[In the following essay, Palmer analyzes the function of the narrator in The Owl and the Nightingale, examining how the poem eludes interpretation.]

The appearance of Kathryn Hume's full-length study of the difficulties of interpretation posed by the Middle English Owl and the Nightingale has effectively silenced what had been, for the last three decades or so, a lively (if chaotic) debate over the meaning of the poem. Since Hume's persuasive debunking of a wide variety of previous hermeneutic claims in 1975, no new thoroughgoing reading, in fact, has been proposed. Thus her own view that this literary debate is a burlesque-satire which takes as its object “human contentiousness” has been unchallenged.¹ Though I agree with Constance Hieatt that Hume has performed a “much-needed job of house-cleaning” by pointing out the inadequacies of previous interpretative efforts, I do believe that Hume's reading of the poem is likewise seriously flawed.²

Hieatt has suggested that, mindful of the failure of past scholarship, we should go back to the poem itself, and that is what I intend to do here. In particular, I hope to demonstrate that The Owl and the Nightingale is self-reflexive, that it is a poem which transforms the task of its own reading into an aspect of content. Metafictional structures in the poem deliberately undermine, by establishing different stances to the understanding of the birds' debate, any attempt at a transcendent interpretation, at a reading that would take us beyond the boundaries of literary experience as the text defines them. In short, I will argue that the poem is not the serio-comic treatment of any theme, as Hume would have it, but rather a playful exploration, based on the expectations aroused by certain genres and by medieval literary tradition in general, of the processes by which texts, in collaboration with the reader, either construct or (more blatantly) offer up their own meaning. Central to my argument is a full-scale analysis of the poem's narrator, who, in the tradition of the exemplum and fable, functions as the reader's surrogate in the text, as an intelligence who attempts to (but never succeeds in) writing out the meaning of the avian debate he witnesses. Before turning to the poem itself, however, we can usefully begin with a brief survey of critical opinion, for these various readings, when placed in the context of certain larger structural features of the work, have much to tell us about the contradictory stances that the narrator adopts toward the discussion he witnesses.

In reviewing briefly critical work on the poem I do not intend to follow Hume in testing the adequacy of different readings; instead I would like to examine the significance of the fact that such readings have been wildly conflicting, much more so than those occasioned by most other medieval texts. Beyond an extensive body of scholarship that has sought answers to the historical questions of authorship, date, and provenance, critical treatment of the poem uniformly falls into the category of what Tzvetan Todorov would term “interpretation” (or the filling in of the gaps in the text's consciousness of its own message) rather than “analysis” (or the structural description of the ways that the text works to produce meaning).³ We might say that the gaps in The Owl and the Nightingale are particularly troubling to the hermeneutic enterprise: the debate raises the issue of outside judgment but the poem does not represent the scene of decision; the issues debated range from the serious (and human) to the trivial (and largely avian); the disputants, though they are advocates of differing views on a range of important matters, are never identified chiefly with one question, be it political, artistic, social, or characterological. The underlying assumption of the poem's critics, however, has been, as Hume puts it, “that valid interpretation is possible,” a hermeneutic expectation that, as many have maintained, is essentially a modern notion.⁴

In Critical Practice, for example, Catherine Belsey argues persuasively that works from the older periods of English literature do not always set up to be read like the realist fiction of Eliot and Dickens. In particular, she challenges the notion that the poems of Donne or the plays of Shakespeare, for example, uniformly contain an ordering of discourses which, through the devices of closure and disclosure, reveals the “truth” about the represented world within. If in Middlemarch a narrative metalanguage recuperates the differences among the characters' separate points of view and renders up an unchallengeable “presence” of meaning, such a device is lacking in a play like Coriolanus, which instead foregrounds the paradox “that heroic individualism is both necessary to and destructive of a militaristic society.”⁵ Expanding on the views of Roland Barthes, Belsey suggests that literary texts fall into three general categories. The declarative text works diligently toward the suppression of any contradiction between its overt thematic project and the challenges posed to that project by the work's constitutive discourses; it generates some form of metalanguage to contain these contradictions. Like the declarative, the imperative text reconciles conflict in the name of “readerliness,” but does so with a view toward engaging the reader's partisanship. Interrogative texts, however, work toward the display of paradox and irresolution, for they emphasize the differences of the claims for meaning and attention made by their constituent discourses.

