" and illusory status of perceptual prosopopeia up to the domain of the second personification. 110

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The site from Bussy D'Ambois and the one from The Clouds number among the more complex and better-known instances of perceptual prosopopeia dramatized or narrativized in classical or Renaissance texts. Other notable examples range from sites in Pliny's Natural History (2.3) to Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (16.69), Ford's The Witch of Edmonton (5.1.15), and Du Bartas' Divine Weeks and Works (Ridley 172). The effect usually occurs during thematic focalizations upon " illusion," " faulty apprehension," or the " transitory nature of things." Perceptual prosopopeia thematized works therefore as a momentary tropological intrusion that rarely (except perhaps in the case of The Clouds) programs and orders the whole narrative or dramatic text. Whereas the literary or dramatic thematizations of perceptual prosopopeia in the Renaissance and before have been textually delimited, pictorial treatments of the effect in the visual arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance enjoyed even more obscure and abstract execution. The pictorial grotesques in medieval manuscript illuminations (Vinaver 68-81) and in Renaissance loggi or decorated columns (Jones 100-29; Kayser pll. 2-4) provide countless illustrations of the effect whereby human faces and forms are intertwined in intricate and abstract graphic designs. From this legacy the seventeenth century inherited the short-lived traditions of the knorpelornamentik and knorpelgroteske, the ornamental styles in which there seems to be thematized the cognitive process of "seeing faces" or bodies in alien, random, chaotic textures and shapes. Wolfgang Kayser explains: The literary historian knows [the knorpel-groteske] from the title plates of many a work by Grimmelhausen. Our illustrations... reproduce ornamental engravings by Simon Cammermeir and Johann Heinrich Keller, both of whom were active around 1680. Here the firm contours [of the earlier scrollwork and moresque] have vanished. The heads and limbs of fantastically distorted animals and monsters, often in masklike stylization, are intertwined and give rise, at numerous points, to new shoots, limbs, excrescences. (23) As Kayser notes, knorpel means a chunk of "cartilage" or "gristle" (23). The fantastic anthropomorphs and faces, composed of the surgically extracted knotty cords that tie human or animal bodies together, emerge and come into form while they are simultaneously torn, melted, and de-formed (Kayser pll. 5 and 6). Moreover, the images resemble "masks" - illusory prosopa. For art history, the knorpelgroteske represents a highly anti-mimetic and tenuous tradition (the concept does re-emerge in the twentieth-century paintings of the 111

The poetics of personification surrealists Simon Hantai and H. R. Geiger). For the poetics of personification, the minor tradition demonstrates that thematized perceptual prosopopeia can incorporate a micronarrative of simultaneous figural construction and destruction endemic to the trope. The seventeenth-century pictorial advent of such peculiar and selfconscious perceptual prosopopeia coincides with the self-conscious linking of the effect to prophetic allegory in literature. In the prefatory Apology to The Pilgrims Progress, Bunyan asks, Dost thou love picking meat? Or woudest thou see A man i' the clouds, and hear him speak to thee? The entire Apology is often worded in this characteristically confused syntax. For example, the conjunction "or" used in the second line can work as an antithetical marker, opposing the preceding clause to the following one, making the two clauses suggested courses of alternative action. The conjunction could also be a mere paratactic marker, designating "seeing a man" as an additional but not alternative activity to "picking meat." Because The Pilgrims Progress is about divine revelation and the search for spiritual salvation, the lines no doubt describe the traditional Western image of theophany - the man in the clouds who speaks to the human chosen to receive revelation. Clouds are also the traditional metaphor in medieval and Renaissance allegory for allegorical writing itself (Hawes 20—35). But another, fundamentally less metaphorical meaning of this line concerns the human cognitive proclivity to make faces out of the visual textures perceived in natural objects like clouds. The idea of "seeing a man in the clouds" is a discourse-level realization of the cognitive effect "perceptual anthropomorphism"; the idea of "having him speak" amounts to a discursively realized perceptual prosopopeia. The proximity of this realization to "picking meat" might even allude to the popular knorpelgroteske of Bunyan's and Cammermeir's day: the sinuous sinews of the groteske posit the same initial act of violence, surgical or gustatory, essential to the activity concomitant upon (for Cammermeir's images) or prior to (for Bunyan) the cognitive experience of seeing illusory faces. More important, however, is that Bunyan's inaugural connection between perceptual prosopopeia and character personification in the Apology synecdochally and centrifugally represents the poetic motor of the entire Pilgrims Progress: endless and elaborate personification allegory. The foregoing investigation into the psycho-perceptual basis of

Phenomenology of personification

personification has not been an excursus from the phenomenological inquiry promised in this chapter. Rather, a thorough phenomenology of personification must account for all phenomenally experiential bases. This includes the perceptual precursors to the regular cognitive experiences of real and waking human consciousness, as well as the purely conceptual experience of phenomenological construal. The theoretical role of illusion thus becomes paramount. Where and when a figure "exists'7 - and whether or not it exists - determines the human textual and cognitive epistemology of presence, a topical problem central to all poststructural thought. It is hoped that this chapter has also made evident the interdependence of poetic formalism and phenomenology as traditionally distinct methods of inquiry. The very broaching of illusion as a theoretical reference point suggests this interdependence. The general drift of this chapter has been to underwrite the narratological formalization of character ontology extant in allegories like the Psychomachia or The Nuns Priest's Tale with a tendentious phenomenology. Poetic figures, even apparently simple ones, can be understood as textual encodings of phenomenal illusion. For example, paranomasia and syllepsis, the two figures needed to construct a verbal pun (or a visual rebus), fundamentally arise from a cognitive error. A person illusorily perceives the graphic or phonic phenomenal constitutions of two semantically different words as if they were the same. However, the entire critical discourse in which one sets out to write a phenomenology of tropes must be governed by the pervasive and inescapable vocabulary of figures. We cannot avoid saying things like "the phenomenological transgression between two alien states of affairs isfiguredas an act of forgetting or erasure." Phenomenological criticism can be pursued only after a rigorous critical description under the terms of formalism. Yet, phenomenology cannot escape the language of formalism. Particularly in the case of literary personification, perception, hallucination, and figuration demand corollary theorizations in the realm of poststructural thought.4 The "poetics" of personification, then, involve a deconstructive mutuality between the coded formal features of the trope taken as "trope," and an indispensable phenomenology of interpenetrating but alien states of affairs.

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V • % V V V V • % % V % % %" V V V V

Personification, dreams, and narrative structure in P/ers Plowman B A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A

A

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 Plowman1 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 Lords 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. As the primary narratorial consciousness in Piers, Will does not suffer the kind of literalized phenomenological diminishment ("loss" of speech) suffered by Chaucer's protagonists. But the condition acedia, as John M. Bowers's study convincingly shows, governs Will's perception and behavior in the text. Bowers describes Will's 114

Piers Plowman B succumbing to sloth during prayer, thereby dozing off and muttering or "babbling'' the holy words he should be saying in earnest (142). The babbling clearly amounts to a mutilation of language; it becomes the equivalent of noise which, as we saw in our discussion of The Parliament of Fowls, is non-language. Language is the power and attribute sine qua non of the human being, and Will's mutilation of it during a dorveille-\ike state which comes over, him during prayer marks him as ontologically diminished. In fact, the kind of babbling described by Langland and other medieval clerical writers such as Richard Rolle and the author of The Book of Vices and Virtues can be thought of as equivalent to Orwell's conception of "duckspeak": speech coming solely from the larynx, not from the brain (1984 254; "Politics" 172). Such babbling would have been of special importance to medieval memorizational traditions, particularly if it resulted from forced, artless, or "unintelligent" recitation "by rote" (see Carruthers 252). The subject of babbling, however, received peculiar conceptual treatment in the standard didactic moral treatises of the Middle Ages. Siegfried Wenzel links the sleepiness of acedia to the telescoping or " syncopation " of the constituent words and phrases of prayer during mechanical performance. The author of Jacob's Well writes, "thou hast seyd rechelesly thi seruyse in rape, in syncopyng, in ouyr-skipping, in omyttyng" (113). Doubtless the mechanical recitation of prayer involves a deadening of language and consequently of human spirit. It is highly peculiar, therefore, that the Jacob's Well author centers the mechanical and self-diminishing act in a moment of figural invention: syncopation. Syncope, as the classical rhetorical tradition reminds us, is a poetic device used in telescoping the spoken or written text. In the conventional discourse upon acedia, this syncopation, although normally a poetic action conveying a conscious motive in the invention of artifice, becomes the signal act of automatism. The specific identification of syncope, though, tacitly invokes a chain of related tropes used for telescoping verbal discourse: apocope, elision, ellipsis, apheresis, aposiopesis, what ancient rhetoricians termed " aporia," and lexical contraction.2 The tropes of contraction are all formal or poetic mechanisms. In a modern conceptual framework like that of Russian Formalism, tropes and figures are the signatures of ostraneniye, of " defamiliarization." That is, the presence of tropes in discourse reveals not automatism or, as Shklovskij calls it, "algebrization," but rather the self-conscious attempt of the human being using language to escape that which is

The poetics of personification verbally automatic, deadened, mechanical. The close attention paid by medieval didactic writers to the potentially "figural" nature of speech produced by the homo acidiosus creates an odd clash with formalist notions of figuration and verbal discourse. Indeed, even non- or postformalist modern theories of rhetoric or poetics seem to be contradicted and undermined by this peculiar medieval conception. As Derrida has it, "man is the maker of metaphor" (248). That is, the invention of figures and tropes is the self-conscious signature of human language. Figuration is the human act par excellence. Why then does Jacob's Well (and by extension, Piers Plowman — which, of course, does not explicitly use the term "syncope") describe figural invention, albeit an unusual variety of it, as the signal act of the diminished human being? Mechanical babbling also has its syntagmatic binary opposite in stammering — a related defective mode of speech, often mentioned interchangeably with babbling, that extends and renders redundant the phonemic syntagms of words and phrases whereas babbling contracts corresponding phonemic syntagms. That is, babbling removes vowels and consonants from words; stammering adds them in linear (that is, "syntagmatic") redundancy. Yet, "prophetic stammering" once carried associations of divine inspiration or theophanic advent (Marks). Stammering is a vatic activity. Both babbling and stammering represent the poles of linguistic mutilation or disfiguration. Language unconsciously but "systematically" defective or disfigured (as tropological syncope or tropological dilation) exists as a specular version of consciously inventional figuration and disfiguration. As the product of the diminished human consciousness, it becomes the conceptual marker or signal flag for the parallel creation of animational figures - the walking and breathing prosopopeias of allegorical narrative. Although Will's muttering during prayer is not a common image in Piers, it thus reveals an isolated and ironically tempered, encoded mise en abyme of the phenomenological correlation so far articulated in this study. Medieval personification tabulation works as an experimental mode of literature wherein is revealed the phenomenological inquiry of the fictional human consciousness in corresponding relation to invented figural characters. For Prudentius and Chaucer, this phenomenological experiment takes the form of personification fables in which the primary human or narratorial consciousnesses are diminished in proportion to the invention of personification figures. Langland's 116

Piers Plowman B image of verbal figuration produced by the muttering, dozing human speaker is the ironic reflection (that is, the inversion) of the production of signs and figures by a healthy and consciously acting human mind. It is also a direct but miniaturized description of the text's invention of personification figures that are the specular and reified images of a template narrative consciousness, the consciousness of homo acidiosus. The foregoing phenomenological description of personification fabulation in Piers Plowman should serve as a general and introductory note to the complexity of figural character invention in Langland's poem. A primary means of constructing figural characters for Langland involves (in a manner similar to but more complex than Chaucer's) the manipulation of relationships among narrative levels. In my discussion of The Parliament of Fowls, I argued that the text creates the illusion of a progressive itinerary traveled by the dreamer through a concentric array of "contained" structures. At the core of this array are the ekphrases contained in the brass temple; the temple, in turn, is surrounded by the garden wall with its "personified" gate. Containing or encapsulating the garden wall is the dream world into which the narrator, after falling asleep, enters. In Piers Plowman, the narrator continually falls asleep but does not enter the traditional allegorical park (hortus conclusus) or traditional mysterious temples. Nor does he study ekphrastic artifacts on the walls of temples or strange monuments. (In Piers, in fact, the ekphrastic tradition is conspicuously absent.) Instead, he falls asleep and dreams seven times, and within two of these dreams, he falls asleep again! I will address the problem of these well-known " inner dreams " later in this chapter, but for now it is enough to note that the presence of the embedded dream signals the macrometaphor of containment characteristic of The Parliament of Fowls. This understanding also suggests that it might be useful for us to consider the literary dream as a discrete narrative register, a level of diegesis. A useful starting point for this avenue of thought is the reevaluation of the dream as it was treated in visionary and allegorical literature (Russell 21—114; Lewis, Image, 22—gi). As J. Stephen Russell shows, ancient and medieval thinkers conceived of dreams as artificial constructs. Analytical treatises (of which Macrobius' Commentary is the best example) on the visio, the somnium, or the oraculum — treatises traceable to Artemidorus' Oneirocriticon — all held that dreams were really fictional, completed "artifacts" sent to the mind of the dreamer and usually monitored by a divine or supernatural dream auctor, such 117

The poetics of personification as Scipio Africanus. The notion of the dream as a " naturally occurring," irruptive phenomenon that occupies the brain of a sleeping human did not obtain in the Middle Ages; it is clearly a post-Enlightenment conception.3 To the ancient or medieval world, the dream was transmitted, as it were, to the mind of one who slept. Russell provides a cogent example of this belief in his summary of the famous dream of Xerxes presented by Herodotus in Book vn of the History. Xerxes has been suffering from troubling dreams about war with the Greeks. He wishes for his uncle, Artabanus, to experience the dream so that the older and wiser man may ply his interpretive skills. The two believe that the gods who transmit dreams to mortals can be duped into believing that Artabanus is Xerxes, if the latter dons the king's crown and gown and sleeps on the royal couch! Of course, the gods see through the ploy and rebuke the king's uncle. Nonetheless, the incident discloses the marvelous if idiosyncratic idea that dreams are messages or texts transmitted to specific physical loci rather than to specific individuals. They are not unlike letters mailed through the post to predetermined places. The medieval literary dream undeniably has the status of a narrative artifact. Perhaps more accurately, it has the formal status of a play "performed" for the dreamer. The seven dreams framed by waking reality in Piers are embedded registers of diegesis. And the two inner plays take on the status of a "play-withinplay, " or, as we saw in our discussion of A Midsummer Night's Dream in chapter 2, the dramatic metadiegesis. The dream that Chaucer's Parliament narrator falls into is a poetic artifact that circumscribes the garden wall, another poetic artifact. In Chaucer's poem, dreams are texts embedded within the seemingly mimetic frame of the narrator's waking life. Now, of course, this distinction is itself an illusion. In modern psychoanalytical theory, the event of falling asleep within a dream is merely a shift or change in one continuous dream horizon. In accordance with this principle, the inner and outer dreams in Piers are ontologically equivalent. Moreover, the so-called "frame" of waking reality is itself made into an ontological extension of Will's dream world. Langland accomplishes this by installing at the outset of each waking episode semiotic markers which indicate a realm of " waking " reality that lies still "beyond," "above," or "outside" the confines of the outer frame in Piers Plowman* On at least four occasions Will the narrator punctuates the opening of transitional waking narratives by focusing on the resonant image of donning his garments. At the beginning of 118

Piers Plowman B the Prologue, he tells us how "In a somer sesun whan softe was the sonne, / I shop me in-to a schroud" (lines 1-2). Later, at the opening of Passus VIII, Will tells how "Thus yrobed in russet I romed aboute" (1). Following the Samaritan's sermon at the close of Passus xvn, Will tells of how he awoke and set out " Wolleward and wete-shoed" (1). And at the opening of Passus xix, he tells that he awoke "And dighte me derely" (2) before going to church. The programmatic image of donning clothes at the outset of a waking episode is allied to imagery that opens other medieval allegorical dream-visions. In The Romance of the Rose for example, the narrator tells us: In this delightful month, when Love excites All things, one night I, sleeping, had this dream. Methought that it was full daylight. I rose In haste, put on my shoes and washed my hands, Then took a silver needle from its case, Daintily and neat, and threaded it with silk. I yearned to wander far outside the town To hear what songs the birds were singing there In every bush, to welcome the new year. Basting my sleeves in zigzags as I went,

I pleased myself, in spite of solitude.

(60-70)

Langland employs a variation of this traditional opening by having his narrator dress in waking life. The outer frame of Langland's text, therefore, becomes like the dream-frame of de Lords' text: both are artificial, embedded registers (after all, Will's waking life is circumscribed by the titular text Piers Plowman that is read by us). This idea conforms to the traditional medieval topos, derived from Neoplatonism, that "life is a dream." Furthermore, the ontological assimilation of dream levels to waking reality underscores the artifice and textuality of all the registers in the poem. No "level" of diegesis is privileged. This is a resolutely poststructuralist position on the differentiation of formal structures in a poetic text. But as we saw from our discussions of Prudentius and Chaucer, the medieval macrometaphors "vertical hierarchy" or "radial concentricity" often govern the disposition of narrative structures and the articulation of specific characterologies. Our inquiry into the possibility of vertically layered or diegetically ordered dream structures in Piers Plowman promises to illuminate the formal operation of personification tabulation in Langland's poem. Overall, we agreed, Piers follows the "newer" continental tradition 119

The poetics of personification of allegorical character-mixing. The appearances and distribution of personification figures among the dream levels seems, at first, to be random and erratic. However, a variation of ontological quarantining becomes discernible upon closer examination of the poem's waking frame in relation to the dream levels. In actuality, no personifications exist in the mimetic frame of the waking reality experienced by Will. Only about two hundred lines of the poem cover this waking reality, and they are mostly perfunctory: Will wakes up, wanders a short distance, rests again, and falls asleep in another pleasant landscape. Or perhaps he supplies bits of summarized information about trends in his life, such as his new-found zeal expressed when he urges his wife Kytte and his daughter Calote (xvm.426) to kiss the cross "for a juwel." Like Chaucer's dream poems, Piers seems to invoke fictional verisimilitude by quarantining all the mythical, supernatural, or figural characters such as personifications on the narrated dream level. There are two sites in Piers, however, in which personification figures seem to be present in the diegetic level of the narrator's waking life. The first site is at the opening of Passus vm, which follows directly the long Visio that began with Will's meeting with Holy Church early in Passus 1. During these waking moments, Will is searching for Dowell, whom Piers the Plowman told him to seek in the preceding dream of Passus vn. During his travels Will meets two friars of a minor order: Was neuere wi3te, as I wente that me wisse couthe Where this lede lenged lasse ne more; Tyl it bifel on a Fryday two freres I mette, Maistres of the menoures men of grete witte. I hailsed hem hendely as I hadde lerned, And preyed hem par charitee ar thei passed forther, If thei knewe any contre or costes, as thei went, Where that Dowel dwelleth doth me to wytene... "Amonges vs," quod the menours "that man is dwellynge And euere hath, as I hope and euere shal here-after." (6-13, 18-19)

Because Will's ostensible "question" to the friars regarding the whereabouts of Do-well is reported rather than shown in a line of dialogue (11—13), w e cannot be sure about the precise meaning of the friars' response. And because the exchange is filtered through Will's first-person reporting, the drift of the episode leads us to believe that the friars are talking about the same thing Will is inquiring about — namely, an incarnate, anthropomorphic, personified being named 120

Piers Plowman B " Do-well" to whom Will had been referred in a prior dream. It is entirely plausible, however, that Will's reported discourse is conceivable in purely rhetorical terms to the two Friars. Will might be inquiring after an incarnate personification figure, but the Friars may be reading his utterance as sheer rhetorical ornament brought on, as Neoclassical theorists of the trope such as Lord Kames declared, by a heightened or extreme emotional state of mind. The confusion between personification as figural character invention and personification as local rhetorical ornament surfaces, as Lavinia Griffiths's study amply demonstrates, as a continuous problem for the reader of the entire text of Piers Plowman. It also allows the opportunity for comic energy. This confusion between ornamental and characterizational personification among two parties in a dialogue finds other parallels in Middle English literature. An identical textual move initiates the action of The Pardoners Tale. In Chaucer's text, the three young rowdies drinking in the tavern hear a bell tolling and ask their attendant boy about the dead man for whom the bell tolls. The boy tells them that the dead man was a " felawe " of theirs who died drinking on the tavern bench. He adds: Ther cam a privee theef men clepeth Deeth, That in this contree al the peple sleeth, And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo, And wente his wey withouten wordes mo. He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence. And, maister, er ye come in his presence, Me thynketh that it were necessarie For to be war of swich an adversarie. Beeth redy for to meete hym everemoore; Thus taughte me my dame; I sey namoore.

(vi. 675—84)

Clearly the boy's narration can be construed as rhetorical ornament: it comprises iconographically traditional imagery about Death and pestilence. The boy himself may not necessarily understand that his narration is rhetorically ornamental rather than realistically referential. As he points out, the whole explanation was "taughte" him by his mother. As Martin Stevens and Kathleen Falvey demonstrate, the rioters represent a kind of human consciousness that treats everything as literal, substantial, material (155—58). The Pardoners Tale is the literary manifesto of the cult of materialism; it offers a creed of antispiritualism. Both Chaucer's and Langland's texts foreground the gap

The poetics of personification between personification as rhetorical ornament and personification as character invention based in literalized or substantialized rhetorical figuration. The boy in The Pardoner's Tale speaks in unconscious rhetorical figuration to three listeners who understand him as a literal speaker. Will, in a waking moment of Piers Plowman, speaks literally to the friars who possibly understand him as uttering rhetorical ornament only. We know from the first friar's "ship at sea" parable (vm.30—44) that he is accustomed to thinking and speaking with the tools of rhetorical ornament. He speaks of "Do-well" fully aware that such a man really "exists" only as a figment of scholastic discourse. The selfconscious, self-reflexive treatment of the tension between rhetorical and referential language at the opening of Passus vm constitutes part of the tacit code in Piers Plowman that excludes personification figures from the " real-life" sphere of Will's waking reality. Moreover, this code itself depends upon the macrometaphor of structural verticality which, as we saw in chapter 3, powers up the whole business of diegetic layering and allegorical "leveling." In addition, this powerful macrometaphor informs the structuralist construal of narrativity in general. Utterances taken as purely rhetorical, local ornamentations dramatize the vitality of speech as discourse — that is, speech as the structurally linguistic framework of how a story gets told. The "internal" matter of what gets told involves story, here exist not rhetorical ornaments but actantial characters and objects. In the (structural) narratological model of narrative, the homology we label discourse/story equates to the homology we label diegetic/metadiegetic, for both pairs assert the logic of vertical and encapsulatory or concentric disposition. The general confusion between literal reference and local figurative ornament gets mirrored in another ambiguity in Piers that stands prior to the words traded by the friars and Will. The very status of the friar episode depends upon a pun founded on the homologous semantic values of the Middle English verb metten. The verb means " to meet" or "encounter" as well as "to dream." The opening phrase of Passus vm, " . . . it bifel on a Fry day two freres I mette" (8), engages a figural syllepsis: we cannot be sure that the line means, "It befell that on a Friday I met two friars," or "It befell that on a Friday I dreamed (of) two friars." Although Will seemed to wake up from his dream at the end of Passus vn, the status of the friar sequence wavers between mimetic frame and artifactual dream. Above, I referred to a second site in the poem in which a 122

Piers Plowman B

personification figure seems to appear within the plane of Will's waking life. This occurs at the opening of Passus xx. Here, Will meets a character whom he decisively labels "Need": Thanne as I went by the way, whan I was thus awaked, Heuy-chered I 3ede, and elynge in herte; I ne wiste wher to ete ne at what place. And it neighed neyghe the none, and with Nede I mette, That afronted me foule and faitour me called.

