For all that, Pandar does have fine judgment--so wel koude feele/In every thyng, as Chaucer says(III,940ff.)--and we see it in his delicate handling of the early, woe-begotten Troilus and in his reading of the froward Criseyde, but La Donna Mobile is beyond him. The submission of Criseyde registers his success at wooing by association, but with the consummation and subsequent trysts we find the lovers increasingly more self-assured, and Pandar's control reduced to postal delivery. His bitterness and imprecations against his niece are overt sympathy with the wretched Troilus, but covertly they register his failure to grasp, to come to any sense of what real love is all about, because it is beyond his nature.
In this enclosed world of Troy, Criseyde is further enclosed wherever she looks. As widow she is without protector, and much of her subsequent submission to Pandar and Troilus is motivated by a sense of insecurity. The opprobrium to which Pandar is immune affects her such that she seeks the grace and protection of Ector, and one of Pandar's ruses later runs on similar royal lines. The approach to Ector is, delicately veiled, an amorous one--And ofter wolde, and it hadde been his wille(I,125)--and with that rejection she has to fall back under the avuncular authority of Pandar. This is what this society virtually demands of its women.
The comparison of Troilus's routhe with Diomede's suggestion of marriage has been made. What is curious here in Troy is that Criseyde nowhere mentions marriage to Troilus, with whom, on and after the consummation, she is evidently in love. The penchant for secrecy of Troilus and Pandar fits well with hers. Claustrophobic Troy is the ideal location for 'affaires de coeur' : faces read for signs ; relatives such as Troilus's family too decorous to enquire too far into fevers that thin the warring ranks. Despite the precedent of Paris and Helen, true love seems to be as frequent as the Holy Grail--our trio is a cross-section of society, and they are not acquainted with the phenomenon. The game is the thing, and the constant ebb and flow between Criseyde and Pandar, the slow accumulation of concession towards submission replicates in fine the sorties and retreats at the walls, the long war of attrition towards a falling of towers.
The problem with this affair is that the lover-protagonists are ripe for something more serious than nods and winks. Troilus is struck dumb, struck out of his customary scorn, by the Paradise in Criseyde's eyes, whereas Criseyde wax al reed every time she is near or sees Troilus. Another contributory factor is the convergence of virginal Troilus with sexually experienced Criseyde, so that she has the delicacy, understanding and forwardness to make the initial physical advances. And it only happens after the pair have reached a telepathic understanding(III,463-4). After consummation and subsequent trysts, they reach a high point of complete reciprocal revelation, of total honesty : of true love(III,1395-1400). This is heterogeneous merging into homogeneous.
Character traits, however, distinguish them again. Troilus pledges his servize for evermore(III,1288-1319), in a sense which sounds stock courtly, but in this context is genuine. Criseyde's is a more mundane vision--lat us falle awey fro this matere--which takes note of the rising sun, and looks askance at her 'honour'. In their final tryst, once they have wept away their grief, Criseyde, the customary initiator, wants to make practical use of their remaining time together. And her superiority in the physical and courtly-love relationship leads Criseyde to overrule finally and definitively Troilus's more practical remede. Hers is a negative, return-to-what-you-know remede. With Criseyde, the claustrophobic Troy has overruled the remede which would have have been in her best interests. Circumstance, finally, carves out her fate, and, out of Troy, she is left to rue matching Troilus's eternal love with sunrises and 'honour'.
Of the two, Troilus has the much longer road to travel to this matere : he is virginal, scorns the game of love, and likes a quiet emotional life(I,186-7). His knowledge of love, let alone true love, is on a par with Pandar's, and comes from hearsay(I,197-8). Yet of the main trio, it is this quality of novice that makes him the most likely to be impressed by, the most likely to learn from, the process of true love. Rather than being an eager neophyte, he is ever reluctant to commit himself to that Great Unknown, but once wooed into the game by Pandar, he is much the stock Trojan lover, weelawaying on cue. Fortunately, at the climactic moment, his lessoun/To preyen hire, is thorogh his wit ironne(III,83-4), and Troilus passes from Pandar's automatic control into the gentler hands of Criseyde. Even after the consummation, he is taking his cue, but now from Criseyde, and proceeds to echo her curses of the daylight.