My point is this: the Hirschian expectation of Hume (and of course others) that a singular and valid interpretation of the poem is possible may well be historically inappropriate. Like other works from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, The Owl and the Nightingale might be an interrogative text whose “meaning” resides precisely in an unwillingness to provide final answers and resolve contradictions.

Such a view of the poem goes against established opinion, but, it seems to me, criticism devoted to medieval texts has in large measure failed to grapple with the historical limitations of its underlying assumptions and methods of analysis. Nineteenth-century canons of vraisemblance can hardly account for literary practices (and expectations) which are based on radically different notions of the relationship between “text” and “world,” as the recently burgeoning attention to intertextuality as a determining principle of medieval literary production demonstrates.⁶ Likewise, modern notions of closure (and of the structural functions such as narrative metalanguage which are designed to achieve it) are clearly derived from the practice of classic realist writers, yet these notions have obviously influenced even “historical” approaches to medieval works, notably Robertsonianism. While the fourfold method of Biblical exegesis produces an open and plural text resistant to closure (as readers of Gregory's Moralia in Job will agree and as Fredric Jameson demonstrates in his radical cooptation of this critical theory⁷), Robertsonianism has assumed a univocal text in which elements of the dialogic tend to be interpreted away.⁸

Closer attention to the ways medieval works produce meaning will, I believe, lead to a more historical understanding of their literariness; in Troilus and Criseyde, for example, the narrator's concept of the “story” as equally something fixed which pre-exists his discourse and yet also a dynamic process or a structuration of meaning reveals more about the poem's construction of its (and I would argue necessarily ambiguous) interpretation than any extratextually-derived “code of reading.”⁹ Like Chaucer's poem, The Owl and the Nightingale is a work which repays this kind of analysis, for its discursive structures aim at an interrogation rather than a declaration of “meaning,” as we will see below.

The fact that the readings occasioned by the poem fall largely into two opposed categories gives further weight to this supposition. Calling attention to whimsical literary debates in Latin and the various vernaculars as well as to the comic uses of animal characters in the fable and beast epic, some scholars have maintained that the poem is a farcical sic et non that depends for its humor, in large measure, on the incongruous juxtaposition of avian debaters and questions with human relevance. Others, on the contrary, have suggested that the poem is an attempt to propound some serious issue (which has been variously identified) and that the birds, in the manner of medieval allegory, are therefore used as ciphers for opposing views.¹⁰ Because it involves the rewriting of the poem in political, aesthetic, philosophical, or religious terms, this second approach has been the most productive of variant interpretations.

The diversity of critical opinion, however, is interesting not only because it seems to index the poem's resistance to interpretative closure; the two categories of readings produced by the poem also correspond roughly to medieval methods for reading this kind of literature. As a hermeneutic procedure, allegoresis bears a close similarity to an important structural feature of the exemplum and fable: both of these story types customarily (but not always) end with a moralitas delivered by the narrator that rewrites the letter of the narrative as a “lesson.” Content with an immanent interpretation (and hence with the elucidation of the various mechanisms of humor such as invective, irony, and burlesque), the critics who argue for the comic view also have their medieval counterparts: the reader (and indeed the text) satisfied with the pleasures of literary mimesis and narrative.

The twelfth-century French Isopet, for example, a translation into verse of a Latin fable collection, points out to its prospective reader both these different strategies of enjoyment/intellectual nourishment:

Me voil traveillier et pener
D'un petit jardin ahener
Ou chascuns porra, si me samble,
Cuillir et fruit et fleur ensemble:
Fleur, que a ⊙ir est delitables,
Fruis, quar en fait est profitables.
Qui la fleur plaira, la fleur prengne,
Et qui le fruit, le fruit retiegne;
Qui voudra le fruit et la fleur,
Prengne les deus, c'est le meilleur.