(1-5)

This is a bold move on the narrator's part, for the character who begins to speak after this introduction does not identify himself using any specific name. Rather, this character provides a short sermon on the instructive value of the human experience we call "need." His homiletic discourse is common to all instructional characters in Piers, and the references he makes to "need" indicate that the experience is being discussed simply as an abstract concept: "Coudestow nou3te excuse the as dede the kynge and other, That thow toke to thi bylyf to clothes and to sustenance, As by techynge and by tellynge of spiritus temperancie, And thow nome namore than Nede the tau3te, And Nede ne hath no lawe ne neuere shal falle in dette? (6-10) Like the friars, this preaching character supplies an ornamental dissertation on an abstract ethical subject. The strongest evidence that "need" operates as an abstract concept and as a figural character is in lines 20-22. Here, the man says: So Nede, at grete nede may nymen as for his owne, Wyth-oute conseille of Conscience or cardynale vertues, So that he suwe and saue spiritus temperancie.

Through grammatical variation, the speaker makes a distinction in line 20 between need as a personified character and need as an abstract quality. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the character "Nede" to whom the speaker of this sermon refers is himself. This is because the supposed personification figure the waking Will meets at the opening of Passus xx does not identify himself using the exclusive formula "I am x" - a formula that characterizes all the initial verbal declarations made by all the instructional personifications (Thought, Wit, Imagination, Anima) whom Will first meets face to face. Will takes it upon himself in a moment of narratorial authority to give the man a denominational label based solely on the content of the sermon, 123

The poetics of personification which is a dogmatic analysis of the ethical and theological value of need. At this site in Piers Plowman, Will exercises the narratorial power of naming an unknown, or previously unencountered, character on the spot. This power does not seem dependent upon the dream level (inner or outer) in which Will happens to be at any given moment. But Will's power or impulse to name personification figures within the dreams does depend upon variations in the text's narratological structure. In chapter 2, we discussed naming as an important issue in personification theory. Crucial for the personification narrative is not only the text's treatment of which names are given to personification figures, but also how and when these names are given. The often idiosyncratic and self-conscious matter of naming in personification tabulation perhaps foregrounds the dilemma of naming in any narrative. Wallace Martin writes: Constructing a narrative involves two activities: naming objects and events accurately (so that the words represent all important aspects of the reality depicted), and ordering the names (putting words and sentences in a sequence corresponding to their temporal occurrence). {176-77) In this discussion, Martin synthesizes a central tenet articulated by de Man in Allegories of Reading (188—220) and Gabriel Josipovici in The World and the Book {297). Naming is the inaugural and foundational problem of all narration. This problem is deftly and tacitly thematized in the Need episode of Passus xx in Piers Plowman, but it is handled in still more subtle and interesting ways during moments of the dream level narratives in which Will first meets or sees new personification figures. In Piers Plowman, Will the narrator often enjoys a kind of privileged foreknowledge concerning the visual episodes that unfold before his eyes. He automatically can identify on sight all the personification figures presented in the Prologue or in the extended Visio of Passus 11 through VII, the vision initiated by Lady Holy Church. Will tells how at the beginning of the vision: Thus left me that lady liggyng aslepe, And how Mede was ymaried in meteles me thou3te; That alle the riche retenauns that regneth with the false Were boden to the bridale ... Ac Symonye and Cyuile and sisoures of courtes Were most pryue with Mede of any men, me thou3te. 124

Piers Plowman B Ac Fauel was the first that fette hire out of boure, And as a brokour brou3te hir to be with Fals enioined. (51-54, 62-65) Line 51 marks the beginning of a contained narrative episode, one that begins with the conclusion of the dreamer's dialogue with Lady Holy Church. Anne Middleton has provided what is probably the most cogent definition of narrative "episode" in Piers. As the "unit of composition" for Langland, it is any described encounter between personages or animate beings in the poem — whether one or both speaks, and whatever the character of their verbal or physical exchange — which issues in some noted change. (95) Thus, the dialogue between Will and Holy Church comprises a complete episode; the subsequent marriage of Lady Meed may not contain Will in the role of dialogical " combatant" (as Middleton calls the participant in the kind of tension-ridden dialogue for which Piers is noted), but it does contain personages who speak, even though Will conveys their verbal exchanges using the narrative tempo known as " summary." Returning to the narrative matter which follows line 51, we see that Will readily recognizes and names Simony, Civil Law, Prevarication, Falsehood, and throughout the succeeding lines, several other personified abstractions. Yet in the episode directly before this one, Will does not recognize Holy Church on first sight: Thanne had I wonder in my witt what womman it were That such wise wordes of holy writ shewed; And asked hir on the hie3e name ar heo thennes 3eode, What she were witterli that wissed me so fair? "Holicherche I am," quod she "thow obtest me to knowe..." (71-75)

Will's inability to recognize and name her on first sight no doubt bears a predictable thematic stamp: he is spiritually delinquent, and does not "know" his own role and value within the institutional structure of his race's religion. But an identical formula marks the opening of each interchange episode wherein Will meets and converses with other major personification figures. Witness Will's meeting with Thought: A moche man, as me thou3te and lyke to my-selue Come and called me by my kynde name. "What artow," quod I tho "that thow my name knowest?" 125

The poetics of personification "That thow wost wel," quod he "and no \vy3te bettere." "Wote I what thow arte?" "Thought," seyde he thanne (70-74) The same narratological formula orders Will's initial meetings with Imagination (xn.i), Anima (xv.22-24), Faith (xvi.i76), Spes (xvm.i), and several others. All the personification figures Will meets face to face for the first time he does not know by name. This effect conflicts with the nominational power Will enjoys in episodes such as the Marriage of Meed. (And these episodes are equally plentiful: Will automatically knows and labels figures such as the Four Daughters of God in Passus xix, or the character named "Book" in Passus XVIII.) Taken together, the two opposing effects reveal a contradiction in narratorial epistemology. Will's knowledge is subject to seemingly random change throughout the poem. At times he enjoys narratorial omniscience; at other times, he is ignorant and indeed comically obtuse. Is this variation in epistemological powers from one episode to the next random and erratic? Let us reformulate what we have already observed regarding not the thematic matters of each episode, but rather, the narratological codes employed in them. Will's powers of knowledge and nomination can be formalized into a concise set of statements. First, on the diegetic level of the outer dream, Will has the power to name on sight only those personification figures he observes from a distance, as in a tableau or iconographic portrait. He does not, however, enjoy such power during the moments when he meets personification figures face-to-face for the first time. Second, on the metadiegetic level of the inner dream, Will does enjoy the power to name on sight both the figures he observes from a distance, merely reporting on them in a detached fashion, and the figures he meets directly, engaging them in dialogue. At the beginning of the first inner dream which opens Passus xi, Will meets and recognizes Fortune, enters and recognizes the Land of Longing (a moralized landscape), and tells us how: Thanne hadde Fortune folwyng hir two faire damoyseles Concupiscencia-carnis men called the elder mayde, And Coueytise-of-eyes ycalled was that other; Pryde-of-parfyte-lyuynge pursued hem bothe (11-14) This variation in nominational or epistemological powers marks the major formal difference in the mechanics of Langland's method of personification characterization between the diegetic level of the outer 126

Piers Plowman B dream and the metadiegetic level of the inner dream. Further articulation of this proairetic code is possible when we translate the formal features of the diegetic level into familiar narratological terms: Will intuits the names of the figures he observes in third-person narratives, while he must be told directly the names of the figures he confronts in his first-person narratives. In Genette's terms (Narrative 245), Will enjoys narrative omniscience during those sequentially arranged phases of diegetic (outer dream level) text that employ "heterodiegetic" narration. Conversely, he experiences severely reduced knowledge during those phases that involve " homodiegetic " narration. Because the shifts from third- to first-person narration involve what Will knows, we can think of such shifting as "epistemological variation." An array of propositions inform and underwrite this effect. First, Will's reduced knowledge during first-person narration is a possible structural signature of the phenomenological diminishment we addressed in the previous chapter. After all, Will is in physical proximity to personification figures during homodiegesis. The characters he observes during third-person narration are, as I suggested, elements in a series of tableaux vivants — the medieval device prevalent in visionary literature that closely resembles the ekphrasis. In one sense, these third-person, detached narrations take on the status of the embedded metadiegesis.5 They function as discrete, separable blocks within the primary diegesis. Personification characters contained in an interior diegetic level and quarantined from the human narrator do not, as our analysis of Chaucer's poems demonstrates, elicit or accompany a reduction of the narrator's powers of will, memory, speech, and so on. Distanced from the heterodiegetically presented characters at, say, Meed's marriage, Will does not suffer a loss of epistemological power. But the phenomenological proposition regarding first-person narrations discloses further implicit formulations about essential trope distinction and separation. Will meets personification characters face to face, as it were, in first-person narrative sequences. Such personal contact implies direct narratorial experience of another being's phenomenal constitution close up. That is, Will can discern concrete prosopographical quality in personifications he personally encounters. He cannot do so with personifications glimpsed in the tableaux vivants. Will makes narratorial inferences and conveys information in phenomenological response to faces apprehended in homodiegetic or first127

The poetics of personification person narrations. He makes corresponding inferences in relation to spatially distant human forms or physiques apprehended in heterodiegetic or third-person narrations. According to the taxonomy of tropes from chapter 2, the first-person and third-person narrations present, via phenomenological undercoding, two respectively distinct characterizational tropes: faced personifications (genuine prosopopeias) who inhabit narrative homodiegeses, and un-faced or not-yetfaced anthropomorphisms who inhabit narrative heterodiegeses. Formal coding of this sort provides another echo of the characterological quarantining evident in the Psychomachia and in all apologues. The third and most elementary reason for the difference in epistemological variation, however, stations us squarely in the strictly formal domain of narratology proper. A function of the heightened narratorial-epistemological difference between third- and first-person narration is the foregrounding or thematizing of these two narrative modes as practical inventional possibilities for the hypothetical or ideal author. Contrary to the values espoused in the foregoing phenomenological reading, third-person narration traditionally affords the opportunity for narratorial omniscience. More precisely, the heterodiegetic narration supplied by Will really conforms to what Genette would call extradiegesis - the narrating of a story by a narrator exclusively outside the story (Narrative 228-31). Will, therefore, reveals names, secrets, knowledge of essences and relationships, as though he were in a mystical and trance-like state. He enjoys the full epistemological power of the conventional Jamesian extradiegetic narrator. Homodiegesis, on the other hand, traditionally involves ignorance (of a kind common in the naive medieval persona favored by Chaucer for use in dream-visions) and the drive to learn on the part of the first-person narrator. Will, therefore, struggles to learn names, essences, and relationships all the while encumbered by the exigencies of time in those narrative segments he takes direct part in. Consequently, the homodiegetic/extradiegetic ratio of epistemological powers calls up the opposing images of narratorial "mortal" and narratorial "god." Such an antithetical relationship suggests a fourth, theological reason for the poem's proairetic coding regarding epistemological variation: the world and its entire narrative history is a book penned by God - an idea promulgated especially by Hugh of St. Victor (Gellrich 34). Through the person of Jesus, God the transcendent father enters his own narrative text. He no longer remains the omnipotent, external narrator who directs the events of 128

Piers Plowman B the text but becomes instead an internal character directed by forces and events in the text. The structural relation of third-person narrator/first-person narrator, with the attendant epistemological variability, functions as a figure for the medieval topos of God transcendent/God incarnate who has authored and entered the narrative book of the world. The strict epistemological variations of first- and third-person narrative scenes fall away in the inner dreams. As we saw, Will meets and instantly knows Fortune, Concupiscence-of-the-Flesh, Covetousness-of-the-Eyes, and Pride-of-Fine-Living. Indeed, a vatic and prophetic quality controls the formal nature of narratorial epistemology in the metadiegetic, inner-dream level of the poem. The Neoplatonic model of dreaming makes possible the somnium coeleste, the transforming dream in which the narrator is "lifted" up into transcendent, metaphysical realms.6 The inner dream represents a penetration within a penetration; it resembles movement from The Holy Place into the Holy of Holies. Thus, Will's knowledge is transformed into a purer and more powerful quantity. This does not mean that he no longer spiritually "stumbles" in the inner dream. Nor does it mean that he does not require the kind of interpretation supplied by Piers during the second inner dream of Passus xvi. Rather, his ability to recognize and name all personified characters on the spot reveals that he has penetrated into, or moved up to, a cosmic order that is as ontologically different from the outer dream level of diegetic narrative as the outer dream level is from the level of the mimetic frame, waking reality. The poet's apparent immunity to or "escape" from the nominational dilemma becomes the appropriate vehicle for ways of discussing shifts in cosmic levels of being, shifts represented by the narrator's passage among levels of embedded dreaming and corresponding manipulations of epistemological power. Apart from Will's heightened narratorial powers in the two inner dreams, Piers Plowman seems to provide other instances wherein Will names personification figures that appear in first-person narratives contained in newly occurring outer dreams. This might seem to undercut the code we have already outlined. But on closer examination, we see that all the personifications Will meets in the later passus of the poem have been observed or encountered by him in earlier dream structures, both diegetic and metadiegetic, homodiegetic and heterodiegetic. For example, Will meets Old Age face to face in the outer dream at the opening of Passus xx: 129

The poetics of personification And Elde anone after me and ouer myne heed 3ede, And made me balled bifore and bare on the croune

(183-84)

Will does not engage in a verbal exchange with Elde here, as he did with Thought or Imagination. Still, the physical effect Elde or Old Age has on Will marks the episode as a homodiegesis. The preceding twenty lines, however, recount a fully developed heterodiegetic narrative about Old Age's engagements with Death, Wanhope, Life, and Conscience. Here, Will enjoys narratorial omniscience, automatically knowing the name of Old Age. The knowledge is simply remembered by Will in his succeeding first-person narration. This effect reveals the power of narratorial recall enjoyed by Will. Such narratorial recall of the names of personification figures Will has already met can span several episodes and passus. Aside from the heterodiegetic episode in the twenty lines preceding xx.183, Will had already met Old Age nine passus earlier, during the inner dream (of Passus xi) in which he enjoyed that heightened narratorial omniscience. Along with other members of Fortune's train, Will tells us: Thanne was there one that hi3te Elde that heuy was of chere, "Man," quod he, "if I mete with the bi Marie of heuene, Thow shalt fynde Fortune the faille at thi most nede, And Concupiscencia-carnis dene the forsake. (26-29) The same effect takes place in regard to other major figures such as Conscience or Peace: Will meets them in earlier passus of the poem, where he either intuitively knows their names, or inquires after them. He then meets them face to face in later passus of the poem. This automatic recall of personification figures' names further underlines their essence as sheer name or idea. Peace may shift from one gender to another: in iv.47 he is a man; in xvii.167 ff. she is one of the Daughters of God. Whatever thematic significance this gender shift may possess, the change reinforces that Will "sees" or comprehends the identification and nature of a personification before he apprehends and processes any pictorial or iconographic data that might constitute the figure's sensory appearance.7 (In any event, Peace appears in thirdperson instances in both passus.) Overall, though, Will's propensity to name personification figures on the spot is an impulse that increases as we approach the conclusion of the poem. As we saw above, Will identifies a man whom he meets in waking reality as "Need." He does this as readily as he would name figures he meets in his inner dreams. 130

Piers Plowman B Piers Plowman experiments with the idea of the narrator who sees in nearly everyone or everything a personified essence. The poem at times articulates the personification figure as nothing more than a name or idea that has been given form. But just as Langland's text focuses upon the ideational aspect of personification figuration through the narrator's personificational obsession, it also explores ways in which the name of a personification figure can work to represent a being that may be more than a monolithic concept. Langland examines the dilemma of nomination as a facet of personification figuration by methods of character naming that are entirely innovative in the history of Western personification. Piers Plowman, we have already agreed, employs a variety of methods in naming personification figures. Will encounters figures named in Latin as well as English; he sees figures who represent universal abstracts such as Peace or Faith, as well as common social types such as Roberd the Robber or Sir Waryn Witty. Like Prudentius before him and Bunyan after him, Langland experimented with names made of compound words. Covetousness-of-the-Eyes is a nominational label that carries greater significance than the label "Covetousness" by itself. Such a method of nomination approaches that of the epithet phrase-name in power. Langland stretches the method, elaborately expanding the size of his personificational phrase-names. The first such expanded name appears at the opening of Passus iv, where Reason calls for his servants Cato and a figure named "Tomme Trew-tongue-telle-me-no-tales- / Ne-lesyng-to-law3 e-of-f or-I-louedhem-neuere." Next, we see Piers naming a series of topification figures or moralized landscapes and loci during his sermon that follows the confession of the Deadly Sins in Passus v. The loci are topified versions of the Ten Commandments. One, a ford, is named in Latin ('Honora patrem et matrem, etc.", 576), and the longest is an Englishlanguage combination of the two final commandments: Thanne shaltow come by a crofte but come thow 110113 te there-inne; That crofte hat Coueyte-nou3te-mennes-catel ne-her-wyuesNe-none-of-her-seruantes-that-noyen-hem-my3te (581-83) The final example of such complex phrase-naming concerns personification figures, namely, Piers' wife and children. Here, the final compound is the poem's longest yet: Dame Worche-whan-tyme-is Pieres wyf hi3te, His dou3ter hi3te Do-ri3te-so-or-thi-dame-shal-the-bete,

The poetics of personification His sone hi3te Suffre-thi-souereynes-to-hauen-her-willeDeme-heme-nou3te-for-if-thow-doeste-thow-shalt-it-dere-abugge. (vi.80-83)

Langland is probably the first author in English literature to expand the phrase-names of personification figures in so outrageous a manner. No doubt, the effect is self-reflexive in a simple way, for as a means of absurd exaggeration, it calls comic attention to the phenomenon of cumbersome or silly phrase-names found in such well-known personification texts as the much earlier Psychomachia (the Vice "Faith-in-the-old-gods") or the much later morality play Mankind (the Vice "Now-a-days"). But the phrase-named personification or topification reverses the effect of figures that are automatically named. The conception that personifications are no more than "animated names" is dismantled when a figure can bear a name that conveys not just a semantic or lexical quantity, but an entire syntactical one. The (translated) label for Piers' son, " Obey-your-betters-so-that-they-have-their-way-and-condemn-them-not-because-if-you-do-you'11-sorely-regret-it," contains four noun-verb constructions yoked together into a complex " theme." The phrase also employs the subjunctive, indicative, and imperative moods. As a syntactical "unit," it celebrates grammatical excess. The phrase is thus far more than a simple sentence. It embodies a complex theme and works effectively as a complete "text" in itself. Langland, therefore, names a personification figure not with a semantic, lexical, or syntactical unit, but with a template text that somehow reflects the creature's entire "life history" — something in the manner of a biography. Embodied in a real human's surname, no matter how short, is a stratum of biographical information, specifically, a residue of patrilineal genealogy. But more to the point, the human life can be approximately conveyed by the subject's life history - by his or her biography. "James Paxson" is a creature who can be at least approximately reconstructed through physical and behavioral description, through a narrative of events in which he has participated, and by the aid of a transcript of his inner thoughts and feelings. All of this information constitutes a text that "names" who he is. The names bestowed by Langland on Piers' son or on the topified commandments are far simpler than this kind of biography. But their particular form in Piers Plowman potentially engages the same principle: a complex idea or a sentient creature cannot be represented by a one-word label. They 132

Piers Plowman B must be represented by a whole text. In this way, Langland calls our attention to the narrative process of naming personification figures. His text points to the difficulties and the problematic implications of distilling ideas into palpable forms for discursive manipulation. Of course, this conceptual task can never be carried out adequately. The phrase-names in Piers are self-reflexive symbols for the descriptive poverty that inheres in all human discourse. Langland also achieves this stretching of the limits of formalization in Piers Plowman through a kind of transdiegetic metalepsis among the text's dream levels. The metalepsis is not quite the same as the kind in the Psychomachia. Rather, it arises out of what seems to be Will's error in accurately recounting which figures have appeared in which levels of diegesis. The personification figure Scripture, for example, appears and converses with Will in the metadiegetic inner dream of Passus xi, as well as in the encompassing outer dream. After a dialogue with Study, Clergy, and Scripture that rounds out Passus x, our narrator tells of his poor performance by Scripture's tutelary standards: Thanne Scripture scorned me and a skile tolde, And lakked me in Latyne and Ii3te by me she sette, And seyde, "multi multa sciunt, et seipsos nesciunt."