Troilus realises his transformation-through-love when he feels a newe qualitee(III,1653), the immediate proof of which is that he takes his former instructor by the hand and teaches him about Love's effects. As a result of the transformation, he has the inner strength to sustain the shock of Criseyde's transference, as well as survive the slough of discursive self-examination : fate, fortune, necessity. The former novice who swooned is now rational while Criseyde swoons, and he is on the point of following her, by suicide. In IV,546ff. we see his maturity-through-love : he will not steal Criseyde away as his native city did with Helen. But it is not defiance : he will submit to the higher authority of his father's decision on what is a good exchange for Troy. Still, the old bonds are falling away : witness his remede of exile. This worthy knight and terror in war has been transformed into a worthy man who seeks a peaceful, loving life : from homogeneous Trojan warrior to diversified man seeking the homogeneity of love.
From homogeneity to heterogeneity to homogeneity : Chaucer follows this pattern in his narrative tone. He is ever citing his auctoor, implying a continuity which is virtually replication : homogeneous material. But this material is personalised : interspersed with authorial intrusion--proverbs, wise saws--which in tone reflect the upward progress of Troilus to maturity-in-love. In Book I, where Troilus cuts a laughable figure, Chaucer locates him(211-7) clomben on the staire, in a stanza which evidences the rhetorical figure of climax [from Greek, meaning 'ladder']. At I,1044-5, we find Troilus on his knees clasping Pandar round the legs, and then Chaucer moves into the Prohemium of Book II and the tempestuous matere of disespeir that Troilus was inne : one cannot take this matere or the courtly lover, Troilus, seriously. A sentence like To tel al how, it axeth muchel space(II,1071) speaks volumes on the content and volume of Troilus's letter.
The irony fades as the narrative approaches and passes the consummation. Now Chaucer has not the vocabulary to describe their hevene blisse(1323ff ; 1688-94). The irony is gone in Book IV, as Chaucer identifies more and more with the now mature, grief-stricken Troilus, save where he chides thilke fooles(IV,715) for their intrusion on Criseyde's grief. In Book V,Chaucer translates Boethius's idea---that God's 'foreknowledge', as people describe it, is really total knowledge, say, of a person's life, in a non-temporal dimension---into narrative technique :
(1) With Criseyde, I kan nat telle hir age--irrelevant in Boethian vision ;
(2) We plummet back to Troilus's deeds of derring do, i.e. this is one aspect of the total, all-of-a-piece vision
of Troilus ;
(3) The iterative spak...spak...speken...seye...seyd throughout is character-less rendition : Boethian God would not need to ' colour' words to render a narrative, as a human author does ;
(4) Troilus's letter complete is enclosed to convey what genuine human emotion does with language, as contrasted with the dispassionate seyd...spak.. ;
(5) Cassandra's exposition is included to show a prophetess replicating the Boethian mode---a sequence of exempla, roughly one to a paragraph, beginning with the colourless she tolde, and where the mythological tale is reduced to bare outline. But her exposition highlights the extent of a human comprehensive vision : a continuum--And so descendeth down from gestes olde/ To Diomede...(V,1511-2)--down to the present, plus her reading of the future.
The point of all this is for Chaucer to show that the apparently jumbled items just listed will look jumbled because the human vision is measured in terms of time and sequence. These are heterogeneous. But if the vision of the author --as creator and god--is Boethian, then the seeming jumble is part of the whole as Boethian God sees it, and it is homogeneous.
The Boethian time-dimension is eternity, and Chaucer has been at pains to show Troilus's maturity-through-love as something exceptional to the human world we see. Troilus loves Criseyde not only unto death, but for a Boethian evermore. It is the singularity of this love which merits Troilus's translation into the Stellatum. The god after whose image young fresshe folkes are made (V,1835ff) is the divine Troilus, the star-crossed, who first starf, and roos, and sit in hevene above. They loveth hym, not 'Hym'. Troilus is now in the eternal Boethian dimension, where he can see and laugh at human partiality, from a homogeneous viewpoint. Chaucer elevates him thus because he discovered, out of all the disparate worldly elements, the homogeneity of love.
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