(7-16)

[I intend to take pains in and apply myself to constructing a tiny garden where everyone might, so it seems to me, gather fruit and flowers together: flowers, which are delightful to hear, and fruit, because it's undoubtedly advantageous. Let him who likes the flower, take the flower, and let him who likes the fruit keep it for himself; whoever would like the fruit and the flowers, let him take both, for that's the very best.]¹¹

Modern readers of the Middle English poem fall neatly into all three categories, with those moralists desirous of fruit alone undoubtedly the dominant party. In attempting to reconcile the poem's comedy (burlesque) with a serious rhetorical purpose (satire), Hume obviously aligns herself with what, at least in the Isopet, is praised as the best strategy for reading a text whose surface (and easily appreciated) pleasures might lead to the consumption of more solid, moral nourishment. Modern criticism, in short, has responded to The Owl and the Nightingale in ways recognized within the tradition of such learned genres as the debate and the fable, genres that, controlled by the notion of translatio studii, demand a “serious” attention to their significatio and yet an enjoyment of their littera. Furthermore, we should remark that the author of the Isopet, though producing a text with explicitly drawn moral lessons, recognizes a variety of reading strategies that his audience might adopt. What is written as dulce et utile might be understood dulce aut utile. We should, moreover, not fail to notice that the narrator's own project of rewriting the fable with the topos of the garden pleasantly (and probably intentionally) breaks down in favor of the special circumstances of storytelling pleasure. The flowers he has to offer are indeed delectable to hear.

Returning to the Middle English poem, we see that dulce and utile constructions of the text find an obvious reflection (and to a large measure a source) in the two debaters themselves. The Nightingale, a bird who prizes the aesthetic and the sensuous, defines her service to mankind as an enhancement of human enjoyment, while the Owl, as Hume puts it, “represents all that is conservative, ascetic, and solemn,” discovering her own usefulness to man in her baleful warnings and exhortations to reform.¹² Furthermore the debate itself, inevitably reflecting the natures and weltanschauungen of the disputants, moves back and forth from moments that can only be called humorous (these involve not only name-calling but obvious failures on the parts of the birds to be consistent, perceptive, or to the point) to moments which, because they deal with human questions such as the struggle for salvation and the gravity of mortal sin, necessarily evoke a serious response, at least in part. As Hume suggests, both the oscillating tone of the argument and the fact that neither bird receives the endorsement of a judgment in her favor mean that strictly humorous and strictly serious approaches to the poem are equally unable to incorporate or explain the poem's nature as a whole. Any decision in favor of the flower of pleasure or the fruit of morality is further militated against by the inconclusiveness of the debate's finale, which is not characterized by any inherent resistance of the argument to settlement but rather by the narrator's decision not to represent the scene of judgment.

With this in mind, Hume's view of the poem becomes both attractive (because it is a more comprehensive explanation of the work's various features) and, in a sense, authorized (genres such as the literary debate belong to the tradition of dulce et utile consumption). There are, however, serious objections to Hume's interpretation. Beyond some general considerations of the poem as a literary debate, Hume is unable to account for The Owl and the Nightingale's satiric rhetoric in terms of either specific models or types. Medieval literature, we must remember, is tightly structured by a network of intertextual relationships. These involve not only an omnipresent sense of literary history (those auctores peering over the writer's shoulder) but the unshakable conception of literary production as a series of categories or genres. The second flaw, I think, is a more damaging one: the reading off of “human contentiousness” as the subject of the satire. Human contentiousness is not one of the issues debated by the birds, nor does the debate itself, which with its humor and good will argues for the pleasures involved in the witnessing of quarreling, demonstrate that contentiousness is to be condemned. At the end of their argument the birds fly off together, and it is the narrator's expectation that somehow they will be reconciled. Hume suggests that because both birds raise the issue of the deaths suffered by owls and nightingales at the hands of men this proves the disastrous consequences of contention. But, as Hieatt has pointed out, “the men who crucify owls or dismember nightingales are not ‘quarreling’ with the birds.”¹³ We are, in short, no more authorized by the text to name “human contentiousness” as the theme of the debate than other commentators have been to rewrite it in other ways.

The failure of the hermeneutic enterprise seems to me rather strong evidence that the poem deliberately resists efforts at interpretation, that it is, in fact, an interrogative text designed to foil such attempts. Examining the narrator's role, however, we can come to a more specific conclusion. For, as we will see, the function of this structure in the poem is to keep the reader off balance about the way the text should be read.