(1—3)

Will then tells that he wept after this scolding, and falls asleep into the first inner dream of the poem, where he engages in a series of dialogues with personages in Fortune's train, with O l d Age, etc. At one point, Equity ("Lewtee") propounds the value of the common law (80—102). Scripture suddenly appears in the inner dream: "He seith sothe," quod Scripture tho and skipte an heigh, and preched; Ac the matere that she meued if lewed men it knewe, The lasse, as I leue louyen it thei wolde. (103—05) Will then summarizes "hir teme and hir text" (111) — the "many are called but few are chosen" maxim of Mt.22.14. Will stresses that " Al for tene of hir text trembled m y n herte" (115). It is curious that Will has already stressed a similar response to Scripture's scolding during the lesson portrayed in the outer dream. Early in the Passus, Will says, " T h o wepte I for w o and wrathe of hir speche" (4). Scripture, of course, can appear on any two dream levels of the poem just as suddenly as any other personification figure. But it is clear that the narrator has confused the t w o appearances of Scripture, because the signal image of Will's trembling from Scripture's 133

The poetics of personification speech indicates a response to one single context. The image indicates a conflation of Scripture's engagement with Will on both the diegetic and metadiegetic levels. It is as though Scripture had metaleptically "followed" Will into the inner dream, where she continues her barrage of corrective speech. There is a similar confusion between levels of diegesis and metadiegesis in Piers when, in the same inner dream of Passus xi, Will proclaims in excitement and trepidation, "3if I durste ... amonges men this meteles auowe" (86)! The exclamation has ambiguous reference, for it points to the metadiegetic inner dream as well as to the surrounding, diegetic outer one. Like Scripture's intrusion into the inner dream, this emotionally charged apostrophe erases the artificial boundary between diegetic levels. The narratological event of the erased or broken frame — a device employed by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales — is a moment of formal and figural aporia. The aporia thrusts into the foreground of the text the comparative statuses of figural and human characters. We must remember that the physical "action" that takes place on the outermost, waking level of reality in Piers Plowman is minimal. All that happens is Will's sporadic wandering punctuated by intervals of sleep. On the outer level of narrative structure, Will simply lies asleep and dreaming. His body is an inert mass confined to one place. The same condition must obtain on the embedded level of the outer dream during the two instances in the poem when Will "falls asleep" into deeper, inner dreams. While Scripture scolds Will at the outset of Passus xi, or when he faints upon hearing the name of Piers the Plowman in Passus xv, Will ceases to be an active agent on the level of the outer dream. He becomes an object. The boundaries of both embedded dream structures remain intact if we accept and bear in mind this natural precondition of the narrator's visionary dreaming. But what if the text presents figural characters who are part of the figurational matrix of the diegetically programmed text in this same condition? Personification figures are figments of the fictional world of the dream experienced by Will. Not only does breaking diegetic boundaries thrust the question of their ontological status into the foreground, but assimilating personification figures to the narratological status of the narrator (physically asleep and inert on the outer level while active on the "next level down") has the same effect. The resonant image of a character in Piers Plowman lying asleep and dreaming is not exclusively the province of Will's experiential world. 134

Piers Plowman B Such is, in fact, the final narrative image in the poem. When the great building Unity in which all the Virtues have taken refuge seems about to capitulate, Conscience is on the verge of despair: Conscience cryde eft and bad Clergye help hym, And also Contricioun forto kepe the 3ate. "He lith and dremeth," seyde Pees "and so do many other" (xx.3 73-75) This final image echoes and reinforces Will's actantial condition on the mimetic level of waking reality throughout Piers Plowman. Like the complex phrase-name sparingly employed in the poem, the capacity of personification figures to sleep and dream marks them with the peculiar power that is possessed only by humans. Contrition, by implication, produces a metadiegetic dream of his own at the end of Passus xx; but this dream event is invisible to us. The personification characters in Piers may, as I argued above in chapter 2, produce a monological discourse devoid of narrative embellishment. But the creation of dream worlds by key personifications appearing at the close of the text makes them into versions of that subset of prosopopeias evident in the Psychomachia: the species of poetically made characters who make their own poetic texts. Furthermore, the existence of such dreaming signals the potential multiplication and refraction of embedded dream- and waking-reality structures within the structural matrix of the whole poem. Phenomenologically, it could be said, Contrition and the other dreaming personification characters experience dorveille. (Curiously, the C-Text says that Contrition lies adreynt, that is, "in a stupor" or "dazed.") They too undergo psychic diminishment. They are "reified" (or dispersonified), possibly triggering the invention of a species of figural characters within their dream horizons. A personification is a putative facet of a whole human consciousness. When it attains to having its own psychic facets or phenomenological fractions - instantiating what A. D. Nuttall calls "allegorical regress" (39) - the character is in another way defiguralized; it resembles more and more an authentically human mental template that exists as both source of and model for all personifications. An ontological paradox obtains, however, via this defiguralization. The poetic though unconscious creation of dream-texts transforms figures like Contrition into more human-looking consciousnesses. But to repeat, the generation of psychic facets or fractions that become subordinate personification characters reifies the new superordinate 135

The poetics of personification mental template. After all, Contrition and the others lie dormant (a metaphorical image of death). Psychic fractionalism, along with external torpor, entails dispersonification. Although the final scene in Passus xx of the poem provides only the image of torpid personifications, the effect consequently admits a latent process of defacement. Piers Plowman presents a more overt version of personificational defacement (though not so graphically actional as the sites of defacement or dismemberment in the Psychomachia) when Will meets Anima at the opening of Passus xv. He first mentions that he " seigh ... a sotyl thinge with-al" (12). The tenuous assertion that the subject of Will's apprehension is a "subtle" or "cunning creature" (decisively not a "man" or "person") is born out by the observation that this being was "One with-outen tonge and teeth" (13). The strange being somehow "tells" Will that he/she/it is primarily called Anima —a word that means "soul" and thereby gives one reason why the noncorporeal or non-carnal creature has no tongue: it needs neither food nor drink. Of course, as the discussion in chapter 3 above bears out concerning Prudentius' defaced entities, the absence of tongue and teeth - the essential organs of speech — establish Anima as a non- or quasiprosopopeia. Something of the character of Anima exists prior or supplementary to the figural prosopon of the conventional personification. The text develops this semiotic idea in applicable thematic terms. Anima supplies a list of guises by which it behaves and is known: "The whiles I quykke the corps," quod he, "called am I Anima; And whan I wilne and wolde Animus ich hatte; And for that I can and knowe called am I Mens; And whan I make mone to god Memoria is my name; And whan I deme domes and do as treuthe techeth, Thanne is Racio my 1x51 name Resoun an Englisshe (23-28) The creature goes on to include Sensus, Conscience, Amor, and Spiritus as other performative manifestations of its being. The creature — which we cannot even rightly call Anima, for that is only one appellation — aptly has no complete face or prosopon; as "Crystes creature," it exists as the content or substrate to several other personified abstractions, the substance to an array of accidents. That is, the literally non-lingual, anatomically aphasic creature is the conceptual personified for several other duplex personification figures 136

Piers Plowman B (personifier/personified). How does one personify the poetic process of personification? As chapter 3 demonstrated, the inverse of prosopon poein is possible: the un-making or defacing of a prosopopeia character can be literalized in actantial scenes of decapitation, the smashing of mouths, and the tearing out of teeth, tongues, and eyes. The mouthless creature in Piers first appears accordingly incomplete regarding facial anatomy. It then goes on to identify its other, subsequent complete faces or personae that it has the power to adopt. Langland's Anima, or whatever we might call It, is the fullest literary realization of personification personified. The Anima sequence also represents the poetic impulse to reduce the potential multiplication of personificational characters in Piers. In fact, Anima s several masks or personages coincide with other central personification characters in the text. Anima stands as the " signified" to many signifiers (Memory, Reason, etc.), and in so identifying her/himself, fulfills a textual need for simplification. That is, such reduction of character numbers can be construed as a means of philosophical or ideological economicalness or frugality. This feature of the Anima sequence might thus invoke an unavoidable and perhaps crucial intellectual posture in medieval thought: the "frugalist" proclivity of Ockhamist logic. At the height of character multiplication and actantial diversification in the poem, Anima appears identifying itself as the truer, more fundamental and substantial ground of several conceptual terms. The poetic move in Piers seems to be a direct though whimsical dramatization of Ockham's Razor itself — the Nominalist principle of conceptual economy through which a clutter of conceptual ramifications, variations, synonyms, and analogues get trimmed away to reveal a more functionally pragmatic and essential (but not "universal") idea underneath. Piers Plowman clearly has other Nominalist threads equally evinced throughout the text. Of particular interest is Langland's whole enterprise of "nominational innovation." Although I lack the opportunity to enter into a discussion of Nominalism here, it is safe to say that personification in Piers can be thought of as a direct expression of nominalist principles in practical poetic terms. Of course, the linking of personification to philosophical Nominalism invites a contradictory argument. The proliferation of narrative personification could represent the dramatization of philosophical Realism — the weighty fourteenth-century conceptual opponent of Nominalism. Even today critics of medieval allegory maintain that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thinkers did believe in the actual 137

The poetics of personification existence of "beings" or transcendent "essences'7 such as Faith, Reason, Love, and so forth. Not only could such creatures exist in a transcendent Platonic realm-of-ideas, but the sheer fact that they bore names made them as ostensibly "real" as the temporal and material referents to which the nouns in quotidian human language pointed. Owen Barfield summarizes this position: For us, the characters in an allegory are "personified abstractions," but for the man of the Middle Ages Grammar or Rhetoric, Mercy or "Daunger," were real to begin with, simply because they were names. And names could be representations, in much the same solid-feeling way as things were. (86) As the argument of this chapter has shown, Langland's text hardly seems to be a sheer dramatization of Realism. Rather, one might say that narrative personification characterization works as a parody of or satire on the kind of philosophical Realism described by Barfield. Nominalist or Terminist logic always comes down to lively selfcriticism. Terms are terms. There were, for Ockham and his followers, no "universals." Only propositional logic — a logic self-aware of its own rhetorical and nominational underpinnings — formed the meaningful basis of ontology or epistemology. Piers Plowman reflects this philosophical sentiment again and again. The at-first seemingly rigorous formalization of the poem's proairetic code is both instituted and tested by the use of several metafigural tools — nominational innovation, epistemological variation, narrative metalepsis, the personification of personification, etc. Langland's text innovatively makes personification (inter)dependent upon a satire of fourteenth-century philosophy while also challenging narrative structuration based on a unique psycho-phenomenological modeling.

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The Anima sequence in P/grs Plowman exemplifies yet another generative code in the poetics of personification. So far, we have left attenuated the stakes for the diegetic representatation of personification's semiotic structure. Prudentius and Langland supply narrative scenes of defacement or embodiment literalized - a poetic maneuver that gains more meticulous care and density in The Faerie Queene. Spenser's vast poem contains a conventional variety of tropological character types ranging from iconographically simple personification characters (the train of Sins who appear in the House of Pride, i.iv.18—36, or the Faculties of the mind appearing in the Masque of Cupid, m.xii.3-26) to mysterious or superhuman characters named by nonce-words. Although many personifications appear and act according to little more than perfunctory proairetic direction, the central personification characters in The Faerie Queene experience focalization in a narrative moment of embodiment or disembodiment, facement or defacement. This chapter argues (using material predominantly from Books 1 and 11) that the governing poetic code for Spenserian personification is the narrativization of the trope as it comes into or goes out of existence. Such pervasive personification of personification finds its nub in several crucial sites. In some cases, these crucial sites have a mixture of personifications (even ones not named in English) and possible non-personifications. The three sages of the House of Temperance presented in ii.ix have been variously interpreted as personified powers or faculties of the human mind, that is, as psychic aspects or facets of human consciousness (Berger 79). Spenser's presentation of the sages, however, is pregnant with self-reflexive potential. A complete quote of the passage is necessary. The first of them could things to come foresee; The next could of thinges present best advize ; The third things past could keep in memoree: 139

The poetics of personification

So that no time nor reason could arize, But that the same could one of these comprize. For-thy the first did in the forepart sit, That nought mote hinder his quick prejudize: He had a sharpe foresight and working wit That never idle was, ne once would rest a whit. His chamber was dispainted all within With sondry colours, in the which were writ Infinite shapes of thinges dispersed thin; Some such as in the world were never yit, Ne can devized be of mortall wit; Some daily seene and knowen by their names, Such as in idle fantasies do flit; Infernall Hags, Centaurs, feendes, Hippodames, Apes, Lyons, Aegles, Owles, fooles, lovers, children, Dames. And all the chamber filled was with flyes Which buzzed all about, and made such sound, That they encombred all mens eares and eyes; Like many swarmes of Bees assembled round, After their hives with honny do abound. All those were idle thoughtes and fantasies, Devices, dreames, opinions unsound, Shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies; And all that fained is, as leasing tales, and lies. Emongst them all sate he which wonned there, That hight Phantastes by his nature trew; A man of yeares yet fresh, as mote appere, Of swarth complexion, and of crabbed hew, That him full of melancholy did shew; Bent hollow beetle browes, sharpe staring eyes, That mad or foolish seemd: one by his vew Mote deeme him borne with ill-disposed skyes, When oblique Saturne sate in th'house of agonyes.

(111.ix.40—52)

In the fourth stanza of this descriptive passage, the narrator supplies the name of the first, young sage: "Phantastes/' a verbal label which actually fits under the rubric of the Spenserian nonce-word name. (I insist that we focus on Phantastes here because he is part of a structural triad of characters, the third member of which, "Eumnestes," is clearly a personification figure named in Greek.) The name echoes more than anything else a series of English words denoting that which is false, whimsical, outrageously and non-constructively imaginative, and so forth (Spenser Variorum 258). Spenser criticism has generally desig140

The Faerie Queene nated Phantastes as a negative character. Michael Murrin declares that the character represents Spenser's supposed suspicion of the human imagination. He is an emblem of the mind collapsed inward on itself, a figural index of "solipsism and madness" (Epic 134).1 The subject matter of Phantastes' wall-paintings, as Murrin points out, seems to support this hypothesis regarding the personification figure. Spenser, however, concocts a descriptive passage that is heavily laden with the signs and images of traditional dream-allegory, a closer inspection of which serves to vindicate Phantastes' ethical or axiological function in Book 11. Spenser's initial formulation of the three sages in stanza 49 carries no ethical charge. The first sage "could things to come foresee," the second could advise Alma, we presume, of "thinges present," and the third sage "thinges past could keep in memoree." In other words, the three sages can be construed as personifications of historical time, future, present, and past. The poet's focus, however, is on the poetic artifacts created by each of the three sages. Phantastes, who had been described as "never idle," sits in a chamber covered with ekphrases of fantastic shapes and scenes. The condition of these ekphrases leads the narrator to declare them the workings of " idle fantasie." The use of the word "idle" twice within seven lines is not without significance. The word can possibly denote "vain or useless," but given the context of the passage, it can also mean "formless or empty." This is the etymological sense of the word in Old English. (In the OE Genesis, the soon to be created world is described by the poet in line 106 as "idel and unnyt"; Krapp 6) "Idle" in this context means "something not yet fully formed," that is, something embryonic, in process. Such is the condition of the images on the walls of Phantastes' chamber: they are first described by the narrator as "dispersed thin," and "never yit" having been "in the world." As for the thematic nature of the ekphrases, they are clearly derived from the world of medieval romance. Moreover, the creatures and characters at the end of stanza 50 are precisely the entities that inhabit the mythological and romance spaces of Spenser's poem; this tally can itself be further divided along generic lines. The hags, centaurs, fiends, and "hippodames" (Spenser's rendering, most likely, of the "hippogrif") are the creatures of classical and Celtic mythology. The animals are the subjects of the medieval bestiary or Physiologus tradition, a popular genre known for striking use of pictorialized animal figures (Curley xl; T. H. White 228—2on). The lovers, fools, children and 141

The poetics of personification Dames are the subjects of medieval Romance proper. In sum, the ekphrases on the walls of Phantastes' chamber are quite probably less disordered than the initial narratorial foray would have us believe. The three distinct generic groupings - mythology, physiologus, romance -might each belong in its own distinct ekphrastic panel. But the narrator's immediate response as a reader is confusion and distaste. This initial confusion is promoted by the descriptive images presented in stanza 51. The narrator focuses upon the sole actantial feature of Phantastes' chamber — the buzzing flies. Like the thinly "dispersed" visual images of the preceding stanza, the flies generate noise, that is, a degree of entropy in the information contained in the chamber (eyes and ears are "encombred" by the flies). The flies, as the narrator declares in an act of hermeneutical authority, turn out to be animification figures: Devices, Dreams, Opinions, Shows, Visions, and so forth. The stanza concludes with the narrator's general summary that the flies are all that " fained is " — all verbal things, in short, that are fictional, or more precisely, poetic. The flies, or animified verbal texts, along with the inchoate visual images of the ekphrases reveal that Phantastes is a personification of " poetics " in the broadest sense of the word. He represents the human impulse to make things (facere), to engage in the generation of fiction. In stanza 52, Spenser aptly describes the young man as "melancholy" and possessed of " sharpe, staring eyes." Such is the physiognomy of the vates, the prophetic poet who has divine powers. Phantastes is the personified, specular image of the process whereby Spenser's own great enterprise, The Faerie Queene, comes into being before our eyes as we read. The passage wherein Spenser presents the second sage is the shortest and most spare of the three. Whom Alma having shewed to her guestes, Thence brought them to the second rowme, whose wals Were painted faire with memorable gestes Of famous Wizards; and with picturals Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals, Of commen-wealthes, of states, of pollicy, Of lawes, of judgements, and of decretals, All artes, all science, all Philosophy, And all that in the world was ay thought wittily. Of those that rowme was full; and them among There sate a man of ripe and perfect age, 142

The Faerie Queene Who did them meditate all his life long, That through continuall practise and usage He now was growne right wise and wondrous sage: Great pleasure had those straunger knights to see His goodly reason and grave personage, That his disciples both desyred to bee; But Alma thence them led to th'hindmost rowme of three. (n.ix.53-54) The most peculiar feature of this description concerns the expected name of the second sage: Spenser does not supply one. His status as a personification figure, then, is placed into question, according to the table of trope varieties supplied in the conclusion of chapter 2. Yet, the content of his chamber is clear enough. As opposed to the realm of Phantastes, that of the second sage represents all human knowledge that is not fictional. Specifically, he represents human commerce, art, and law. This is problematic, however, because "art" could include all kinds of poesis, the systematic ways of making things which is the province of the figure Phantastes. This problem is compounded by the formal, or rather, the "medial" status of the walls in the second sage's chamber. The narrator clearly says the walls are "painted faire" with "picturals." They would seem, therefore, to be ekphrastic panels like those in Phantastes' chamber. But as we saw in The House of Fame, ekphrastic description often involves narratorial confusion. The narrator lists among the depicted things "famous Wizards," "courts," and "Magistrates" - persons and physical entities which can, with little conceptual difficulty, be represented visually. But the narrator also lists " common-wealthes," "states," "pollicy," along with "lawes," "judgements," and "decretals. " The latter three entities are themselves verbal texts, so we are rightly led to conclude that the walls of the second sage's chamber are engraved with written inscriptions as well as visual ekphrases. However, the middle group of entities — the states and commonwealths - still create a problem for pictorial or graphic representation on the walls. It is possible that these are personifications, for in no other form could an abstract concept like a "state" be pictorially represented in an ekphrastic artifact. More precisely, they are topifications - personified geographical spaces - and they may resemble the visualized Body Politic of the kind we see in the wellknown engraved title page of Hobbes's Leviathan.2 It is useful to backtrack for a moment to comment on the general 143

The poetics of personification function of ekphrases in this part of Spenser's poem. Even though Spenser produces a variety of personification narratives in which the codified practice of ontological quarantining no longer programs the whole text, we do see in this section of Book n a vestigial hint of such a narratological procedure. Aside from Guyon and Arthur who peer in on him, Phantastes, the personification figure of poesis, is the only animate entity in the first chamber; the ekphrases are metadiegetic registers in which are encapsulated the members of a different ontological realm — historically viable humans, animals, and mythological creatures. In the second chamber, we are faced with potential personification figures who are contained within metadiegetic ekphrases, but their ultimate status as "personifications" is as ambiguous as the second, older sage's. Unnamed, he could be one of the genuinely numinous or allegorical personages of Spenser's narrative. Although neither he nor any of the three sages speak, they seem to have created the peculiar and, as it were, fetishistic texts that adorn the walls of their chambers. The distinction between diegesis and metadiegesis gets more substantially realized in the poem during the narrative passages in which the third and oldest sage is presented. This man sits in a chamber "ruinous and old" which is placed far behind the other two chambers in the House of Temperance. The third sage is in a similar physical condition. He is "halfe blind," and "decrepit in his feeble corse." The narrator, however, praises the rigor of the man's mind, and carefully describes his peculiar power: This man of infinite remembraunce was, And things foregone through many ages held, Which he recorded still as they did pas, Ne suffred them to perish through long eld, As all things els the which this world doth weld; But laid them up in his immortal scrine, Where they for ever incorrupted dweld: The warres he well remembred of king Nine, Of old Assaracus, and Inachus divine. The yeares of Nestor nothing were to his, Ne yet Mathusalem, though longest liv'd; For he remembred both their infancis: Ne wonder then, if that he were depriv'd Of native strength now that he them surviv'd. His chamber all was hangd about with rolls And old records from auncient times derivd, 144

The Faerie Queene Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolls, That were all worm-eaten and full of canker holes. Amidst them all he in a chaire was sett, Tossing and turning them withouten end; But for he was unhable them to fett, A litle boy did on him still attend To reach, when ever he for ought did send; And oft when thinges were lost, or laid amis, That boy them sought and unto him did lend: Therefore he Anamnestes cleped is; And that old man Eumnestes, by their propertis.

(n.ix.56—58)

The narrator focuses upon the fact that the walls of Eumnestes' (literally, "Good Memory") chamber are covered with written texts - scrolls, books, and document rolls. "Eumnestes" is perhaps ironically named, for a characteristic effect of his function as historian or recorder in the House of Temperance is his tendency to misplace things, that is, to forget. His cohort Anamnestes ("Recollection") represents the active process of recalling information, while Eumnestes is an embodiment of the process of recording it. Like the partly formed visual images produced by Phantastes, the commodity of stored information handled by these two personification figures is imperfect and susceptible to a kind of entropic deterioration. The worms that eat Eumnestes' books and scrolls are structurally equivalent to the flies in Phantastes' chamber: both sets of insects are animification figures that embody the concept of information decay or entropy. The cankerholes in the books and scrolls engender physical lacunae or informational gaps in Eumnestes' textual record. They are a tactile equivalent of "noise." Yet it is to the corrupt written texts of Eumnestes' lair that Guyon and Arthur direct their investigative energies. What is special about the texts in Eumnestes' hall of records - so special, in fact, that the two knights pass over the worlds of information offered them in the two preceding chambers? Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon both come upon books that narrate the history of their races. Stanza 60 closes Canto ix with the image of Arthur reading Briton Moniments and Guyon reading Antiquitee of Faery Lond. Spenser concludes the canto with an engagement of this frame device - the narration of a scene of reading. The entire tenth canto is given over to a summary of the two books Arthur and Guyon read, enacting an extended metadiegesis. The contents of the two books is neatly capsulized by the rubric that opens Canto x: 145

The poetics of personification A chronicle of Briton kings, From Brute to Uthers rayne; And rolls of Elfin Emperours, Till time of Gloriane. The rubric foregrounds the fact that the two knights are reading chronicles, generic texts which, as Hayden White explains, are elliptical and narratively minimal " lists " of events that come ideally up to the moment of the recorder's writing them and, in turn, to the moment of the reader's reading them ("Value" 1—23). Spenser's summaries of the two texts in fact embellish their narrative constitutions. Many sections use dramatic suspension, rich metaphors and similes, and they incorporate descriptive elements — all of which are features alien, as White demonstrates, to the chronicle or the annal. This is peculiar, because the summary which occupies all of Canto x operates as a fictional artifact; it is a verbal structure ordered by the principles of Phantastes, the personification of fiction, rather than Eumnestes, the supposed personification of history or memory. Eumnestes' texts may be sheer chronicle, but the Spenserian narrator's reassembly is genuinely narrative and not in keeping with the valorization of the poem's explicit axiological preference of Eumnestes over Phantastes. Even as chronicles, the texts in Eumnestes' chamber resist the kind of ontic and temporal verisimilitude or "realism" necessary to the chronicle or journal because of their peculiar distortions of time. Arthur and Guy on "read up to" the personalized conclusions of the two chronicles; that is, they read up to the moments of their own contemporary settings and political affairs. (The effect amounts to a version of the mise en abyme topos in which the reader of a narrative reads about his own life on the spot; see Dallenbach 67-71.) For Arthur, the summary takes him from stanza 5 through stanza 68: After [Aurelius] Uther, which Pendragon hight, Succeeding — There abruptly it did end, Without full point, or other Cesure right; As if the rest some wicked hand did rend, Or th'Author selfe could not at least attend To finish it... And for Guy on, the summary of his text runs from stanza 70 through yyf the concluding passage that recounts the passage of the Elfin throne from Tanaquil to Gloriana: 146

The Faerie Queene Therefore they Glorian call that glorious flowre: Long mayst thou, Glorian, live in glory and great powre! Both chronicles end with the monarchs who commissioned the two questers on their tasks: Prince Arthur has been empowered by his father Uther, Guyon by the Faerie Queene, Gloriana. The two texts undermine ontic and temporal realism because, as readers have always known, Gloriana is a fictional guise for Elizabeth, and the Elfin world is a figure for the Tudor dynasty. Even according to the most cavalier sense of history, Arthur predates Elizabeth by a thousand years. This anachronistic juxtaposing of chronologically removed characters is normally no problem for medieval or Renaissance allegory. For instance, Moses can appear with Abraham on a road with Will the dreamer in Piers Plowman. But the structure of Cantos ix and x reinforces the valorized difference between the textually "more perfect" chronicles of Eumnestes and the "feigned" artifacts wrought by Phantastes. The episode asserts the authority of the written record over any kind of visual or verbal fictional text. But it fails to establish this authority in the end by celebrating its own elaborate stylistic nature, and through a major aporia in the structure of time reference, for time should be the one invariant structure in any authentic " chronicle." The two personification figures, Phantastes and Eumnestes, at first seem to be the characterological operators in a restricted parable about the virtues of the true chronicle over fiction, of the written over the visual text, of the venerable over the current. But they are really the operators or structural functions of an allegory of textuality. The two modes of information are equally governed by entropy. They are equally figurally excessive, and ordered by referential aporia. The poem's passage from the first form of information to the second establishes an illusory graduation to the imagined comfort of the written text. But in truth the passage marks the motion from a primal modality of expression and response to a devitalized, exhausted, and "material" one. The episode literalizes, or more precisely, dramatizes what de Man eventually saw as a mode of human cognition he called "allegory": ... allegory is best compared to a commodity ... The commodity is anorganic because it exists as a mere piece of paper, as an inscription or a notation on a certificate. The opposition is not between nature and consciousness, but between what exists as language and what does not. Allegory is material or 147

The poetics of personification materialistic ... because its dependence on the letter, on the literalism of the letter, cuts it off sharply from symbolic and aesthetic syntheses ... Allegory names the rhetorical process by which the literary text moves from a phenomenal, world-oriented to a grammatical, language-oriented direction.3 (Resistance 68)

The episode of the three sages provides an emblematic narrative of this very shift in cognitive and expressive modality. It is no coincidence that the chains of images associated with the two sages Phantastes and Eumnestes coincide with the evolutionary passage of human cognition and expression so thoroughly described by Benjamin in the Origin of German Tragic Drama. Phantastes' realm, with its disordered order, its vertiginous physical spaces inhabited by flies that "encumber" men's eyes and ears, its visual ekphrases depicting "infinite" yet indefinite shapes and figures, is the realm of what Benjamin denominated the "auratic"; it is the pre-linguistic realm of things coming-into-being, the atemporal realm of an eternal present.4 Structurally opposed to this is Eumnestes' realm, the world of literal ruin and fragment, the world littered (like many a stage described by Benjamin as part of the Baroque Drama) with documents, scrolls, records, codices, and writing instruments. Of all the personification episodes in The Faerie Queene, the Phantastes-Eumnestes sequence is the prime figural metanarrative of the discursive machinery by which Spenser's poem displays one kind of allegory fundamental to its poetic creation: the idea of allegory as the figural representation of the commodification of language. Although the sequence allegorizes the idea of language commodified and "ruined," it also offers a correspondingly oppositional semiology of language and representation. The narrator asserts that Eumnestes enjoys "infinite remembrance," laying things "up in his immortal scrine, / Where they for ever incorrupted dweld" {56). Yet in addition to these "immortal" and incorruptible records, Eumnestes tends to walls crammed with rotting, corruptible documents. The stanza plays on the ambiguity of the incorruptible records' status: are they non-substantial or ideational mental acts, or are they actual objects in the physical space of the narrative world containing Eumnestes? The narrator says Eumnestes lays these records up in his scrine or chest. And after all, the passage, like much of The Faerie Queene, presents the objectification or substantialization of normally conceptual entities. In practical terms, the scrine seems to be a sheerly metaphorical object existing on the structural level of narrative 148

The Faerie Queene discourse, while the rotting scrolls and parchments exist on the level of narrative story. This distinction is only auxiliary to the alternate semiology mentioned above. Nearly blind (metaphorically eyeless) and decaying himself, Eumnestes is a personification being physiologically undone, defaced. He is in the same condition as his physical handiwork. But beyond, anterior to, and apart from, this physical decay is Eumnestes "infinite remembrance" —the real "good memory" that has no existence in the phenomenal world of material things, the world of human bodies or written documents. This formulation reveals Eumnestes to be an embodiment of the non-efficacy and impermanence of embodiment. Furthermore, he functions as a figure or sign of the Platonic conception of the sign itself: for centuries of Hellenic and Christian thinkers, the sign was a duplex form consisting of a deictic material signifier that had to be punctured or bypassed in favor of the more pure, perfect, ideational or "spiritual" signified (Handelman 4-15). And mental signifieds themselves were imperfect signifiers that pointed further to the transcendent Realm of Ideas, a realm figured as unrestricted by space ("infinite") or time ("immortal"). As a figure of the Platonic sign, Eumnestes naturally reveals the most rudimentary semiotic ground of all signs: they are inscriptions of temporality. De Man's description of "allegory" provided above derives in part from his earlier description of it in "The Rhetoric of Temporality": he identified the device as the "trope of anteriority," the trope which exposes the essence of cognitive temporality in a pure semiotic form. That is to say, the extent or limit of semiotic power engendered in the allegorical sign is no more than a "pointing backward" to yet another sign — a temporally anterior one (Blindness 207). The aged and decaying Eumnestes is like one of Benjamin's "ruins" (Origin lyj-jS): both are metaphors for the allegory of temporality. In The Faerie Queene, then, personification characters' physical status can come to signify the very semiotic process that makes personification — and all signification, for that matter — textually possible. This personification of temporality occurs again in a less obvious passage. The procession of personified rivers (see above, chapter 2) involves an allegory of temporality that depends upon the traditional symbolic role of the river as both a concrete and an "intangible" image. That is, the river is a physical thing which, because of its ever-changing nature, its condition of perpetual flux, is not a "thing" in the usual 149

The poetics of personification phenomenological sense. The river is, in fact, the emblem of mutability and, by extension, temporality. The locus classicus for this symbolic line of thinking is, of course, the famous aphorism attributed to Heraclitus: Upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow ... they scatter and ... gather ... come together and flow away ... approach and depart. After citing this aphorism, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield explain it with an equally concise and eloquent statement: According to the Platonic interpretation, accepted and expanded by Aristotle, Theophrastus, and the doxographers, this river-image was cited by Heraclitus to emphasize the absolute continuity of change in every single thing: everything is in perpetual flux like a river. (195) The Book iv procession of personified rivers involves, therefore, a complex metafictional enterprise: how does the poet substantialize and place into a narrative continuum that which is the pre-eminent figure of temporality? The problem is compounded by the fact that narration is already the figural and formal inscription of temporality, as Paul Ricoeur's whole narratological project seeks to demonstrate {Time 3). Spenser's fictional treatment in iv.xi is thus an allegory of narrative temporality; it is the metafigural meditation upon time as a changing linear phenomenon. (It is no coincidence that The Faerie Queene has as a kind of epilogue the two peculiar "Mutabilitie Cantos/ 7 a direct and explicit satire on the value and properties of mutability or, more specifically, temporality.) The river sequence, like the narrative of the three sages, presents an interchangeable array of figurations: personification, temporality, narrative, semiology, language, and writing, are all figures or versions of each other. Semiotics teaches us that the binary oppositions first/last, anterior/ posterior, outside/inside, upper/lower, and surface/substrate are all imagistic versions of each other. Spenser's river sequence and narrative of the sages expresses this proposition, but not according to the proairetic code I promised at the outset of this chapter. The selfreflexive semiological statuses of Eumnestes or the Rivers are given by the text a priori. In The Faerie Queene, this given condition gets narrativized in a direct, visible way, making the personification of personification not just an implicit semiotic value in the poem, but an explicit narrative event. 150

The Faerie Queene Duessa, the central evil female personification in the poem, lexically signifies the very condition of "duplicity" in the etymological sense of the word. That is to say, she is the figure of something two-fold, duplex - the figure of the sign or of the personification figure themselves. The climactic scene of her stripping by Una and the Red Cross Knight narrativizes her self-reflexive tropological nature by engaging in a chain of programmatic images clustered around the structural molds of allegory and personification: So ... that witch they disaraid, And robd of roiall robes, and purple pall, And ornaments that richly were displaid; Ne spared they to strip her naked all. Then, when they had despoyld her tire and call, Such as she was their eies might her behold, That her misshaped parts did them appall: A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill favoured, old, Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told. Her crafty head was altogether bald, And, as in hate of honorable eld, Was overgrowned with scurfe and filthy scald; Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld, And her sowre breath abhominably smeld; Her dried dugs, lyke bladders lacking wind, Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld; Her wrizled skin, as rough as maple rind, So scabby was that would have loathd all womankind. (i.viii.47-48) The poetic presentation of disrobing was a pervasive image, in medieval interpretation, for allegoresis itself (Dronke 32). But even the characteristic words in the description of what lay beneath Duessa's "purple pall" adumbrate the semes of figurement/disfigurement, surface/ substrate, container/content. The revealed Duessa is at the same time "misshaped" in her "parts" (46) and limbs (48), and possessive of a "crafty head" (47) - a primarily metaphorical attribution that has further resonances: recall Chaucer's personification Craft (an ostensible synonym for "Poesis" or "Figure") in The Parliament of Fowls who is described as "disfigured." The head, moreover, is covered with " scurfe and filthy scald " (46) while her skin is incredibly "scabby" (47). Like Prudentius' slain Vices her teeth are gone from a now dysfunctional mouth (a primary feature of

The poetics of personification defacement) that poisons the air with foul breath. And her breasts are "lyke bladders lacking wind"; that is, they resemble objects that signify the idea of temporary, vulnerable, deceptive containment. The image of a bladder or balloon containing nothing but air (an idea favorable to satires on learning and allegorical interpretation — witness Swift's Aeolists in A Tale of a Tub) controls the narrative scenes dealing with the birth and death of Orgoglio ("Pride"). The scene of the giant personification's creation is told in a digressive flashback by the narrator: The greatest Earth his uncouth mother was, And blustring Aeolus his boasted syre; Who with his breath, which through the world doth pas, Her hollow womb did secretly inspyre, And fild her hidden caves with stormie yre, That she conceiv'd; and trebling the dew time In which the wombes of wemen doe expyre, Brought forth this monstrous masse of earthly slyme, Puft up with emptie wynde ... (i.vii.o) The son of Aeolus, or the personification Wind, Orgoglio meets his expected fate at the hands of Prince Arthur. A cut through the leg from Arthur's sword makes the giant crash to the ground, leaving strange remains: But, soone as the breath out of his brest did pas, That huge great body, which the Gyaunt bore, Was vanisht quite; and of that monstrous mas Was nothing left, but like an emptie blader was.

(i.viii.24)

As an example of the container/content seme, the inflated bladder convinces less persuasively that there really are "contents." A balloon is filled with air, an image of nothingness in pre-Modern thought, for the contents are the same as that which is putatively outside the container. We might say that the balloon image parodies conventional semiotic examples of the container/content dichotomy (Augustine's shell/kernel, Chaucer's chaff/fruyt, the clothed body, the mask/face, etc.). Both the Duessa sequence and the death of Orgoglio, however, provide direct, literal narrativizations, gauged according to the narrative tempo called "scene," of the making and unmaking of the personification figure's semiotic constitution. Spenser's text delves into the implicit poetics of this kind of narrativization much earlier than the Duessa and Orgoglio episodes. 152

The Faerie Queene The first characterized abstraction we meet in the poem is Error, a halfserpentine creature that seems to be an animification (she " brays " but does not speak, i.i.17) or a hybrid anthropomorphism rather than a pure personification. Overall, the narrative presentation of Error along with graphically excessive descriptions seems to characterize her as a univocally conceived personification. Again, a climactic and peculiar death scene assigns Error as a self-reflexive exemplum of narrativized prosopopoetic unmaking. Striking at her with "more than manly force" (i.i.24), Red Cross Knight decapitates the creature. Subsequently : Her scattered brood, soone as their Parent deare They saw so rudely falling to the ground, Groning full deadly, all with troublous feare Gathered themselves about her body round, Weening their wonted entrance to have found At her wide mouth; but being there withstood, They flocked all about her bleeding wound, And sucked up their dying mothers bloud, Making her death their life, and eke her hurt their good.

(i.i.25)

Like direct facial destruction, decapitation amounts to a version of figural defacement. It is the dramatized inverse or unmaking of the figure that makes a character like Error poetically possible (Johnson 108—10). But even after decapitation, Error's head exists under a strange erasure. The inky-black little monsters that habitually creep into her mouth when they are startled (15) surround her corpse and expect to find their "wonted entrance." The precise visual scene is ambiguous: are the imps waiting at the mouth of the severed head (that presumably lies on the cave floor), or are they waiting at the location above the prostrate torso where the sheltering head with its cavernous maw used to bel The first proposition finds the imps seeking entrance to a head that is minus a bottom, a foundation, an interior — for the face or head is the symbolic "apex" of the body with all its organs, oral and alimentary (Bataille 82—84). The second proposition finds the imps seeking entrance to a body that is minus a head, a head that is now gone but defined and delimited by the collective action of the imps who gather about the slashed and open neck. The head is a palimpsest. It resembles the absent or invisible heads found in the paintings of Magritte. The narrativized unmaking of Error, therefore, resembles the death of Orgoglio in that both events set out to literalize and stage the 153

The poetics of personification binary semiology of the personification figure but consequently deconstruct the process. The unmade personifications remain illusorily constructed. They are made unreal, no longer (arti)factual, but this unrealness mirrors the condition of all literary personification figures even while they are intact and functional. The prior figural character that gets undone was never "factual" or material in the first place. It is both present and absent, like the unmade personifications. The formulation designates the deconstruction of textual presence. This degree of textual aporia informs the episode of Malbecco's transformation into the personification Jealousy in Book in. After seeing his wife Hellenore sport with a satyr throughout the night, Malbecco flees into the wilderness, where "all his substance was consum'd to nought" (iii.x.57), and he lives a kind of death-in-life. Malbecco ultimately undergoes an ontological transformation: ... through privy griefe and horrour vaine, It woxen so deform'd that he was quight Forgot he was a man, and Gelosy is hight.

(60)

Thomas Maresca points out that the passage reveals an ironic relationship among key figural operations. Malbecco literally loses his form and substance, yet he becomes a personification figure (Epics 45-46). According to the terms laid down in chapter 2, the passage confronts us with one of Spenser's most striking figural aporias: Malbecco the human being is dehumanized (dispersonified, rarefied, perhaps " ideated" — turned into an ideational, insubstantial essence), but via the invention of a nameable prosopon, the actantial personifier for a personified abstraction. Does the conversion of Malbecco entail the stripping away of a human and biographical mask to reveal an abstract essence underneath, or does it entail the man's donning of a new mask, the name of a figural prosoponl (The confusion enacts the dilemma of conversional "directionality" identified by Quintilian in the Institutio Oratoria, 6.1.25.) In addition to pinning down "what gets personified into whom," the passage dismantles the logic of personification and its binary opposite, rarefication or ideation. In a single narrative gesture, a personification character is made by the structural logic through which personification figures are unmade. Malbecco the man is gone, and Jealousy the personification is equally indeterminable in terms of its actantial and ontic status. On the whole, conventional wisdom still views this passage as a moment in which Malbecco's true nature is merely "made evident" 154

The Faerie Queene rather than as a moment in which the text thematizes the poetic making of a figural prosopon: Since [the transformation of the man Malbecco into the personification Jealousy] is logically impossible, Malbecco, and therefore the other characters in this episode too, must be personifications all along. (Kouwenhoven 32) But the Malbecco sequence is an implicit parable of poetic dilemmas which underscores the sense of radical ontic transformation. The sequence also provides a dramatization of phenomenological human diminishment in which the diminished consciousness does not, in any ostensible narratives it could produce, give rise to subordinate or consequent personifications. Instead, the diminished human consciousness becomes a personification itself. The effect is striking because it is narrativized in a single diegetic continuum using the mimetically practical narrative tempo of scene. An analogue to this "personifying" of a human exists in John Skelton's "The Bowge of Court." In this satirical poem, the narrator falls asleep and dreams that he is a personification character named "Drede." The ontic transformation, however, is not mimetically direct because the submergence into a dream state entails, as chapter 5 demonstrates, the structuring of a subordinate level of diegesis — a metadiegesis or hypodiegesis. Furthermore, the conversion, in accordance with a kind of magical realism, of a fictional man into Jealousy while he is conscious differs phenomenologically from another's conversion into Dread while he simultaneously falls asleep, that is, while he naturally departs from fully functional, waking consciousness. Consciousness, of course, stands as the ultimate ground of inquiry for phenomenology. The Faerie Queene takes an interest in origins, transformations, genealogies, and acts of creation. The personification of personification is one of these motivated interests. Following traditional strands of thought in the Renaissance, the poem narrates the philosophical drive behind all kinds of creation, poetic and human or natural and divine. That is, The Faerie Queene stages Aristotelian holomorphism — one particular conceptual framework upon which figural substantialization and personification predicate themselves - as the model for the creation of a complete narrative world that mimes the divinely shaped real universe. Thomas Maresca demonstrates how the opening stanzas in Canto 1 articulate an array of signs which designate the principle of holomorphism or hylozoism (the informing and arrangement of

The poetics of personification matter — morphe or silva — by hylos) and, subsequently, the poetic invention of a fictional world. The Red Cross Knight, his Lady, the dwarf, and the lamb ride in procession on the barren plain. They move, after the narrator provides a programmatic notatio on their characters (inventing them, in situ, as sheerly iconographic entities), into the forest seeking shelter from a rising squall. The episode conveys multiple poetic acts: (1) the invention of three characters via visual notatio; (2) their removal from a geometrically primal or not-yetinvented physical world (signified by the "plaine") and placement into an invented material world (as Maresca notes, Spenser plays with the sylleptical pun of silva-' wood" and silva-' matter "); and finally, (3) the poetic shift of the characters from iconographic stasis into narrative actantiality. This actantiality is signified by the melodramatic plot element of the rising storm, and by the subsequent poetic arrival in the "epic world" which is signified by the epic catalogue of trees {Epics 17—20). So understood, the narrative opening of The Faerie Queene programs the ensuing text as the mimesis of a philosophically conservative but reigning Aristotelian idea. The drift of this chapter, though, has been to suggest a more incisive metapoetic operation in Spenser's text. The narrativized semiologies of personification in The Faerie Queene complement other theoretical "origins" of personification, some commonplace in Renaissance thought, others describable in recent poetic theory. The first theoretical origin of personification can be called the hermeneutic model. This origin, which presumably could be fixed historically, occurs when exegetes who translate a prior narrative text depart from the prior text to invite independent fabulations made up exclusively of the hermeneutically derived material. (In line with the argument from chapter 3, only the third or "moral" level of the four-fold exegetical paradigm gets elaborated in this model.) Sages stop defining Adam as Reason or Eve as Sensuality; they write narratives containing Reason, Sensuality, Death, Sin, and so forth. The ongoing process links up, of course, with the allegory/allegoresis distinction that has come to receive ever finer historical inspections in recent theory (Dawson). The second theoretical origin of personification we described in chapter 2: the so-called narratological or rhetorical model wherein a local rhetorical personification or simple animate metaphor is literalized and placed into a story-level narrative continuum. The description needs one more refinement in light of the claims about Spenserian "narrativization" of personification in this chapter: the materializing 156

The Faerie Queene of a discourse-level animate metaphor in story-level differs from narrativizing the hidden or latent semiotic structure of that animate metaphor. A "narrativized" local personification or animate metaphor does in fact occur in The Parliament of Fowls in the form of the "speaking" gate through which the dreamer enters the garden (127—33, 134—40). Here, the primary diegesis presents an ekphrasislike inscription that functions according to simple local personification. Both Chaucer's gate (a "first personification" narrativized) and Nature in that poem (a "second personification," or a "first personification" literalized) differ from Spenser's narrativized moments of personificational origin and undoing. The third origin of personification resembles the encoded Spenserian effect in that it narrativizes the emergence or generation of individual personification characters in a primary diegesis according to the narrative tempo of scene. We saw this category of origin exemplified in the genesis of Sin in Paradise Lost. The narrativized effect designates the phenomenological diminishment of a human consciousness. This proposition is always ironic, however, for just as the narrativization of such spontaneous phenomenological generation indicates the dissolution of will and consciousness in a human template, it also represents the impulse to recover pristine and primary human response. The narrative invention of a personification character signals the urge to recover or reintroduce the social realm of primary orality — the interactive realm where humans respond face to face. Arcane disciplines like ethics, philosophy, or cosmology contain discursive objects that exist apart from the phenomenal world of sensuous, face-to-face experience. The understanding of personification as originating in the cognitive drive to renew or vitalize intellectual experience marks a phenomenological avenue corollary to the phenomenology of personification as the devitalization of human intellect. Spenser's narrativized metapersonifications comprise a theoretical category of origins wherein self-referential semiologies are deconstructed. In economic terms, the Spenserian model of origin pays out, tenders, or reveals more than the other models of originary description. It lays bare the whole semiotic apparatus of tropology or figuration. The rhetoric employed here is no accident. The metanarrative motivation for such origin in The Faerie Queene reflects the physical stripping away of the Duessa episode and of conventional allegoresis itself. Written in psychoanalytical parlance, Spenser's narrativized

The poetics of personification personification of personification discloses the "allegory of desire" (Fineman 26-28). The central proairetic code in the text inscribes the spectational drive to see all. It expresses the human impulse to contain, cover over, and hide while paradoxically countering that impulse with the desire to empty, open up, reveal, make available to the gaze. This paradox of motivations implies an "ethics of prosopopeia" — an axiology of figuration that limits the boundaries of the trope in socially pragmatic human terms, according to the latest work on personification carried out by J. Hillis Miller in Versions of Pygmalion. In the terms of conservative medieval and Renaissance ethics, the spectative drive equates to the fault of curiositas, the imperfection of will thematized especially in Book 11 of The Faerie Queene when Guyon is tantalized by Mammon's labyrinthine complex of nested, secret chambers filled with gold and cunningly worked treasures (vii.26—36). Contrary to this impeachment of the drive to expose and see all is the correspondingly conservative and conventional ethos that condemns the poetic making of things with insides and outsides. We saw in chapter 2 how figuration had suffered a negative connotation in the minds of certain medieval thinkers. Figure equalled error, imperfection, evil. Clearly the personification "Error," via her narrativized semiotic constitution, is interchangeable with "Figure"; and Duessa signifies directly the evil of structural "duality." Spenser even composed a parable on the ills of personification itself, titled "Prosopopoia: or Mother Hubbard's Tale." Popular critical sources have erroneously labeled the "Prosopopoia" part of the title phrase as the subtitle (The Shepherd's Calendar 159; Drabble 674, 793), whereas the word is clearly the main title of the poem. This reveals that the narrative about the conniving ape and the fox who don disguises as other animals is not just a satire on court life but a poetic meditation on a trope. (Paul de Man suggests a similar tactic for titling Hugo's "Le carillon"-, Resistance 48.) The two deceivers, in short, assume various prosopa in playing their roles, thus making the poem the prosopopeia (an ape and fox given speech) of several prosopopeias (the disguises). Since Spenser's title ambiguously refers to both senses of "prosopopeia," the poetic or rhetorical sense of the word becomes ethically equivalent to the dramaturgical sense of the term. Personification in The Faerie Queene invites many metapoetic meditations upon the trope, ranging from the encoded mutual figurations among fundamental concepts like figuration, embodiment, the sign, temporality, and allegory, to the ethics of prosopopeia 158

The Faerie Queene couched in equally paradoxical and experimental terms. Above all, the encoded narrativization of personificational semiologies with its ancillary theoretical "models of origin" require further taxonomical inquiry into the fundamental forms (like the first and second personifications) the trope can assume in literary texts.