Traditionally, critics have treated The Owl and the Nightingale as if it were a dramatic dialogue; the poem, however, is diegesis, not mimesis, the argument between the birds reported (and to a large extent) mediated by the presence of a narrator. Hume's characterization of the poem's form is typical. She acknowledges that a narrator establishes the tone at the outset, but errs in observing that “once the birds start to exchange acidulous comments, the narrator effaces himself.”¹⁴ This is simply not true, for the narrator, though he does disappear during some of the longer exchanges, is present in the poem from beginning to end. His often long comments on the different stages of the discussion have not entirely escaped critical notice. In Criticism and Medieval Poetry, A. C. Spearing, for example, calls attention to one such passage (lines 669-706) as an example of the rhetorical figure of amplificatio. Not only, he states, does it provide “some sort of interlude” for an audience perhaps tiring from the debate's fast pace. It also marks a “turning-point in the development of the poem's meaning,” when the poet's sympathies shift from the attractive Nightingale to the solemn Owl.¹⁵ Spearing's commentary on this passage is, I think, essentially correct. The interpretation of the poem he bases upon it, however, misses the mark, because, like other critics, he pays no attention to the narrator's other and frequent interventions.

The narrator's role in the poem, however, is easily defined, since he interests himself from the beginning not only in the reportage of an unusual event at which he is accidentally present, but also in its interpretation/analysis. In so doing he functions in some of the same ways as the narrator of the fable. But if the author of the poem has utilized a convention of the fable literature with which he was so obviously well acquainted (for embodied in the text are several short versions of fables), he has made it serve quite different ends. The narrator in this poem, in fact, renders “correct” interpretation quite impossible, because his view of the action is inconsistent. At times he is detached and ironic, while at others he is involved and serious. In the beginning he makes us believe that the proceeding at which we are imaginatively present is humorously incongruous. Later, however, he suggests that the debate is a search for truth and justice. His initial attitude, moreover, suits the Nightingale's demand for sensuous pleasure and her adamant rejection of solemnity. But a change of heart puts the narrator on the side of the moralistic Owl.

Like the birds, the narrator thus sees the discussion from two irreconciled viewpoints. When he is sympathetic to the Nightingale, he makes us believe that the poem is something of which that somewhat frivolous creature would approve: a charming divertissement. Agreeing with the Owl, however, he finds a different rationale for song, namely that it benefits (or at least should benefit) those who hear it. Near the debate's end, however, the narrator withdraws into an unexplained neutrality. The judge agreed upon by the disputants, however, has divided sympathies, much like the narrator. A misspent youth, we are told, found him enamored of the Nightingale's delightful music, though in maturity he has listened more intently to the Owl's message. We never discover, of course, if this Master Nicholas of Guildford has truly been converted to the Owl's point of view. Similarly the claims of the disputants are left unadjudicated by the text.

The narrator begins by announcing the strange experience that forms the subject of his poem, an experience which he frames lightheartedly in the inappropriate language of the law:

Iherde ich holde grete tale
An Hule and one Niȝtingale.
Þat plait was stif & starc & strong,
Sum wile softe & lud among.
An aiþer aȝen oþer sval
& let þat vvole mod ut al;
& eiþer seide of oþeres custe
Þat alre worste þat hi wuste.
& hure & hure of oþere[s] songe
Hi holde plaiding suþe stronge.(16)

(3-12)

With its playful directness, its avoidance of pious invocation and any reference to literary tradition, this opening signals humorous intent to any reader familiar with the customary moralizing of the serious prose and verse of the period.¹⁷ The narrator, we learn, is no clerk feeling the burden of translatio studii, but rather a chance observer, who, avoiding any interference in the birds' dispute, chooses to relate it. His motive is thus narrative, not didactic, the inventive “fictionality” of the text an index of its desire to entertain. Present at an event only imaginatively possible, the narrator, moreover, is strictly fictional himself; he asks to be read as an element of the work's structure and not as an intradiegetic representative of the author. In the fable, on the contrary, the narrator is set apart from the realm of the story in the metafictional—but still textual—area of its interpretation.