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I According to chapter 6, Spenser's Error in The Faerie Queene signals " the deconstruction of textual presence." That is, the peculiar narrative scene of the figural character's unmaking posits that even "unmade," she still exists as a palimpsest, as a present absence or absent presence. This paradoxical state of affairs tacitly designates the condition of all personification characters. The Faerie Queene presents a reminiscent absent-but-present personification at the end of the poem. Arriving at the rear of the procession of hours, months, and seasons in the "Mutabilitie Cantos," Death appears well outside of his traditional iconographic agency (see Macey 45-47), seeming to defy description: And after all came Life, and lastly Death; Death with most grim and griesly visage seene, Yet is he nought but parting of the breath; Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene, Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene ...

(vii.46)

The rhetorical question about the parting of breath ambiguously marks Death not just as his real signified ("death" - the moment of human expiration) but also as the authentic phenomenal character of his status as a textual signifier: the illusory character "Death" is no more than a jet of air laryngeally formed. (Shakespeare plays with an identical analysis of Honor in 1 Henry 4 when Falstaff declares that the formidable personification is no more than "a word" or "air"; v.i.133.)1 More intriguing, though, is the personification's virtual invisibility and intangibility, his phenomenal status as an absent presence or present absence. Milton's Death in Paradise Lost also (un)exists according to this kind of descriptive obscurity: The other shape, If shape it might be call'd that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, 160

Conclusion Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd, For each seem'd either; black it stood as Night, Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell, And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem'd his head The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on. (11.666—73) Structurally, Error and the two Deaths represent a set of coded personificational variants that includes, as its preliminary subsets, the "first personification" and the "second personification" explained in chapter 2. The total set of coded variants includes, among other variants, a modified (meta)personification in which the text records a narrativization of the making or unmaking (for example, the destruction of Prudentius' Vices) of a prosopopeia character's rhetorical structure (the personifier/personified dichotomy). Spenser.'s Error involves this narrative move and the subsequent narrativization of characterological absent presence/present absense. The two Deaths of Milton and Spenser, however, indicate a narrativization only of the absense-presence paradox. Each particular example here is underwritten by a distinct poetic code, a code controlling a respective subset in the whole set of personificational varieties. A reordered taxonomy along with an illustrational calculus of varieties will help explain the codes in schematic terms: W e can designate as P x the "first personification," that is, the variety that is local rhetorical ornament. Pl = (p r /p d ) (D), where " D " is the domain of discourse. O n a parallel line with David Dawson's distinction of basic personification vs. narrative allegory (6), John P. Hermann calls this effect a "microallegory" (37). (Example: "Aprill with his shoures," CT Gen. Prologue, I.i.) In the "second personification" a P x is defiguralized or literalized; what existed solely on the level of discourse now exists on the level of story. This modification can be schematized as P 2 = (p r /p d ) (S), where " S , " or narrative "story level," is the domain in which the homology exists, gets distributed. As in the first calculus, p r = the "personifier," p d = the "personified." (Examples include all actantial characters like Danger in The Romance of the Rose or Bunyan's Despair in The Pilgrims Progress.) The trope "anthropomorphism" may be a categorical hybrid of or bridge between P x and P 2 . Both P x and P 2 , however, differ only in terms of narratological actantiality: their difference is governed by the putative separation of discourse from story as well as by the syntagmatic modulations of narrative tempo (see above, chapter 2). Essentially, the two personi161

The poetics of personification fications' signifieds (or personifieds) can be the same: abstract ideas, institutions, human mental faculties, inanimate objects, etc. The poetic potential thus exists for signifying the very semiotic structure of personification itself as a personified. When this is accomplished sheerly on the level of discourse, a variety evolves that we can think of as a "third personification," or P3. These are not fully materialized or literalized instances of the elementary structure p r /p d . Rather, p r and p d are not fused into a homological pair, but are heterological components that get distributed in the domain of discourse as elements. The heterology signifies the idea of the semiotic power whereby the homology is made: (pr + pd) (D). A P 3 can entail an elaborate micronarrative comprising ornamental metaphors and similes of encasement or eruption, as in the scene from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde where Troilus is described by the narrator as metaphorically similar to wood encased in bark and as a tree losing its cover of leaves (iv.225-31). More commonly, however, it involves the use of semiotically programmatic words like "embody," "enclose," "uncover," or "deface" in the verbal context of a Pv The programmatic word works like a sylleptical pun to foreground the imagery of insides/outsides, faces/masks, minds/faces, etc. (Examples: Criseyde's promise to Troilus that Fortune will not "deface" her fidelity, Troilus and Criseyde iv.1682; Duessa's flattery that Night "can the children of fayre light deface," The Faerie Queene, i.v.24; Prince Arthur's similar claim that Night "doest all thinges deface," FQ m.iv.56.) The full-scale narrativization in the primary diegesis of the elementary p r / p d structure instantiates a P4, the "fourth personification." More precisely, the effect can be schematized as the transferring onto the level of narrative story a discourse-level P3, that is: (pr + pd) (S). For J. Hillis Miller, the narrativization of personification's elementary semiotic structure assumes literary vitality in the topical scenes of magical human making or unmaking. The tale of Ovid's Pygmalion and Galatea visualizes the magical prosopopoetic process directly; it is a dramatic parable for all poetic personification (Pygmalion 6). Conversely, other Ovidian metamorphic tales, like the detailed, reificational conversion of Myrrha into a tree or of the Propoetides into stone statues directly dramatize prosopopoetic unmaking (Pygmalion 5—11). The Ovidian metamorphoses do not always amount to a P4 in which programmatic imagery of personification's semiotic structure gets narratorially revealed, as in Duessa's 162

Conclusion

stripping, Orgoglio's deflation, or the violent defacements of Prudentius' Vices. Rather, the Ovidian conversions link up with two other subordinate varieties of metapersonification detailed at the opening of this chapter. We therefore have: (1) Sin's emergence in Paradise Lost and Galatea's animation both designating the narratorial act of prosopopoesis narrativized, minus, however, programmatic imagery of personification's semiotic structure (p r /p d ); (2) Spenser's Death and Milton's Death which designate the narrativization of characterological presence—absence, minus any moment of conversion;2 (3) the Error event, in which conversional act, residual presenceabsense, and imagery of the p r / p d structure, written as p r + p d , exist in full representation. Moving to another combination of metapersonificational representations, we have Ovid's tale of Myrrha: nam crura loquentis terra supervenit, ruptosque obliqua per ungues porrigitur radix, longi firmamina trunci, ossaque robur agunt, mediaque manente medulla sanguis it in sucos, in magnos bracchia ramos, in parvos digiti, duratur cortice pellis. iamque gravem crescens uterum perstrinxerat arbor pectoraque obuerat collumque operire parabat: non tulit ilia moram venientique obvia ligno subsedit mersitque suos in cortice vultus. (x.480-07)

(For even as she spoke the earth closed over her legs; roots burst forth from her toes and stretched out on either side the supports of the high trunk; her bones gained strength, and, while the central pith remained the same, her blood changed to sap, her arms to long branches, her fingers to twigs, her skin to hard bark. And now the growing tree had closely bound her heavy womb, had buried her breast and was just covering her neck; but she could not endure the delay and, meeting the rising wood, she sank down and plunged her face in the bark.) As Myrrha is reified or dispersonified, the narrator characterizes the actual event with images of physical encasement. Myrrha's limbs do not just change into branches and shoots; the earth covers her feet, and the bark of the tree grows around her torso, neck, and face. The sequence of reification3 is governed by the same metapoetic code that underwrites the destruction of Orgoglio, even though Orgoglio exists as a genuine personification character before his unmaking, and Myrrha is a woman before her magical undoing. This variation of metapersonification (or metareification) involves narrativization of the creative or destructive act and materialized imagery of the the p r / p d structure, minus the paradoxical presence/absence residue. 163

The poetics of personification

This elaboration of the taxonomy presented in chapter 2 demonstrates above all that personification is governed by a series of codes founded upon a common set of logical propositions. The taxonomy of this concluding chapter does not claim utterly to exhaust personification's potential representation in an extended series of coded calculi (above all, I stress that the calculi primarily serve an illustrative purpose).4 But another variant of metapersonification concerns the phenomenological status of the whole literary text that is consequently rendered self reflexive by the interdependent operations of the codes heretofore described. The intensely self-reflexive character of the literary texts examined in this book implies a further dimension in personification and allegory theory. When we speak of a narrative text that is "self-reflexive/' "self-referential/' or "self-conscious," we employ metaphors that figurally imbue the text with its own sentience. Narratives that thematize their own poetic creation and form are seen to "turn back" on themselves; they "reflect" upon their own ontological natures.5 This metaphorical characteristic is the simulacrum of human consciousness. The arguments proposed in chapters 4 and 5 gain greater weight in light of this association: we have seen that medieval personification allegory often opposes the psychic condition of the putative narratorial persona to the invention of artificial psychic entities — personification characters. The elaborately self-reflexive personification text,- which exists already as a field of poetic unreadability, becomes itself a specular image of the narratorial consciousness. Both the text and the narrator are sentient entities that reflect upon their own being. In short, this metaphorical "sentience" makes the text itself into a personification figure. The effect thus presents a metonymy of all texts during the phenomenological act of reading. According to Georges Poulet, a work of literature becomes at the expense of the reader whose own life it suspends a sort of human being ... it is a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in [the reader] as the subject of its own objects. (62) The claim confirms that the creative or compositional act of personified characterization, the phenomenological diminishment of the narratorial or actantial mental template, and the inclusive phenomenology of reading (which " suspends the life " of the reader as it suspends, by extension, the life of the poet or figurator), are three reflexive and corollary theorems in the poetics of personification. 164

Conclusion

The metaphorical idea of a "personified text/' however, often provokes derision from contemporary critics who oppose the rhetoric employed in deconstruction or New Historicism — the latter being particularly prone to the personifying of literary texts (R. Levin 498). The idea of the personified text, of course, predates contemporary literary theory. Swift presents actual books (solid volumes of paper and leather) conducting combat on library shelves in The Battle of the Books. A Tale of a Tub concludes with the image of the world/human body/book that is being "written" by the narrator (Swift 89, 144). Overall, the narrative text that puts forward the formal problematics of character invention while it proclaims itself to be a sentient entity, a specular image of the author-narrator, aspires to a kind of mystical activity. The self-personifying personification narrative involves, as I have tried to show, so many complex registers of textual operation that it resists ready paraphrase or schematization. The aim of this book, as its full title promises, has been to prove that literary personification is a code-specific langue that cannot impel, at the point of specific texual instantiation, the narrative of its own making without the narrative of its own unmaking. Barbara Johnson claims this correlation not only for personification but for the whole world of figures (106—10, 114—15), a world of competing and equally placed knowledges and uncertainties. The four preceding chapters indicated how personification can work less to clarify meaning and reduce uncertainty than to complicate meaning and raise uncertainty. Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland, and Spenser present prosopopeia and its related tropes by testing their figural limits. Following Lavinia Griffiths, I showed that key narrative moments in Langland's text oscillate between the mimetic creation of actual personified entities (further characterized by nominational complications) and sheerly rhetorical, local instances of personification. With The Faerie Queene, I showed how the text narrates the structural making and unmaking of personification characters while deconstructing the very idea of textual presence. The epistemological "wavering" or oscillation concomitant upon such aporia promotes the kind of unreadability which de Man sees as the phenomenal basis of all " allegory." The selfreflexive nature alone of such personification texts — texts which constantly foreground the complexities of their own figural structures and their own poetic invention — consigns them to the realm of genuine allegory. This is because the text that proclaims its own aporetical structure indeed "says other" than its sheer narrative 165

The poetics of personification content. It tacitly bespeaks the tension between expectedly ordinary, simple personification action with its often reductive dramatical power, and the literary potential of a trope which, when pushed to its formal and semiotic limits, has the power to call into question all mimetic re-creation. It still remains for us to make further generalizations about the more culturally inclusive symbolic status of the trope personification. As the foregoing discussion indicates, personification can be understood as a key trope, a "metafigure" in the invention of figural discourse. In more fundamental ways, it can be seen as the cultural sign or figure of several large-scale features of human language and discourse. First, personification needs closer re-evaluation in relation to narrative. As we have seen from Ricoeur's general definition, narrative is the discursive reh'guration of temporality, the formal inscription of human time {Time 3.3). Narration is a discursive activity whereby any number of actants are arranged in a temporal continuum. Thus, the world of narration: characters, things, objects, places, events, actions. Opposed to this discursive activity, at least since the declarations of Plato and until the writings of Derrida and de Man, are all those forms of human discourse that are not " poetry." Until de Man demonstrated that philosophy, for example, is not an " epistemologically privileged " discursive form - that, in fact, philosophical texts can be read as "novels" - the fabric and substance of philosophical discourse were abstract and atemporal. That is, philosophy, logic, ethics, theology, and for that matter, physics and mathematics, were all conceived and treated as "purer" than, and superior to, drama, lyric poetry, the prose romance, or the fable.6 But via personification, especially of the didactic variety, the abstractions of philosophy or ethics become the actants of a narrative continuum: love, honor, the state, the earth, and so forth, become characters named Love, Honor, the State, and Earth. Abstract intellectual quantities have, naturally, no form, substance, or temporal dimensions. They are ontologically and phenomenologically alien to living persons and substantial objects. Personification, therefore, is not only the formal trope by which one material entity can be "translated" into another (that is, sheer "personation"), it is the trope whereby a whole domain of ontologically alien, separate, and privileged quantities can be translated into familiar, present, and timebound ones. Personification, or more accurately substantialization, is constitutive of all narration. It is " the fundamental trope of narrative " (Hillis Miller, "Narrative," 79). This line of argument of course 166

Conclusion concedes to the deconstructive jurisdiction in personification theory: prosopopeia gets expanded to characterize all human cognition. It is therefore important to keep in mind, as chapter 2 above indicates, the structural subordination of personification to substantialization. Since the greater part of this book has tried to forge a compromise between the deconstructive purview of " universal prosopopeia" while dealing with the literary problems of personified entities that appear as thinking and speaking actants, the figural translation of the non-substantial into the substantial bears crucial semiotic value for the larger concept (larger than, say, narration) of figuration. For more than two thousand years, "trope" and "figure" have been defined as the deviation of a word or phrase from their "proper" usage or conceptual basis. Gerard Genette was perhaps the first to provide a purely structural definition of the term "figure." For Genette, between the letter and the meaning, between what the poet has written and what he thought, there is a gap, a space, and like all space, it possesses a form. This form is called afigure,and there will be as many figures as one can find forms in the space that is created on each occasion between the line of the signifier ... and that of the signified ... (Figures 47) Paul Ricoeur has shown how even the old notion of figure or trope (tropos, "a turning") as a "deviation" is a spatial figure itself (Rule 53). This spatial form is a tri-dimensional structure of imaginary contours which in turn suggests a latent image of material substantiality. Substantialization, therefore, is the self-reflexive sign of the cognitive process whereby substance and contour is given to that which has no physical substance.7 It is the figure of figuration. Even the putative conceptual subset of substantialization, personification or prosopopeia, conveyed this essential semiotic charge especially in the guise of certain Latin translations for the concept. Chapter 1 above covered the terms conformatio, deformatio, and effiguratio. These terms were the only attempts in classical rhetoric to translate prosopopoeia. The substantive roots of these words are figura and forma — the two all-purpose Latin substantives, as Erich Auerbach has pointed out, used by Roman rhetoricians and scriptural commentators to render a host of Greek terms ("Figura" 14—15). The early translations hint at a self-referential semiotic value not articulated until the work of Genette. In the foregoing arguments, personification and substantialization operate as key tropes or metafigures of certain "large-scale" features of human discourse in a purely synchronic sense. Yet current 167

The poetics of personification poststructural analyses of the poetics of figuration carefully account for the evolution of figures through time. Derrida's now classic discussion of metaphor appears in "White Mythology," the deconstructive analysis of the conceptual evolution of metaphorical images through a culture's history.8 For Derrida, the metaphor is the expression of an ever-present impulse in human discourse to "vitalize " itself, as well as the natural decay or erosion to which figural utterances are prey when they are used again and again. The natural process of "metaphorization" is the historical sequence the metaphor undergoes: first, it is born; next, it gains currency as a vital figural utterance; finally, it is assimilated into everyday language. Derrida explains this process by using the French term usure — that is, the exhausting of the metaphor's original potency. All figural language undergoes usure, but the very initial existence of such language entails the engagement of the cognitive process Derrida labels relever. Related to Hegel's term aufheben, relever is the impulse of language to revitalize itself, to "uplift" itself to a pristine significational condition. Derrida's discussion, in turn, accesses its own privileged figural chain of terms: relever and aufheben are figural terms of animation - the conceptual foundation of a trope such as personification. If, as Jane Hedley maintains, "prosopopeia is the trope of energeia" (56), the key feature of metaphorics is a once again "latent" image of animization, of personification. Personification can therefore also be conceived of as the figure of relever, as the trope of the motivating engine that powers Derrida's notion of "metaphorics." The concept of usure, however, echoes an established medieval conception of personification addressed in chapter 5. The Pardoner s Tale thematizes the deadening effects of literalized figuration. In the Tale, personification is clearly seen as a cognitive "pathology" that is in perfect correspondence with the imagery of death, decay, exhaustion, fragmentation, ruin, and social discord that organizes the text. Indeed, literalized metaphors in a culture's language represent the final stage or atrophy of diachronic metaphorization, making them appear to be direct expressions of linguistic usure. The fact that personification can simultaneously designate the oppositional pair usure/relever further establishes its aporetical status as an emblem of tropological marginality.

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Conclusion

II The preceding argument, like those treating how personification signifies narrative and figuration, proclaims the trope's peculiar primacy in rhetoric and poetics. Personification, as de Man declares in "Hypogram and Inscription" (see above, chapter 1), indeed enjoys the rank of privileged trope in all poetic and literary discourse. My discussion of the trope in conjunction with Derrida's conceptual framework, however, begins to show how far a purely formal poetics falls short as a conclusive analytical tool in the study of tropes. As I suggested, Derrida's analysis of metaphorization accommodates a diachronic or historical model of the inception and evolution of verbal figures. Near the conclusion of the Introduction to this study I acknowledged the acute need for a historical model of personification fabulation through the successive periods of Western literature. What would such a model look like? To begin with, it would have to account for the origins, during specific periods and cultural moments, of the major generic and topical forms associated with personification fabulation. In chapter 3, I cursorily suggested the plausible connections between the decline of Roman military, social, and economic hegemony during the third through fifth centuries A.D. and the popularization in the realm of didactic literature of the bellum intestinum topos. Land acquisition through localized military venture is the business of empire; it seems inevitable that the human psyche would itself be h'gurally constructed according to this reigning ideological rule. Moreover, it is perhaps possible to show how the mind-as-landscape topos, or paysage moralise, derives historically from the bellum intestinum of early Christian didactic literature, rather than from Renaissance conceptions of internal mental activity. (An example of the latter appears in Bacon's Advancement of Learning xiii; Fletcher, Allegory, 37.) Documents such as religious poems of the kind Prudentius wrote, military memoirs (Julius Caesar's Commentaries are an early example of the popular genre), civic records on war and finance, and private letters would all provide illumination into the connection between personification or the moralized landscape as rising literary forms during the early Christian era and the Roman conception of commerce, international relations, and even social and religious duty conceived as "battle." A historical focus on changing ideologies of economy and

169

The poetics of personification government would also illuminate the ascendancy of personification as a primarily public form of expression at the close of the Middle Ages. By the reign of Elizabeth I, personification pageants are directly connected to the public image of the monarch in England. John Nichols, in his highly regarded eighteenth-century treatise on Tudor pageants and processions, described how Elizabeth's coronation ceremony in 1558 culminated in the Queen's receiving a Bible from Truth after meeting with Time (Mehl 9). Such public pomp reveals the respect Elizabethan culture had for personification as a serious expressive form. The juridical reports of the Elizabethan lawyer Edmund Plowden crystalized the idea that the monarch personifies the realm (Kantorowicz 9). Yet, around the time of the Restoration, personification begins to suffer as a serious poetic form. Subsequently, the eighteenth century is known more for the wooden or mechanical personification characters of Graveyard Poetry (see Spacks or Chapin) than for, say, Pope's narrative of rhetorical figures personified in The Dunciad (1.55—74). The personificational mode, with the exception of parodic and academic exercises by writers such as Poe in "King Pest" or Hawthorne in "The Celestial Railroad," fades entirely in nineteenthcentury English or American literature. Could the initial displacement of personification in the seventeenth century be connected to the radical shift in the English conception of government and politics? After all, Charles I had been killed following a mandate from non-royal collective will - a first for English history; Charles II, who as a prince climbed the mythical "royal oak" to escape his pursuers, helped diminish the notion of the monarch as the heroic heart, pillar, and anchor of English civilization. By the reign of William and Mary, the English monarch enjoys less and less the privilege of absolute power. It is plausible that the major expressive forms of monarchical public occasion and governmental activity faded with the dissolution of the ideological value of the monarch in England.9 Clearly the notion of the monarch as an imbued or sublime personage fades along with the undoing of pre-modern totalitarian vitality. Ernst Kantorowicz's excellent description of the old belief in the medieval or Renaissance English king who possessed "two bodies" — one "beyond his ordinary body, a sublime, ethereal, mystical body personifying the state " (Zizek 145; italics mine) — discloses a hidden and preternatural logic that energized and hyper-elevated both personification (in conjunction with the Body Politic figure) and kingship. This energizational faculty begins and ends, though, with the institution of totalitarian ideology 170

Conclusion

(Zizek 145-49). The Body Politic figure, in fact, undergoes radical transformation via the acts of Parliament in 1642: "the King body politic was retained in and by Parliament whereas the king body natural was, so to say, frozen out" (Kantorowicz 21). The "head" of the Body Politic therefore changes from being a finite persona (Charles) to a collective aggregate; the latter is itself already the down-scaled figure of the whole, collective Commonwealth. Whether or not a causal relationship exists between this shift in English political symbolism (or political "theology," as Kantorowicz has it) and the historical devitalization of personification remains to be seen, and only after a great deal of historical research has been accomplished. This historical devitalization of the trope, however, might be attributed to another seventeenth-century shift describable not in historical-materialist terms but according to the simpler tactics of lexicography. The English word "personification" did not exist prior to the late seventeenth century. It derives from the French verb personnifier which Boileau coined in his Eleventh Reflection on Longinus (Haworth 43). Boileau used the neologism to exonerate Racine from the charge that the playwright was unappropriately lurid in Theramene's recapitulation of Hyppolyte's death scene at the close of Phedre (v.vi). Boileau's defense was built on the fact that Racine was conveying a moment of sublime sentiment, and, more importantly, that the playwright did not " speak the words himself," using instead Theramene as a verbal mask or representative (Haworth 44). Boileau's inkhorn term conveyed no more than the earliest Hellenic conception of the trope as a means for any dramatic presentation of a speech. The new term proved so potent, apparently, that little more than a century later, another French thinker - Pierre Fontanier - saw the need taxonomically to separate la personnification from la prosopopee. Boileau's successful neolatin coinage, however, carried a new conceptual charge alien to the conservative connotations of the word "prosopopeia." According to Foucault and a number of other contemporary thinkers, the concept of the "person" is an invention of the late seventeenth century (Sexuality 17—47; Rorty 17—69; Zimbardo 1—14; Elliott 3—32; Ginsberg ch. 1). A human person was, for thinkers as varied as Montaigne, Descartes, John Locke, or Theophilus Gale, a rational being constituted by an entirely interior psychology, by a discrete, unique, and private consciousness that functioned as its own mechanism of self-definition and regulation. Boileau's engagement of the French word personne, or rather, of the Latin word persona, latched 171

The poetics of personification onto a concurrently evolving sense of what a human being was thought to be. As this book has shown, the figurally invented personages that result from personification are anything but realistic or modern " characters." The latter are fictive and simulational human beings, who, according to Rose Zimbardo, are native to literature only after the late seventeenth century and who possess an "internal arena" of soul and psyche (2). Indeed, Zimbardo holds that no fictional character, prior to the time of the English Restoration, was conceived of as an accurate simulacrum of psychological interiority. Such characters were mere ideational effigies. The seventeenth-century conceptual shift concerning personality and mind punctured old expectations of what literary character could be. The term "personification, " by dint of its new connotational force, was therefore at odds with the older conception of "prosopopeia." Although both words etymologically mean "to make a face or mask," "prosopopeia" retained that sense of sheer literary game or artifice. "Personification," on the other hand, could have promoted a deep conceptual confusion about its status and value. Literature and drama became more and more taken up with the mimesis of actual human personality — a conceptual property promised but not delivered by the term "personification." This knot of lexical and conceptual confusion may be concomitant upon the trope's imminent historical decay as a serious and powerful means of poetic invention. And what of the twentieth century? In their poetry and fiction, mainstream American and British writers eschew personification entirely. It is interesting, however, that variations of personification do exist today, but generally in the hands of writers who represent the cultural, political, and social margins of American or British society. Ntozake Shange's play For colored girls who have considered suicide when

the rainbow is enuf consists of seven personified "colors," all women, who provide speeches on their devastated lives in the African ghettos of big American cities. Alexis Deveaux's Spirits in the Street is punctuated by images of African Americans figured as disconnected anatomical parts, as well as images of personified buildings and instances of genuine paysage moralise. Her poem "There are no mad rooms on 114 street" begins by describing Harlem at 110th Street and 8th Avenue as a moralized landscape: "Here, at the corner of HAVING & NOT traffic turns left at the corner" (27). It is intriguing that personification and its coordinate tropes, at one time so securely connected to the absolute center of society (the English monarch), are 172

Conclusion

now a favorite poetic mode of voices on the absolute periphery, the margins of modern Western society. That African women authors, tenants of the economic and social bottom of the hierarchy we call American culture, would embrace an expressive form that is now entirely abandoned by the literary voices of cultural ascendancy perhaps in a move of tropological appropriation and self-empowerment — makes for an interesting hypothesis. The tactic, whether executed consciously or unconsciously, is revolutionary and potently counter-cultural. An account of the valuation of personification through several centuries of Anglophone culture would be an indispensable historical apparatus for a more thorough understanding of the trope. The rediscovery of personification in modern women's literature also raises the crucial problem of the trope's relation to questions of gender and representation. Another necessary historical project — one supplementary to the more economically and politically focused, historical-materialist strategy suggested above - would account for the universal imaging of personification figures in early Christian literature as women. The fact that all Roman personifications are women was once noticed by Joseph Addison, who proposed, in a paper on Roman medallions, what is still the accepted explanation of the problem: in Latin, abstract nouns take the feminine gender (Chapin 52). Personified abstractions, therefore, must necessarily be female. The argument, of course, begs the philological question regarding the relationship between gender and grammar. But Addison's explanation diverts our attention from a substantial stock of theoretical discussion, present in extant rhetorical treatises from antiquity, that associates the programmatic imagery of the female body with the general notion of figuration. Tzvetan Todorov discusses how the notions of rhetoric as "seductive" ornamentation and figuration as "cosmetic" feminine concealment were primary metaphorical tactics for Cicero, the Rhetorica ad Herennium author, and Quintilian (Theories 74-75). In the classical rhetorical tradition, the female body itself, as well as female social and cosmetic practices, are the figural images of figuration. Concealment, clothing, structures of insides/outsides or forms/ contents are the foundational semiotic registers of personification, as we saw in chapter 2. It is no coincidence, then, that the female body becomes a corollary image to the cognitive act of personification; an unavoidable literalization of this corollary relationship dictates that the phenomenal constitution of the personification figure be a human 173

The poetics of personification female. This representational structure corresponds to a similar proposition regarding personification's cousin — allegory. As Carolyn Dinshaw argues, "allegorical interpretation is ... undressing the text -unveiling the truth, revealing a body figuratively represented as female" (21). An assessment of the social shifts that occur after the decline of Roman hegemony would be essential to an account of underlying gender ideology. Again, Addison attributed the appearance of male personification figures to the decay of grammatical inflection in the European vernacular tongues. But this grammatical explanation fails to account for the eventual outnumbering of female personification figures by male ones in Western personification fabulation. The most striking example is The Pilgrim's Progress, in which nearly all of the personification figures met by Christian are men - most of them bearing the title "Mr." before their names. Personification, understood according to such a feminist program of critical analysis, might perhaps turn out to be at the figural heart of cultural issues regarding representations of sexuality and gender. Each of the foregoing proposals for historical projects must take us far beyond the scope of the present poetics of personification, while richly supplementing it. Yet, the feminist project promises the same kind of "universal key" (one is reminded of Causabon's proposed panmythography in Middlemarch) to discourse and ideas of representation that major points of my formal poetics promise: personification is an imbued, privileged macrofigure, a meta- or super-trope. It can be construed as the figure of narration, of allegory, of figuration, of poetic discourse in general. It works as the figural core of cultural images of gender and of political ideology. And as we saw in the Nazi use of the Body-Politic figure or in Spenser's allegory of desire, it implies a selfimposed ethics. We would be thus prudent to recognize a favorite move in current literary theory: many theoretical discussions conclude by adopting a particular trope as the key to all tropes, as the figure of all figural invention. De Man, as we have already seen, has variously proclaimed allegory, prosopopeia, and irony to be the primary tropes of literary discourse. J. Hillis Miller similarly idolizes personification. Roman Jakobson has promoted metaphor and metonymy as the proto-tropes out of which all other tropes arise. Foucault, as Hayden White observes, has proclaimed catachresis as the fundamental and constituent trope of all human language ("Foucault" 94). Regarding

174

Conclusion

personification, this study (and the future ones it suggests) closes by following this trend. A thoroughgoing poststructuralist explanation must therefore account for the critical impulse to discover a "superior," more fundamental, more powerful key to discourse, a key that is both "originary" and "apocalyptic," to use Derrida's conceptual terms. The drive to see a universal prosopopeia at the core of cognition — the deconstructive stance on personification in general — thus needs countering by the deconstructive suspicion of foundations, origins, and Big Endings. (Such internally at-odds polemical posturing is, after all, the sine qua non feature of deconstructive thought.) Metatropes and macrofigures are the rhetorical images of that never-accessible but longed-for secret origin. I am not inclined to defuse the conclusion of this study by wholeheartedly adopting this Derridean position on personification as a signature of the expressive and phenomenological "secret origin" latent in all acts of human creation and interchange. But I am compelled to appreciate personification as one of several tropes that are uniquely and deceptively powerful in the creation of literature. Personification is a prime poetic mark of theoretical selfawareness and maturity, a signal not of the failure of the literary imagination, but of its success and fulfillment.

175

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Introduction 1 Examples from middle twentieth-century criticism include Lewis, Allegory, 45 ff.; Curtius 44, 120-21; and Auerbach, Scenes, 79-98. The corresponding move in contemporaneous art history included Wittkower and Panofsky. For a current lack of distinction between allegory and personification in the theory of art, see Camille. 2 See Richards 191-92; Frye, Anatomy, 90-91; Fletcher, Allegory, 33; and Maresca, "Saying," 257; Steadman 72. 3 Haworth 51 represents the most recent and vehement assault on the allegory-personification confusion. D. W. Robertson, Essays 42, has been less firm about the confusion, but he still sees the need to distinguish the "symbolism" of allegory and personified abstractions. See also Maresca, "Saying," Murrin, Allen, Steadman, and Rollinson. 4 As Frye 90 suggests, the devaluation of personification has involved a long process of patterned aesthetic reception in response to centuries of pervasive and compact, simple, visual artifacts: coins, medallions, public statuary, funerary ornament, political pamphlets and cartoons, and modern commercial advertizing. In addition, political propaganda and juvenilia have accounted for much pervasive personification in the guises of simple morality plays and state pageants, terse iconographic manuals (see Ripa) and emblem books (see Freeman, and Diehl), dictionaries, sermons and homilies, children's fables, and pithy moralized dialogues (see Tuve, Allegorical, 5—25). 5 Allegory itself is still a tough concept to pin down in literary theory. Overall, this study follows de Man's discussions of allegory as the textual advertizement of figural aporia, of a text's failure to order itself, to offer epistemological certainty and closure. For this conception of allegory as the inscription of "unreadability," see de Man, Allegories, 200—01, 205, 209; Martin 177—78; Norris 95. See also Quilligan, Language, esp. chapter 1, for a description of allegory as the cumulative effect of textual ambiguity and suspension of closure brought about by programmatically operational puns and pun-like effects (i.e., the figures syllepsis and paranomasia). 6 The problem of animism represents a larger subject bordering on 176

Notes to pages 11-20

theology and comparative religion, a problem that has in fact taken much ground in Romantic critical theory. In turn, this study also avoids direct address of the role personification plays in Wordsworth's writing and thinking. See Knapp's study on this matter.

I A history of personification theory 1 The Horatian notion of formal "propriety" would exclude any kind of figural maneuver that is not pleasing or does not strike a note of aesthetic concordance. Horace's famous opening parable in the AYS Poetica on the painter's monster involves the trope catachresis; yet such a formal effect is aesthetically inappropriate. See the beginning of Horace's Art of Poetry in Adams 68. 2 See also Curtius 44. Murphy's task at this point in his study is the sorting out of medieval concepts like "solecism," "metaplasm," and "figure." Whereas a solecism is an outright grammatical error, metaplasm and figure connote the idea of a "necessary" error, an act of poetic license. John Balbus' position in the Catholicon, however, adamantly places all such error under the heading of the "vices." (Attention to this thinking is paid below in my analysis of Spenser's Error.) 3 Whereas the "animating feature" of poetic invention is minimized in The Rhetoric, commentators on Aristotle, particularly Averroes, play up the theoretical importance of prosopopeia in the Greek master's text. See Averroes' discussion of prosopopeia and Aristotle in Preminger, Hardison, Kerrane 368—69. 4 Much of Haworth's argument rests on the idea that prosopopeia had nothing to do with the idea of abstract concepts given corporeal reality. Rather, it was a means of dramatic re-presentation. The argument, as I show below, can be supported only by a selective reading of the definitions of the term supplied by Demetrius, the Rhetorica ad Herennium author, and Quintilian. 5 The conformatio definition is in fact longer than the usually pithy definitions the author supplies for most of the other figures. Here is a characteristic entry for a related figure: "Sermocinatio est cum alicui personae sermo adtribuitur et is exponitur cum ratione dignitatis" ("Dialogue consists in assigning to some person language which as set forth conforms with his character"; 1v.lii.65). 6 Halm 62: "Prosopopoiia est figura sententiae, qua oratio ad alterius personae orationem imitandum retorquetur. Latine dicitur deformatio vel effiguratio." 7 For Rutilius, see Halm 15: "Prosopopoiia. Hoc fit, cum personas in rebus constituimus, quae sine personis sunt, aut eorum hominum, qui fuerunt, tamquam vivorum et praesentium actionem sermonemve deformamus." See also Murphy 32—42 for a very useful summary of the contributions

177

Notes to pages 21-30

8

9

10

11

12

13

made by Donatus, in his Barbarismus, to the compendium tradition of tropes. Not all thinkers agreed with this kind of logical subordination regarding prosopopeia. See Miller, Prosser, Benson 155, for Alberic of Monte Cassino's brief discussion of the trope in his Flores Rhetorici. The eleventhcentury Italian teacher defines the trope rather generally by collapsing Bede's grid: "[Prosopopeia] is a method of applying foreign characteristics to an object; that is, it ascribes to things qualities which nature does not bestow." After providing several examples of simple prosopopeia (images of animization, actually), Alberic writes, "There are some who maintain that [prosopopeia] is the same thing as metaphor; in reality, though, the two seem much alike, yet it is clear that they are different: the metaphor can be used in many ways, but this is extremely limited, in that it is an expression attributing senses to things which lack them." For a survey of the approaches and formats of these major treatises, see William Crane's chapter "English Rhetorics in the Sixteenth Century," 97-112; see also Tuve, Elizabethan, 90-116 for several discussions of these English theorists regarding the relationships among tropes, figures, schemes, and inventional topics in lyric poetry. The sum total of oppositional semes in Sherry's definition includes living/non-living, abstract/concrete or formed/formless, animal/human, and speech/aphasia. See below, chapter 2, concerning these semiotic registers. Eighteenth-century English poetic and rhetorical theory abounds in observations about personification — too many to accommodate in this chapter. It is perhaps true that Lord Kames's book is known as one of the major rhetorical and critical treatises; but Dr. Johnson's observations on the trope are better-known still. See Chapin 98—115 for a critical overview of the views on personification held by Johnson. Note too that Fontanier takes up personification as the first of the "tropes." As Ricoeur claims (Rule 58), the fundamental semiotic division used by Fontanier for the mapping of tropological transformations is the opposition animate/inanimate. Personification, the trope of animation, thus attains a tacit, self-reflexive ascendancy in Fontanier's conceptual hierarchy of tropes and figures. An interesting problem arises when we compare the French counterpart to the Warburg School of iconography: the art historian Emile Male. In The Gothic Image, Male provides a brilliant chapter (titled "The Mirror of Morals," 98—130) on the historical evolution of the characters from Prudentius' Psychomachia into relief images on the walls of French churches built during the thirteenth century. It is curious that Male never uses the word "personification" in this chapter, and uses the word "allegory" to describe the Vices and Virtues only once (109). He may have avoided use of the term "allegory" for conceptual reasons; then 178

Notes to pages )o-}s

14

15

16

17 18

again, he may be so comfortable (like Panofsky or Wittkower) in using "allegory" to denote "personification" that constant theoretical recognition of the term is unnecessary. An exception to this characteristic tendency of the Warburg art history scholars can be found in Gombrich 126—45. Gombrich's discussion of personification in classical and Renaissance visual art cautiously avoids the term "allegory." See also Kantorowicz 78—81, 303—04, for exclusive use of the term personification. In fact, Kantorowicz' taxonomic interests (regarding the precise identification of personified cities and states in the ancient world) surface strongly in his preference for the coined term "angelomorphic personification" as opposed to "anthropomorphic personification" (304). The former expresses the idea of those numinous, haloed personages who represented the "eternalness" of geographical places. Barney describes how "reification" works three ways in Walt Disney's Pinocchio: (1) the growth of the nose when the puppet lies reveals a directly proportional literalization or substantialization of "sin"; (2) the dramatic function of Jiminy Cricket as Pinocchio's "conscience"; and (3) the final metamorphosis at the end of the film of the puppet into a living boy (34). Strangely, however, Barney has neglected a fourth but prior figural engagement: the initial activity of the "puppet" speaking and thinking involves personification. This set of statements ranks with de Man's aphoristic declarations on allegory (see chapter 6, n. 3). See Culler, "Lyric", 93—106 for a critique of the conceptual terms that inhabit de Man's "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric." See Michael Riffaterre 107-23 for a brilliant extension of de Man's analytical strategy into Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. See for example Hillis Miller's essay "Prosopopeia in Hardy and Stevens." Miller's reading of Stevens's "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself" culminates in the detection of a latent prosopopeia that exists in the image of the sun as "a battered panache above snow": the panache, an ornamental helmet feather, implies or suggests that the sun is a head - and in turn, that it is a figurally construed face or prosopon {Tropes

256-57).

2 Towards a taxonomy of tropes 1 Classifying personification figures can hinge on whether they actually "exist" in a narrative, as Griffiths's opening claims about the shifting uses of the trope in Piers Plowman indicate. Piers manifestly plays with the lectorial confusion between rhetorical personification and narrative personification. This frequent, illusion-like confusion (which resembles the cognitive wavering produced when one studies a pictorial "figure-

179

Notes to pages 37-4.6

2

3

4

5 6

7

8

ground gestalt"; see chapter 4 below) parallels, for Griffiths, Barthes' formalization of fictional character in general. See Griffiths 5; Barthes 67. See Genette, Narrative Discourse, 86—112, for a description of the four tempos of narrative duration. Narrated time is the duration of events depicted within a narration. Time of narration is the duration of the narrator's act of telling his story. I borrow the term "actant" from A. J. Greimas's elaboration of the six actantial roles (subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, opponent) that constitute narrative deep structure. My interest in personification characters engaged in mimetic, fabular narratives focuses upon the actantial roles of the figures (subjects) affecting other figures and their environments (objects). See Greimas 89, 106—114; Schleifer 87—99. The metaphorics of kinship is itself a variation on the epistemic metaphorics of genera and species. See Ducrot and Todorov 0-14 for a brief history of Bopp's inaugural work instituting such metaphorics. For classical discussions of this term, see Quintilian's censure of so "useless" a trope in the Institutes 8.6.37-39. See below, chapter 3, for the distinction between the conceptions "cofigural metalepsis" of classical rhetoric and " transdiegetic metalepsis" of modern narratology. The term pragmapeia is itself a Renaissance neohellenism, the roots of which have similar connotative qualities to "reih'cation." Pragma is a word with many meanings. Like res, it can mean a physical "thing" as well as a "matter for discussion" or a "court case." Both terms reveal the inkhorn tendencies of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The OED vm.384.coL1 provides a concise definition of reification: "The mental conversion of a person or abstract concept into a thing." In his De divisione naturae, John the Scot categorizes all conceivable essences according to the levels (1) quae creat et non creatur; (2) quae et creatur et creat; (3) quae creatur et non creat; (4) quae nee creatur nee creat

("that which creates and is not created"; "that which creates and is created"; "that which is created and does not create"; "that which is neither created nor creates"; Vignaux 21). 9 The preceding note indicates that the fourth category — the "nonexistent" — is equivalent to the sheerly abstract or ideational. The trope "ideation" or rarefkation which I outline above must, according to this description, be the making of substantial quantities into abstract, ideational, or materially non-existent ones. It is the binary opposite of substantialization. But this line of reasoning is subject to a rhetorical trap dependent upon other logical criteria for states of affairs governing "abstraction." Echoing Husserl, M. Laporte, in Le Probleme de I'Abstraction, says that "an abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state. The concrete by contrast is a totality which can exist by itself alone" (Sartre 3). When we substantialize and "personify" abstract concepts such as mercy, justice, or 180

Notes to pages 51-64. humanity, we put them into "an isolated state," translating them into spatially and temporally delimited, physically measurable corporeal beings - into three "masses" called Mercy, Justice, and Peace, each measuring, say, seventy inches in height and 160 pounds in weight. Substantialization or personification, therefore, would entail direct engagement of Laporte's concept of abstraction. Yet the conventional logic of our taxonomy has dictated that the figural movement away from the ideational or " abstract" is the opposite of abstraction. The problem is not so much a failure of logic, but a signature of the slippage inherent in taxonomical rhetoric which tries to verbalize elusive conepts like "abstractness" and "materiality." For an early but lively and pertinent discussion of "the rhetoric of substance" and non-materiality, see Burke 51-5310 Lifton, however, does not use the term Volkskorper extensively in his discussions. For a thorough treatment of the historical dimension of this German social principle, see Proctor. 11 The topics of Spenser's nonce-names and foreign-language personification names are too large to be fully addressed in this study. Orgoglio, for example, is not only the Italian word for "pride," but also the coupling of an anagram of Gorgos — the Red Cross Knight's name — with an orthographic variant of the word leo. (" George," which Red Cross is told means "earth," is the verbal label that names England's hagiographic symbol. This label is coupled with "lion," the country's animal symbol.) As a lexical and orthographic refraction of George and Lion, the name of the character Orgoglio and its relationship to the name and significance of the Red Cross Knight is underwritten by a powerful ironic code. See below, chapter 6, for a discussion of Orgoglio.