Yet the narrator at this point is more than a character whose witnessing of the birds' debate places him in much the same role as the reader (or listener) of the poem. For his misappropriation of legal jargon—words like tale, speche, and plait are legalisms—suggests his complicity in what, in the beginning, promises to be one of the poem's main effects: the juxtaposition of human and human manqué for their comic effect, a humorous device which, although it has its roots in the anthropomorphism of the fable, is more obvious a product of the beast epic. In the Roman de Renart, which during the likely period of the Middle English poem's composition (c. 1180-1250) was at the height of its international popularity, the animal figures of the fable are removed from that genre's somewhat abstract mise-en-scène and placed in a setting more similar to everyday reality, a setting in which the society of animals is formed on the analogy of that of men.¹⁸ Like the Owl and the Nightingale, the Fox and the Wolf of the beast epic move in a “realistic” world, a world in which they are, incongruously, still beasts, but beasts with human desires, failings, and institutions.

Because at this stage the narrator of the poem, like the narrator of the beast epic, serves the essentially comic purpose of underlining the impossibility (and hence the fictionality) of the experience he relates, it is also fitting that his sympathies (hardly, however, real partisanship) lie with the nightingale who finds sensuous pleasure in song. And, appropriately enough, he reacts favorably to the harmony of her singing because of the analogy with human music that the sound forces upon him:

Ho was þe gladur uor þe rise,
& song a uele cunne wise.
Bet þuȝte þe dreim þat he were
Of harpe & pipe þan he nere.

(19-22)

Silent throughout the Nightingale's initial attack, the owl affords no pleasure; she therefore receives no compliments from the narrator. Detached at first, he has become a superficial critic of the proceeding. And as long as the argument concerns the birds' natures alone, the Nightingale, because of her obvious appeal, will remain the narrator's favorite.

After the birds decide on a proper debate, however, the narrator's attitude shifts dramatically. The Owl defends her nature (lines 269-308) as that proper to “hauekes cunne,” slyly introducing into the argument a point based on the human notion of the chain of being here applied analogically to avian society (an idea, of course, that is presented more dramatically in Chaucer's Parlement of Fowles). This rationale is intellectual and shifts the discussion, at least for the moment, away from simple flyting. The Owl further suggests a new standard according to which different songs should be judged. Pure delight in “harpe & pipe & fuȝeles song” (343) can, she maintains, be overdone. A superfluity of any good, except that of God's kingdom, soon becomes objectionable. And discussion of benefit, as necessarily limited by moderation, leads almost inevitably into the Owl's claim about the importance of serving mankind:

Ich do god mid mine þrote
& warni men to hore note.
Ich folȝi þan aȝte manne,
An flo bi niȝte in hore banne.

(329-30, 389-90)

No matter that this second point, in particular, is a dubious construction of the owl's nighttime activity and interests, the Nightingale is befuddled by a different tack in the discussion. Her plight engages the narrator's attention:

Þe Niȝtingale in hire þoȝte
Athold al þis, & longe þoȝte
Wat ho þarafter miȝte segge;
Vor ho ne miȝte noȝt alegge
Þat þe Hule hadde hire ised,
Vor he spac boþe riȝt an red.

(391-96)

Here the narrator has obviously adopted the Owl's point of view, though it is uncertain, because formulated in something resembling indirect free discourse, whether it is the narrator's, the Nightingale's, or the narrator and nightingale's shared view that the owl has said what is true and right. In any case, the narrator's comment here suggests to the reader that song can not only speak the truth, but it can also urge good counsel. The Owl's sharply conceived defense of her nature and abilities, in other words, has caused the narrator (like the Nightingale) to reconsider the relationship between the world of birds and that of men or, analogically, the relationship between the text and the reader.

The narrator's earlier attitude was that the juxtaposition of the birds and a human observer was the occasion for comic dismissal, to be accomplished by his characterization of avian argument in terms of human discourse (that of the law). Following the Owl's call for the human relevance of the birds' various activities, the narrator begins to view the debate as an experience which can be interpreted in the light of human wisdom. The narrator, in short, functions here in the mode of the fable narrator, rewriting the Nightingale's behavior as an instance illustrating a proverb:

Ac noþeles he spac boldeliche;
Vor he is wis þat hardeliche
Wiþ is uo berþ grete ilete,
Þat he uor areȝþe hit ne forlete:
Vor suich worþ bold ȝif þu fliȝst
Þat wle flo ȝif þu (n)isvicst;
Yif he isiþ þat þu nart areȝ
He wile of bore wrchen bareȝ.