3 Narrative level, personification, and character ontology in Prudentius' Psychomachia 1 Fulgentius' use of the notorious "id est" formula renders The Aeneid into a network of algebraic equations. Domenico Comparetti started a tradition of attack against this mechanical and algebraic hermeneutical format eighty years ago. See Vergil in the Middle Ages ~L-LZ ff. For an accessible English translation of Fulgentius' Continentia, see Whitbread 105-53.

2 The format of Haworth's project is in part much like mine in this study: he begins his book with a historical survey of ideas about personification and allegory, provides a reading of Prudentius' poem, and then concludes with an iconological declaration that the "allegory" of the Psychomachia is "descriptive." By this term, he seems to refer to the obvious ways in which the Vices and Virtues are represented by their visual appearances and physical actions. 181

Notes to pages 66-75 3 Many commentators on Vergil's epic have seen the combat descriptions, in which faces are smashed and throats pierced, as technically " realistic." No doubt, when an opponent wears armor (a lorica for the thorax, a helmet on the head), the only logical striking place on his body seems to be the face or mouth. However, as medieval illustrations of the Psychomachia demonstrate, the Vices are shaggily attired. Unlike the Virtues, they wear no armor. See the ample illustrations culled from illuminated manuscripts by Katzenellenbogen, especially plates 5, 8a, 8b, and 12. 4 Because the " tropological" or moral level involves the application of scripture to post-biblical and actual Christians (particularly in the Middle Ages), one could argue that the actants of this domain must be contemporary historical humans. That is, if Dante sees the departure of Jacob from Egypt as the typological or allegorical precursor of Jesus Christ and as the eschatological precursor of the New Jerusalem, he could also see himself and his fellow Florentines as corresponding to thirteenthcentury tropological or moral postfigurations. But the self-attribution made by a medieval thinker as a postfiguration or antitype could never be sanctioned in terms of biographical precision. Such contemporary biographicizing of scripture captured the essence of the Joachimian Heresy. Rather, the " contemporizing " of scripture meant the conception of medieval man or woman as tropological postfigurations in general. Considered on the moral level, Jacob becomes a medieval Everyman — at best a figural isotype of all medieval Christians. 5 Todorov's metaphorical term " embedding," which he claims to take from modern linguistics (Poetics 70), really comes from the discipline of geology. Engendered in Todorov's term is the figural notion of containment, nested substance, encapsulation, and in turn the seme of "vertically" (the indispensable inside/outside binary opposition of structuralism is traditionally reconfigured as the upper/lower opposition). Todorov's term more closely resembles the older narratological motif of "framing," another term contingent upon the figural seme of containment. (Moreover, figures of containment and geology are traceable, Foucault would argue, to the ascending episteme, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of geophysics — a subset of the new natural history, the positivistic "nomination of the visible," Order 150. See chapter 2 above for mention of Foucauldian epistemes and poetics.) Serious use of the term " framing " in narratology begins with the separate ring-compositional studies of Homeric oral poetry carried out by Van Otterlo, Notopoulos, and Whitman. 6 The fights include: (1) Fides vs. Fides Veterum Cultura Deorum; (2) Pudicitia vs. Libido; (3) Patientia vs. Ira; (4) Mens Humilis vs. Superbia; (5) Sobrietas vs. Luxuria; (6) Operatio vs. Avaritia. After the conclusion of the battle proper, there is the final extermination of Discordia by Fides. 7 This proposition is problematic, for as my discussion of the figure Job in 182

Notes to pages 77—97

the Psychomachia demonstrates, the distinction between action and stasis is intensely questioned in the poem; the Virtues cannot with any seriousness be conceived of as contemplative. In very general terms, though, the eschewing of immediate physical or social action for meditation or rhetoric was, in medieval ethics, the manifestation of the vita contemplativa (Aristotle's bios theoretikos concept described in the Nichomachean Ethics) - the opposite of the morally preferable vita activa {bios politikos).

This use of the term metalepsis should not be confused with the classical use of the term (as transsumptio) in chapter 2. Classical rhetoric, to repeat, described a metafigural effect in which a speaker could make figures of figures; she could compound them into a new tropological hybrid. Genette's term gains its classical warrant from treating narrative levels as if they were discrete tropes that can be combined or collapsed into one another.

4 A phenomenology of personification 1 The allegorical quite tradition, in which the protagonist or narrator meets personification figures along the linear course of his itinerary, seems to be of distinctly French origin. Of course, the "mixing" of humans and personifications finds its first literary expression with the face-to-face encounter between the narrator and Philosophy in Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae. 2 See Swearingen for a demonstration of this method regarding Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a characteristically modern narrative where we expect alinear diegesis and signs of a fragmentary consciousness. (Notice that Swearingen's use of the term "reflexivity " in his title differs from the way I use it below in my Conclusion; cf. the title of Siegle's study.) The problem of the narrators in all four of Chaucer's early allegorical dream visions has invited this kind of inquiry. In a summary of critical models describing these Chaucerian narrators, Edwards invents a trans-textual supernarrator. He takes inadvertant recourse to phenomenological ground when he claims that this "narrator gives us a sense that everything is contained within his consciousness, hence that the experience is unified and intelligible " (43; italics mine). Regarding the lectorial or readerly interest in phenomenological criticism, the reader's attempt to coincide with or "get into" the narratorial or authorial consciousness likewise finds precise figuration in the form of the ontologically "incomplete" personification character. See my Conclusion for a brief discussion of Georges Poulet's idea of the all-expansive authorial consciousness that must be met by the reader's consciousness. The latter can never hope to match or "fill" the ontic space of the former. Thus, the ontologically fragmentary personification and the dorveille183

Notes to pages 101-15 diminished narratorial persona both stand as emblems of the reader's dwarfed or inadequate consciousness in proximity to the text it encounters. See also Hillis Miller's early work regarding this phenomenological model in his "The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet." Among his typology of fictional worlds, Eco understands the third variety, the "nonverisimilar small world," as the one in which animals can have the power of speech. Indeed, speaking animals so understood would require an alternate biological-evolutionary history, one in which animals " have humanlike phonatory organs and a more complex brain structure " (76). The distinction in this taxonomy upholds an ontological difference between "personified" animals and "personified" abstractions, for the latter could only exist in inconceivable or impossible worlds. The whole business of the ideational and impossible worlds found in medieval allegory thus presages Husserl's notion of "bracketing" — a well-known tool in philosophical phenomenology. For Husserl, one must bracket off the outer hyletic world of sensuous experience and live in the inner realm of noetic (that is, reason-shaped) and eidetic consciousness in order better to know that consciousness. The personified abstraction lives always already as the eidetic "stuff" (pardon the oxymoron) of bracketed consciousness. Moreover, the purely eidetic personification "character" can be thought of as a microversion of the phenomenologically at-work, self-bracketing human mind itself. See Chase 65-81 for an intermittent discussion, following the demanian lead, of hallucination and prosopopeia in the Romantic lyric. Chase provides an especially useful extension of de Man's formalization of apostrophe/prosopopeia, 68-72 and So. Note too that the phenomenological orientation of this chapter serves as a touchstone for a theoretical promise made in the Introduction to this book: allegory and personification theories need to reconcile deconstruction with traditional, literary-historical understanding. In charting the deconstructive purview of personification theory, this book thus pays homage to the fact that much of Derrida's work has involved the articulation of (Husserlian and Heideggerian) phenomenological bases in deconstruction.

5 Personification, dreams, and narrative structure in Piers Plowman

B

1 I have used the B-Text of Piers Plowman simply because of its familiarity and popularity in modern criticism. Where necessary, I have made references to material in the C-Text, and for this reason I have used Skeat's parallel version of the poem. 2 Apocope is the cutting off of a word's final syllable; elision, the cutting out of a middle syllable; and apheresis, the cutting of the initial syllable. Ellipsis is the omitting of a word or several words from a syntactical unit; 184

Notes to pages 118-30

3

4

5

6

7

aposiopesis is the abrupt ending of a sentence, using a dash to indicate the break. Aporia, a favorite term of deconstruction, was originally any large gap (a thematic lacuna) or a moment of thematic confusion and hesitation (caused by the telescoping of the logical steps in an argument) in a text. The conception of the dream as a "natural" or unconsciously activated irruption in the sleeping brain becomes a central topos for Romantic poetics. Coleridge's story about the composition of "Kubla Khan" is the most memorable and emphatic example of the dream and poesis as acts of automatism. (This view recalls the negative medieval one concerning the "automatic" creation of figuration by the homo acidiosus.) Actually, Locke's conceptual framework of the operation of ideas and sensations in the human mind suggests the earliest modern conception of the dream as a random "residue" of psychic and sense-perceptual impressions. In the conceptual framework of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the dream could never be more than the medieval idea of the insomnium, the residual data of the day that haunts the sleeper at night. See Lewis, Image, 64-66, for a taxonomy of medieval dream-types according to Macrobius. All of these spatial metaphors of containment and vertical elevation are metaphorical figments of what a narrative text is. Vertical privileging that is, the placing "above" or "beyond" (Greek meta-) of formal registers - can be reversed as vertical demotion, thereby revealing the illusion of hierarchical containment promoted by Genette's convenient system of narratological shorthand. See Bal, "Embedding," 41-42, for a critique of Genette's use of the prefix meta- in his term "metadiegesis." Bal argues that a more accurate prepositional prefix would be hypo-, because the embedded narrative level is "within" or "under" (and not "above") the primary level of diegesis. (A resolutely poststructuralist perspective, of course, would attack the mystificational rhetoric of formally differentiated "levels" altogether and dispense with any idea of them. All aspects of narrative become equally fictional.) " Diegesis," or embedded and second-hand narration, originally meant to "tell" a story rather than to "show" it. Genette has embellished and altered this distinction in his taxonomy, and I have in turn altered Genette's distinctions. The classical modern summary of the distinction between showing and telling is still Booth 8. There is of course a contradictory idea regarding the "falling into" the dream world. Many medieval dreams are often construed as a katabasis (such as the narrator's dream of descent into Hell in Dunbar's "Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis," 1. 120). This descent, in Neoplatonic thought, mirrors the primeval holomorphic descent of the soul into silva or matter. Conceived according to these terms, the dream is the re-creation of the movement into lower rather than higher ontological realms. See Frank, 247, who has no problem with Langland's Envy being "now a man, now a woman." The gender shift merely shows the abstract concept envy "at work among men and women." The peculiar shift

185

Notes to pages 14.1-4.8

should remind us of the gender change undergone by Prudentius' Virtues towards the end of the battle (lines 329-59), which Barney and Van Dyke construe as a blunder in Prudentius' sense of continuity. Such shifts in Piers, however, might engage larger, culturally determined conceptions of gender in Langland's social world. See my Conclusion for some suggestions for a future study of gender and personification. 6 Narrating the personification of personification in The Faerie Queene 1 Citations to The Faerie Queene are taken from J. W. Hales's Everyman edition. Like Berger, Barney, and Fletcher, Murrin subscribes to the phenomenological model of psychic "fractions" in The Faerie Queene. In accordance with our discussion in chapter 4 of the phenomenological "myth of holism," Murrin in fact divides Spenser's characters into "two seemingly contradictory character types." First, there are the personification figures, which he calls "perfect emblems of the unfinished personalities which we have in temporal life." Second, the poem contains "realistic characters" which are the "essence of an individual's total life, its consummation in eternity" (Epic 152—53). The apocalyptic or parousiacal "consummation" is precisely the phenomenological myth of a completed human being that is yearned for but can never come into existence, as Erwin Strauss or Merleau-Ponty would point out. 2 See the Penguin edition of Hobbes, 71. The kind of pictorialization I refer to consists of the lineaments of a gigantic human body that comprises a congeries of tiny, clustered persons. A current example of this clever visual concept can be seen in the work of New York Times illustrator Peter Sis. See also Kantorowicz, passim, for the most thorough study to date of the Body Politic concept. 3 This passage, which is from "Reading and History," has become a classic example of one of de Man's major theoretical positions, along with the pronouncements in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," Allegories of Reading, and "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion," on the expressive mode he calls "allegory." 4 For Benjamin's discussion of "aura," see his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Illuminations 217—51). His correspondingly well-known discussion of "allegory," the polar opposite of auratic cognition and expression, can be found in the second part of the Origin of German Tragic Drama, titled "Allegory and Trauerspiel," 150-235.

186

Notes to pages 160-jo

Conclusion: Taxonomy II and future directions in personification theory 1 Falstaff's "catechism" on Honor is another meditation on the trope prosopopeia. His conclusion (that the personified concept is "air" and "a mere scutcheon" - a n empty sign) conjures up the image of Spenser's Orgoglio, whose personificational unmaking amounts to no more than the escape of trapped air. It also recalls a similar link between personification and trapped, forced, or exhaled air in Chaucer's The House of Fame. Here, the connection concerns Eolus and the personified, ambient utterances. 2 In a comparative discussion of personification in Wordsworth and Milton, Stephen Knapp maintains that the Restoration poet was indifferent to the "oscillation between literal and figurative agency in poetry" (139). Despite this dubious appraisal of Milton's personification figuration, Knapp's book offers one of the few dynamic and interesting recent examinations of the trope as the vehicle for poetic sublimity. 3 In this syntactical hierarchy of coded modifications, reification, personification's "symmetrical mirror image" (Hillis Miller, "Narrative," 77), ceases to be that trope's mutually excluding binary opposition. The elements P 3 and P 4 equate to the elements "R 3 " and "R 4 ." 4 Recall the effect of illusory or unconscious "gestalt prosopopeia" described in chapter 4. It too requires a schematic calculus (perhaps Po) or even two calculi because it can exist as (1) a purely psychological effect in real-life cognition, and because (2) this real-life effect can be narrativized in a literary text, as witness the scene from Aristophanes' The Clouds. 5 See Siegle for a discussion of the metaphorics critics attach to narratives that are "reflexive." Useful overviews of the philosophical and phenomenological dimensions of reflection and human consciousness are provided by Gasche 13-22, and by Eco, Philosophy of Language, 204-07. 6 De Man's reading strategy along these lines is best exemplified in the chapters on Nietzsche and Rousseau in Allegories of Reading, as well as in "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics," and "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant." 7 The logical axiom whereby measurable space "implies" material objectivity which can occupy it proceeds from the Kantian analysis of space and time as the a priori "preconditions" of phenomenal intuition. See Kant 30-40. 8 See Derrida 209—71, whose strategy, however, is not in itself "historical." The historical perspectives held by, say, Hegel or Anatole France concerning metaphor are the subjects of his critique. 9 It is interesting how a nation like Spain, which maintained its monarchy along with strong Roman Catholic institutional imagery throughout the Protestant Reformation and into the eighteenth century, clung to personification as a viable expressive form. The public autos sacramentales 187

Note to page ijo — the equivalent of the Middle English mystery and morality plays — are the most memorable examples. I am inclined to consider the effects of the Reformation on the waning of personification allegory to be more important than governmental issues, but this is a hypothesis in need of further investigation. Underdown's study points up interesting connections between issues of government, politics, and popular culture in Jacobean England - connections of the kind essential to an historical study of generic forms and devices in the seventeenth century.

188

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Works cited %* V V V %* %* V V V V V %* *** V V V V V V V V V" V *I* V V V V V V *•* V V V %* V

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202

Index ^Tfc ^Tfc ^Xfr ^Xfr ^ Tfr^Tfr ^Tfr ^Tfr ^Xfr ^Tfr ^Tfr ^Tfr ^Xfr ^Xfr ^Tfr ^Xfr ^Xfr ^Xfr ^Xfr ^Xfr ^ X ^ ^ Xfr^Xfr ^Xfr ^ T ^ ^ T ^ ^ T ^ ^ T ^ ^T ^ ^Tfr ^ T ^ ^ T ^ ^T^ ^ T ^ ^ T ^ ^Tfr

Abrams, M. H., 25 abstraction, 6, 66, 73, 98, 166-67, 180-81 acedia, 4, 94-95, 95-96, 98, 100, 115, 116, 117, 185 actant, in narrative, 40, 43, 66, 74, 122, 142, 166, 167, 180, 182 Adams, Hazard, 71, 177 Addison, Joseph, 173, 174 Aelius Donatus, 20, 178

Aristophanes, 22; Clouds, 108-9, ni< 187 Aristotle, 150, 155, 156, 183; Rhetoric, 2, 8, 11-12, 20, 28, 44, 177 Arnheim, Rudolf, 107 art history, 29, 111 Artemidorus, Oneirocriticon, 117 Auerbach, Erich, 29-30, 46, 167, 176 Augustine, St., 72, 80, 90, 152 Ausonius, 22

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 2

autos sacramentales, 187—88

Aesop, 47 African-Americans, infiguralnarratives, 48,

Averroes, 177

172-73

Alberic of Monte Cassino, 178 Alighieri, Dante, 46, 71, 72, 74, 182 Allan of Lille, De plandu Naturae, 2, 99, 100 allegoria in verbis/in facto, as distinction, 35

allegorical interpretation, 30, 6j, 112, 151-52, 156, 157, 174; and four-level paradigm, 3, 71-73 allegory, 1, 11, 32, 61, 93-94, 176, 181, 186; association with personification, 1, 5, 2-9,-35-56,38, 39, 41, 176; deconstructive model of, 1, 147-48, 149, 176, 186; as hyponoia, 39; and temporality, 147-48, 140-50, 186; and textual self-reflexivity, 5, 165—66; traditional medieval examples and concepts of, 11, 57-58, 93-95, 99, 112, 147, 176; theoretical "rescue" of, 8 Allen, Don Cameron, 176 Amazon topos, 48 ambiguity, in reading, 55—56, 87, 122 anachronism, and allegory, 147 ancestors, and apostrophe, 12, 14, 20-21 animism, 6, 7, 17&-77 Anouilh, Jean, and Jean Aurenche, 99 anthropology, 6, 65, 176-77 aphasia, see muteness Aphthonius of Antioch 19, apologue, 40, 43, 44, 47-50, 61, 70, 77, 92 aporia, 62, 147, 176; see also tropes Aquinas, St. Xhomas, 90, 98, 105

babbling, and stammering, 115-16 Bachelard, Gaston, 97 Bacon, Francis, 169 Bacon, Roger, 90 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 49, 58, 79-80 Bal, Mieke, 41, 185 Barfield, Owen, 138 Barney, Stephen, 32-33, 34, 55, 65, 66, 70, 76, 179, 186 Barthes, Roland, 180 Batany, Jean, 64 Bataille, Georges, 153 battle, as allegorical topos, 64, 75, 169 Baudelaire, Charles, 34 beast fable, see apologue Bede, 2, 20-21, 24, 28, 178 bellum intestinum, 6, 79, 169

Benjamin, Walter, 148, 149, 186 Benson, Xhomas, 19, 20, 178 Berger, Harry, 87, 98, 186 Bernardus Silvestris, 2 bilateral symmetry, 107 binary structure, 50-54, 73, 86, 93, 97, 116, 151, 154, 178, 182, 187 biography, 132 Bloomfield, Morton, 30—31, 71, 94 Body Politic figure, 44, 46, 50—51, 143, 170-71, 174, 186 Boethius, 22, 77, 90, 99, 100, 183 Boileau, Nicholas, 171-72 Book of Vices and Virtues, 115

203

Index Booth, Wayne, 185 Bopp, Franz, 39, 180 Bowers, John, 94-95, 114-15 Braden, Gordon, 55 Brandt, Sebastian, The Ship of Fools, 48 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim's Progress, 59, 61, 109, 112, 131, 161, 174 Burke, Kenneth, 181 Bush, Douglas, 59 Camille, Michael, 176 Cammermeir, Simon, 111, 112 Campbell, Joseph, 6 Carruthers, Mary, 115 catalogue, as device, 55, 87 Cavendish, Margaret, 48 Cazamian, Louis, 10 Chapin, Chester, 170, 173, 178 Chapman, George, 110—11 character, literary, 3, 96, 171-72; passim; and characterization, 36, 96, 171-72; and dramatis personae, 13, 14; ontological status, 3, 33, 41, 42, 171-72 Charles I and II, 170-71 Chase, Cynthia, 52, 184 Chatman, Seymour, 41 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2, 6, 7, 75, 102, 116, 118, 119, 120, 127, 128, 134, 152, 161, 162, 165, 183; House of Fame, 2, 4, 61, 84-86, 93, 103-6, 114, 143; Knight's Tale, 53; Legend of Good Women, gg; Man of Law's Tale, 71; Nun's Priest's Tale, 2, 90-92, 93, 105, 113; Pardoner's Tale, 53, 121-22, 168; Parliament of Fowls, 2, 4, 47, 86-90, 93, 104, 114, 115, 117, 157 Chirius Fortunatianus, 19 chronicle or annal, as genre, 146-47 Chrysippus, 22 Church Fathers, 1, 63 Cicero, 9, 13, 15-16, 22, 91, 173 Claudian, 66, 70 Clifford, Gay, 69 clothing, as allegorical topos, 118-19, 151, 152, 173-74 codes, formal or structural, 3, 4, 66, 71, 73-74, 76, 77, 7S, gi-g2, g6, 123, 126-27, 12&> 13&' !39' 1 5 1 ' 159> 161-63, x ^ 4 , 165, 187 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2, 28, 185 Comparetti, Domenico, 181 compilatio or compendium tradition, S-g, 12, 15, 16, 19, 21 Condillac, C. C, 26 Connelly, Marc, 48

"contagion," magical, 93 containment, as macrometaphor, 39-40, $6, go, 117, 122, 173-74, 182, 185 Copeland, Rita, 9 Cornelius Agrippa, 99 Cornificius, 13 Cox, Leonard, 23 Crane, R. S., 10 Crane, William, 23, 178 Culler, Jonathan, 52, 179 Curley, Michael, 141 Curtius, E. R., 29-30, 41, 176, 177 Dallenbach, Lucien, 146 Dawson, David, 36, 156, 161 daydreaming, 94, 97 debate topos, 79-80 deconstruction, 33-34, 81, 85, 93, 108, 113, 154, 157, 165, 166-67, 168, 175, 184 defacement, as theme and image, 34, 95, 136, 137, 139, 149, 151-52, 153, 163; and disfigurement, 34, 89, 111; and dismemberment, 34, 66-70 defamiliarization, 115 deictification, 30 Demetrius of Phalerum, 2, 11, 12-13, ^A> 1O> 20—21, 91, 99, 177 Dennett, Daniel, 99, 106 depression, as neurosis, 95-96 Derrida, Jacques, 108, 116, 166, 167—68, 169, 175, 184, 187 Descartes, Rene, 171 description, 37, 54-56 Deveaux, Alexis, 172 de Houdenc, Raoul, 83-84, 114 de Lorris, Guillaume and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 2, 6g, 78, 89, 114, 119, 161 de Man, Paul, 1, 10, 29, 33-34, 45-46, 52, 62, 69, 97, 101, 107, 124, 147-48, 149, 158, 166, 169, 174, 176, 179, 184, 186, 187 de Mery, Huon, 83-84, 114 de Pizan, Christine, 48, 78, 100 dialogue, 13, 17; see also sermocinatio, under tropes diegesis (see also Genette), passim; and hetero/homodiegesis, 127-30; layering or embedding, 4, 54, 74-75, 76-77, go, 91, 101, 117, 127, 182, 185; and metadiegesis, 54, 74-75, 76-77, 84, 87, 88, 00—91, 118, 127, 129, 134, 144, 155; and play-within-a-play, 54, 118; and "quarantining" of characters, 74-75, 77, 85, 100-3, 114, 120, 144

204

Index Diehl, Huston, 176 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 174 "dispersonihcation," 31, 43, 135, 154; see also diminishment under personification Donne, John, 43 dorveille, 94-95, 97, 115, 135 Drabble, Margaret, 158 Dronke, Peter, 151 DuBois, Jean, 28 Ducrot, Oswald, 180 Du Bartas, Guillaume, 111 Du Marsais, Etienne, 26 Dunbar, William, 185 Duns Scotus, 45 Eagan, Sister M. Clement, 66 Eco, Umberto, 84, 90, 101, 105, 184, 187 Edwards, Robert, 105, 183 effictio, 37, 89

ekphrasis, 84, 85, 87, 88, go, 117, 127, 141, 142, 143-44, 148 Elizabeth I, 170 Elliott, Robert, 171 Emporius the Great, 19 energeia, 168

enthymeme, 11 epic, see under Prudentius, Vergil Erasmus, Desiderius, 2, 22, 23 error, and figure, 41 etymologies, of terms, 3, 171-72 Euripides, 13 Everyman, 46 exemplum, 61, 131; see also typification under

tropes expressivism or expressionism, 24, 25, 26, 29

face, semiotic value of, 1, 22, 25, 34, 39, 68-69, 80, 111, 127, 153, 183 faded-deity concept, 65 Falvey, Kathleen, 121

France, Anatole, 187 Frank, Robert Worth, 60, 185-86 Fraunce, Abraham, 23 Frazer, J. G., 93 Freeman, Rosemary, 176 Frye, Northrop, 87, 176 Fulgentius, Continentia Vergiliana, gg-100, 181

Gale, Theophilus, 171 Gasche, Rodolphe, 187 Geiger, H. R., 112 Gellrich, Jesse, 128 Gendlin, Eugene, 101 genealogy, historical, 10, 11, 78 genera, and species, as macrometaphors, 38-39, 180 Genette, Gerard, 28, 37, 38, 41, 74-75, 77, 88, 127, 128, 167, 183, 185; and narrative framing, 74—75, 77, 185; and narrative tempos, 37; see also diegesis, narrative Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 2, 21-22 gestalt, 107-108, 170-80 Ginsberg, Warren, 171 gods, literary depictions of, 6, 7, 29, 64-65 Gombrich, E. H., 65, 107, 179 grammar, 15, 30—31, 174 Grant, Robert, 72 Graveyard Poetry, 170 Greenburg, Moshe, 79 Gregory, Richard, 107 Greimas, A. J., 180 Greimas Square, for illustrating trope relations, 52-53 Griffiths, Lavinia, 35, 114, 121, 165, 179-80 grotesque, as category, 111, 112 "grotesque idealism," as Ruskin's term, 28 Group Mu, 28, 38 Hall, James, 56 Halm, Karl, 20, 177-78 Hamon, Phillipe, 37, 57 Handelman, Susan, 149 Hantai, Simon, 112 Hardison, O. B., 21, 177 Hardy, Thomas, 34

fata morgana, 109

Ferrante, Joan, 100 figuration, 10—11, 21, 25, 46, 51, 89, 116, 157, 158, 167, 173-74 figures, see tropes Fineman, Joel, 158 Fletcher, Angus, 79, 93, 96, 98, 169, 176, 186 Florescu, Radu, 99 Fontanier, Pierre, 2, 9, 26-28, 38, 171, 178 Ford, John, The Witch of Edmonton, 111 formalization, 2, 54; see also codes, poetics formlessness, 15, 160—61 Foucault, Michel, 38, 171, 174, 182

Hawes, Stephen, The Pastime of Pleasure, 57, 112

Hawkes, Terence, 38 Haworth, Kenneth, 38, 64-65, 171, 176, 177, 181 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 170 Hedley, Jane, 168 Hegel, G. W. F., 168, 187 205

Index Kanizsa, Gaetano, 107 Kant, Immanuel, 187 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 44, 49, 51, 170—71, 179, 186 katabasis, 185 Katzenellenbogen, Adolf, 182 Kayser, Wolfgang, 111 Keats, John, 29 Kennedy, George, 19 Kerrane, Kevin, 21, 177 Kirk, G. S., 150 Klein, Fritz, 51 Knapp, Stephen, 28, 176, 187 Koff, Leonard Michael, 53 Kolve, V. A., 71 Kouwenhoven, Jan, 155

Heraclitus, 150 Hermann, John, 161 hermeneutics, 101, 156 Herodotus, History, 118 Hesiod, Theogony, 2, 6 hierarchies, ontological, 45 Hobbes, Thomas, 143, 186 Holbein, Hans, 47 holomorphism or hylozoism, 22, 155-56, 185 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 1, 25-26, 27, 28, 29, 121, 178 homeopathy, logic of, 93 Homer, 85; Iliad, 2, 6, 68 homunculus, 99—100 Horace, 11, 22, 177 hortus condusus, as topos, 87 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, 100 Hugh of St. Victor, 128 Hughes, Merritt, 59 Hugo, Victor, 34, 158 Husserl, Edmund, 73, 98, 108, 180, 184 hypostasization, 42; see also substantialization under tropes ideology, 6, 50, 160-71 illusion, cognitive or perceptual, 106-13; see also gestalt impersonation and personation, as translated terms, 16-17 Indo-European languages, 39 inexpressibility topos, 81 Ingarden, Roman, 101 Irvine, Martin, 20 Isidore of Seville, 72 isotype, 46-47, 60—61 Jacob's Well, 115, 116 Janzen, J. Gerald, 79 Jakobson, Roman, 18, 38, 40, 174 Jauss, Hans Robert, 63, 101 Jerome, St., 13 Jews, dehumanization of, 51 Joachimian Heresy, 182 Job, in Psychomachia, 79-81, 82, 83, 93, 95, 182-83 John Balbus of Genoa, 11, 177 John the Scot Eriugena, 43-44, 180 Johnson, Barbara, 110, 153, 165 Johnson, Samuel, 178 Jones, Owen, 111 Josipovici, Gabriel, 124 Julius Caesar, 169 juvenile culture, and personification, 109, 176

Lacan, Jacques, 108 Lamy, Bernard, 22, 24-25, 29 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 3^ 35. 57-58, 59, 61, 62, 69, 75, 94, 114, 116-38, 139, 147, 165, 179, 184; character knowledge in, 124-30, 138; dreams in, 117, 120—21, 122, 123—24; image of sleep in, 134-36; see also names Laporte, M., 180 Lavarenne, Maurice, 63 Lear, Norman, 48 legalistic discourse and traditions, 49, 51; see also Quintilian Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, 48 Lessing, G. E., 40—41 Leupin, Alexandre, 22 Levin, Richard, 165 Levin, Samuel, 31, 52, 100—1 Lewis, C. S., 63, 91, 117, 185 Liddell and Scott's Greek Dictionary, 13 Lifton, Robert Jay, 51, 181 Linnaeus, Carolus, 38, 39 list, literary, see catalogue literalization, 40—41, 42, 56, 103, 147, 153, 157, 168 literary history, 10 Locke, John, 57-58, 171, 185 Lucian, 22 Macey, Samuel, 160 Machaut, Guillaume de, 99 Mack, Dorothy, 31 Macrobius, 86, 117, 185 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 109 magister, allegorical, 88-89, 99> Magritte, Rene, 153 Malamud, Martha, 66, 70 Malarme, Stephane, 34

206

1OO

>

1O

5

Index Male, Emile, 178-79 Mankind, 46, 132 Maresca, Thomas, 32, 154, 155—56, 176 Marks, Herbert, 116 Marmo, Constantino, 45, 80, go, 105 Martianus Capella, 2 Martin, Wallace, 124, 176 martyrology, 66 Marxist discourse, Verdinglichung and

notatio, 37, 156 Notopoulos, J. A., 182 Nugent, S. Georgia, 66 Nuttall, A. D., 69, 135

Versachlichung as terms, 42; see also

reihcation under tropes McKeon, Richard, 9, 21-22 McKim, Donald, 72 Mehl, Dieter, 170 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 98, 186 metalepsis, as diegetic transgression, 77-78, 88, 102-3, 1O4> 133~34' 1 3 ^ 180, l 8 3 ' as "cohgural" transumption, 22, 40-41, 180, 183 metaplasm, 177 Middleton, Anne, 125 Miller, J. Hillis, 1, 34, 35, 52, 158, 162-63, 166-67, 174, 179, 184, 187 Miller, Joseph M., 19, 20, 178 Milton, John, 59-60, 187; Paradise Lost, 47, 59, 95-96, 157, 160-61, 163

" O," of apostrophe, 52, 92, 105 Ockham, William of, 137-38 O'Connor, Flannery, 109 ontogenesis, 45 ontogeny, as macrometaphor, 11 Origen, 72 Orwell, George, 47, 115 Other, and Otherness, 50; see also allegory Ovid, Metamorphoses, 85, 162-64 paganism, and early Christianity, 63, 65 pageant-procession, 4, 54-56, 170 palimpsest, 153, 160 Panofsky, Erwin, 29, 176, 178 Paracelsus, 99 Parker, Alan, Bugsy Malone, 48-49, 77 parousia, 72, 73, 186 Pater, Walter, 29 pathetic fallacy, 28-29 Paxson, James, 76 paysage moralise, 6, 43, 169, 172

Peacham, Henry, 2, 11, 24 Perl, Sondra, 101 personifications, Death, 13, 46-47; Nature, 21, 88; Seven Deadly Sins, 61; Wisdom, 36-37; see also vices and virtues, and under Chaucer, Langland, Prudentius, Spenser personification, or prosopopeia, 1-7, 8, 12-34, 35-38, 39-4O, 42-46, 47-62, 63, 64-73, 74-78, 80-81, 82, 83-100, 103-6, 107-13, 114, 116-17, 119-37, names (and labels), of characters, 4, 58—62, 137-38, 139-47, 148-49^ 150-59, 124, 129, 131-33, 138, 181; of tropes, 160—75, 176-88; apostrophic variety, 44, 124; see also taxonomy 12, 13, 16, 91, 99; as dramatic narrative, 1, 58, 150, passim; discourse vs. character in general, 13, 177; and story, 3, 41-42, 148-49; and ethics, 73, 158-59, 174; and gender, 6, narratorial person, 83, 128; and tempo, 12, 130, 173-74, 185-86; historical 37, 152, 155, 157, 180; see also theories of, 11-34; historical-materialist diegesis, Genette models of, 5—6, 169-71, 187-88; as narratology, narratological tactics, 3, 37, metafigure, 5, 166, 167—68, 174-75; 41-42, 71, 73-75, 81, 114, 122, 128, and "metapersonihcation," 53, 157—58, 156-57, 166-67, 182 161, 163, 164; "origin" or generation Nazis, and Volkskorper concept, 51, 174, 181 of, 156—57; the personification of, New Historicism, 165 136-37, 138, 139, 151, 153, 157-58, Nichols, John, 170 165; and public spectacle, 170—71, 176; Nietzsche, Friedrich, 187 psychoanalytical models of, 95-96; Nims, Margaret, 22 semiotic structures in, 18, 20-21, 31, Nominalism, 137-38 39, 40, 47, 49-50, 139' 161-63; nonce-words, see names varieties or categories of in earlier Norris, Christopher, 108, 176 mise en abyme, 116, 146

Montaigne, Michel de, 171 morality plays, 32, 46, 176, 188 Moschus, 22 Mosellanus, Petrus, 22 Murphy, James, 11, 41, 177 Murrin, Michael, 176, 186 muteness, and silence, 3, 14, 78, 80—81, 89, 90, 100

207

Index taxonomies, 26, 26-28, 35, 171, and in contemporary taxonomies, 30—31, 32-33, 35, 70, 110, 121, 128, 161-63 phenomenology, or phenomenological criticism and approach, 4, 31, 72, 73, 81, 93, 96-106, 135-36, 138, 155, 164, 175, 183-84; deconstructionist appropriation of, 108, 184; diminishment of narrator or human actant, 4, 83, 95, 104, 116, 117, 127, 1 55> 157' 164, 183-84; epistemological powers of characters or narrators, 116-17, 183-84; and Husserlian bracketing, 184; and psychic fragments or facets, 116-17, 135~3&> 183-84, 186; generation or emergence of personification, 95, 164; and "phenomenological construal," 31, 100-1, 102, 105; and spaces, 101-3; and states of affairs, 100-3, X13 Philo of Alexandria, 72, 74 philology, 29 phylogeny, as macrometaphor, 10, 11 Physiologus tradition, 141 Piehler, Paul, 96 pictorial or visual images, 4, 56, 111-12, 143, 176, 182 Plato, 13; and Platonism, 98, 108, 119, 129, 149, 150, 185 play-within-a-play, see diegesis Pliny, 111 Plowden, Edmund, 170 Poe, Edgar Allen, 105, 170 poetics, 1, 2, 5, 6, 50, 101, 113 Pope, Alexander, The Dunciad, 170 positivism, in formalism, 54 poststructuralism, 1, 33, 50, 113, 119, 175 Poulet, Georges, 98, 164, 183-84 Preminger, Alex, 21, 177 presence, textual, 113, 154, 163-64, 165 "pretext," allegorical, 73 Priscian, 19 Proctor, Robert, 181 proof-texts, scriptural, 57-58 propaganda, 50-51, 63, 176 prosopopeia, 1, 3, 12—13, 17—20, 22—24, 27-28, 33-34, 39, 5^-53' t>9. 107, 153-54, 158, 171-72, 177-78; as contradistinguished from personification, 26-28; etymology and lexical significance of, 18, 39, 69, 171 ; as "master trope," 1, 34, 166; perceptual or gestaltist, 107-13, 187; see also personification Prosser, Michael, 19, 20, 178

Proust, Marcel, 74, 179 Prudentius, Peristephanon, 66; Psychomachia,

2, 3, 5, 6, 32, 37, 58>, 59, 62, 63-71, 73-81, 82-83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 93, 94, 96, 100, 102, 113, 114, 116, 119, 128, 131, 132, 136, 139, 151, 161, 163, 165, 178, 181-82, 182-83, 186; personified characters in, 67-69, 75, 182; plot or structure of, 75, 182 Puttenham, George, 2, 23

208

quest, as topos, 183 Quilligan, Maureen, 73, 176 Quintilian, InsHtutio Oratoria, 2, 9, 13, 16-19, 20, 21, 22, 43, 49, 92, 154, 173, 177, 180 Racine, Jean, 171 rarefication, 43, 44 Raven, J. E., 150 Realism, philosophical, 98, 137-38 rebus, 113 reification, see under tropes Restoration, 170-72, 188 Revelations, 72

rhetoric, 7; classical, 1, 7, 8, 14, 20, 39, 183; medieval, 7, 9, 16, 22, 39, 46; Renaissance, 7, 16, 19, 22-23; Neoclassical, 24, 121, 178; modern, 8 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 2, 9, 12, 13-15, 22, gg, 173, 177 Richards, I. A., 176 Ricoeur, Paul, 9, 28, 41, 150, 166, 167, 178 Ridley, M. R., 111 Riffaterre, Michael, 179 Ripa, Cesare, 176 Robbe-Grillet, Allain, 77 Robert, W. Rhys, 12 Robertson, D. W., 176 Rogers, Jack B., 72 Rolle, Richard, 115 Rollinson, Philip, 176 romance, as genre, 142 Romantics, critical theory of, 29, 176-77,185 Rorschach, Hermann, 107 Rorty, Richard, 171 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 187 Rufinus, Julius, 19 Ruskin, John, 28-29, 94 Russell, J. Stephen, 85-86, 117-18 Russian Formalism, 115-16 Rutilius Lupus, 20 salvation-history, 72-73 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 180

Index satire, 47 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 40, 54 Schleifer, Ronald, 180 Schofield, M., 150 scholasticism, medieval, 43—44, 122 Scipio Africanus, 88-89, 118 self-reflexivity, textual, 69, 81, 82, 87, 8g, go, 142, 151, 164-66, 167, 187 semiotics, and semiology, 20-21, 34, 52-53, 81, 92, 93, 148, 149-50, 156-57, 161-63 Shakespeare, William, 26; A Comedy of Errors, 43; Antony and Cleopatra, 109-10; Coriolanus, 43, 51; Hamlet, iog; 1 Henry 4, 56, 105, 160, 187; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 54, 118 Shange, Ntozake, 172 Sherry, Richard, 2, 23-24 Shklovskij, Viktor, 64, 115 Sidney, Sir Phillip, 11 Siegle, Robert, 183, 187 Sis, Peter, 186 Skeat, W. W., 184 Skelton, John, The Bowge of Court, 48, 155 Sklute, Larry, 84, 90 Smith, Macklin, 67 solecism, 177 solipsism, literalized in Chaucer, 103-4 somnium coeleste, 129 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 170 speech, kinds of, 3, 57—58, 92, 115-17; as ontological feature, 82, 90—93, 96 Spenser, Edmund, 32, 150; The Faerie Queene, 2, 4-5, 6, 28, 47, 54-56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 00, 130-59, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 174. 177, 181, 186, 187 spiritual conflict, as theme, 63, 81 Sprinker, Michael, 10 Steadman, John, 32, 176 Stevens, Martin, 121 Stevens, Wallace, 34, 179 Strauss, Erwin, g7~g8, 186 structuralism, 1, 25, 28, 30-40, 52-53, 122, 149, 165; see also semiotics sublime, the, 187 Swearingen, James, 183 Swift, Jonathan, 48, 78, 152, 165 symbolism, 30, 176, 181 tableau vivant, 80, 126, 127 Taine, Hippolyte, 10 Tasso, Torquato, 111 taxonymy, and terminology, 3, 16, 20, 27-28, 34, 35-62, 71, 73, 81, 128, 159, 161-63, l 8 4

temporality, 98, 140-50, 158 temporal distortion or annihilation, 12, 13, 14 textuality, and texts, 4, 132, 145-49 theophany, 112 theory, 1, 3, 5, 35, 174-75, i«4 Thomson, H. ]., 65 "ticket-named" character, see names Todorov, Tzvetan, 9, 28, 74, 173, 180, 182 Tolkien, J. R. R., 106 transformation, "direction" of figural, 18-19, 32> 4°> 42> 48-49, 9-2" 154> 178 translatio imperii topos, 60 translation, 4, 13, 16—17, 50—60, 65—66 Tree of Porphyry, 45 Tristram Shandy, 77, 183 tropes, 1, 2, 10, 13, 38, 39, 50, g6, 113, 167, 169, 174-75, 177; amplificatio, 23-24; animification, 43, 54, 110, 142, 145, 152; anthropomorphism, 29, 33, 42, 45-46, 57, 6g, 70, 89, 128, 152, 161; apheresis, 115, 184; apocope, 115, 184; aporia, 115, 185 (and see above); aposiopesis, 115, 185; apostrophe, 12, 13, 27, 52, 92, 105, 184 (and see apostrophic personification, and "O"); boustrophedon, 70; catachresis, 1, 174, 177; collatio, 22; conformatio, 3, 13, 21, 167, 177 (and see under personification); deformatio, 19, 167, 177; effiguratio, 19, 167, 177; eidolopeia, 19, 53; elision, 115, 184; ellipsis, 17, 115, 184; ethopeia, 19, 49, 53; irony, 1, 38; hyperbole, 67; metalepsis or transsumptio, see above; metaphor, 1, 11, 20, 21, 26—27, 30, 38, 93, 168, 174, 178; metonymy, 1, 16, 17, 26-27, 38, 94, 164-74; objedification, 43, 110, 148; onomatopeia, 105, 106; oxymoron, 41, 70, 184; paranomasia, 113, 176; parody, 17; personification and prosopopeia, see above; prosopographia, 22, 127; reification or pragmapeia, 32, 42, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53-54, 85, 163, 180, 187; sermocinatio or dialogism, 27, 53, 177; simile, 11; substantialization, 17, 40, 42, 43, 45, 70, 110, 148, 150, 155, 167, 180-81; syllepsis, 113, 122, 156, 176; syncope, 115; synecdoche, 26-27, 46, 51, 98; topification, 12, 43, 44, 131, 132, 143, 179; zoomorphism, see animification troubadour lyric, 84, 94, 114 Tuve, Rosemond, 47, 64, 176, 178

209

Index tyche, 65

" typification," 60-61, 131 typology, biblical, 32, 65, 70-71, 72-73, 76, 78, 182 Underdown, David, 188 unreadability, 176 usure Irelever, as philosophical dichotomy,

167-68 Van Dyke, Carolynn, 32, 65-67, 76, 186 Van Otterlo, W. A. A., 182 Vergil, 17, 26, 85; Aeneid, 2, 3, 44~45> 59. 66-67, 68, 70, 83, 84, 8g, 181, 182

"vertically," as macrometaphor, 74, 77, 110, 122, 185 Vico, Giambattista, 7, 29 vices and virtues, personified, 15-16, 64, 75, 77, 96, 178-79, 182 Vignaux, Paul, 180 Vinaver, Eugene, 111 voice, 52-53, 82, 105; see also de Man, apostrophic "O"

Walt Disney's Pinocchio, 32, 179 Warburg School, 178—79 Wenzel, Siegfried, 94 Whitbread, Leslie George, 181 White, Hay den, 146, 174 White, T. H., 141 Whitman, Cedric, 182 Whitman, Jon, 6, 39 William and Mary, 170-71 Wilson, Thomas, 23 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 106 Wittkower, Rudolf, 29-30, 176, 187 Wordsworth, William, 69, 177, 187 writing, 150; see also texts Xenophon, 17 Zaner, Richard, 98 Zimbardo, Rose, 171-72 Zink, Michel, 83-84, 93-95 Zizek, Slavoj, 170-71 Zumthor, Paul, 114