(401-08)

This short quotation hardly does justice to the tone and style of the narrator's intervention. The commentary lasts some twenty lines (lines 390-410) and is characterized by a homely didacticism which bears no trace of the comic sense revealed in the narrator's opening remarks. Since a pleasant song is no longer sufficient in itself as a criterion of judgment, he has begun, like the Owl, to seek the fruit of moral nourishment concealed by the pretty flowers of the debate's humorous surface.

After this radical shift in attitude, the narrator continues to move us from the world of animals (embodied truth) to the world of men (its moral application) and then back again. The truths he gleans, however, are strictly psychological, as when he remarks (lines 665-74) about the difficulty involved in putting up a brave front in the absence of inner conviction. Certainly he never explicitly supports any of the Owl's intellectual positions beyond a general endorsement of her valid argumentation. He never addresses himself to the issues debated, but he does adopt a stylistic level very similar to that used by the Owl, a stylistic level which, with its repetitions and circular reasoning, often resembles homiletic prose. The narrator's sententiousness appears genuine, as when he remarks:

For Aluered seide of olde quide—
An ȝut hit nis of horte islide:
“Wone þe bale is alre hecst
Þonne is þe bote alre necst.”

(685-88)

The movement of such commentary suggests an allegorizing of the text; but the fact is that the proverb, once enunciated, has more application to the progress of the debate itself than to the more generalized, humanized realm of morality that the fable's significatio trades in. In the fable, the moralitas is less a comment on the narrative which engenders it than a replacement for it. This means that the moralitas often maintains only a tenuous connection with the narrative; as Albert Pauphilet has said, the closing moral “dévie souvent, interprète tout de travers l'exemple où il s'appuie, et se peine pour en tirer un enseignement qui n'est pas celui qu'on attendait, and qui souvent vaut moins.”¹⁹ In the Middle English poem, on the contrary, the narrator's moralizing expends itself in extended commentary, such as the passage (lines 659-700) where the proverb above is quoted twice and where many lines are devoted to a painstaking and finally tedious attempt to make a rather obvious point about human resilience in extremis.

The effect of the narrator's remarks, however, is to make the reader return to the text, his critical attention focused more on the letter than the lesson of the proceedings. The narrator, in short, becomes another version of the Owl, who tries but signally fails to raise the horizon of the debate beyond the fact of different natures. The narrator's didactic tone does hint that the poem has some serious intent (and seems, in fact, to have been responsible in some measure for the view of many modern readers that it does). If they were familiar at all with learned genres such as the fable and the literary debate, medieval readers, it seems to me, would not have been so easily taken in. They would likely have read the narrator as the straw man he is, a structure designed to provoke interest in the kind of reading the poem demands for itself. The hermeneutic circle of his commentary shows that the reading strategy recommended plays with the notion of allegoresis but finally returns us directly to the pleasant surfaces of the debate. Notoriously silent about the larger aspects of literary structure, medieval critical theory offers, at least to my knowledge, no support for this “interrogative” analysis of the poem's manner of presentation. Schooled in the open pluralism of biblical exegesis, however, the educated reader for whom this poem was obviously destined would have experienced little difficulty in recognizing the English author's separation of the levels of meaning represented by the discourses of his two debaters, a separation that he fails to recuperate with the narrator's metalanguage. For like the narrator in Troilus and Criseyde, the teller of this tale reflects a “process” of meaning beyond his ability to unify and simplify.

The clearest signal of this rhetorical intent is the fact that the narrator's attitude shifts once again. After another extended comment replete with proverb (lines 940-54), he reassumes his initial ironic detachment. When describing the Nightingale's reaction to the news that one of her fellows had been murdered by a cuckolded husband, the narrator observes:

Þe Niȝtingale at þisse worde
Mid sworde an mid speres orde,
ȝif ho mon were, wolde fiȝte;
Ac þo ho bet do ne miȝte
Ho uaȝt mid hire wise tunge.
“Wel fiȝt þat wel specþ,” seiþ in þe songe.
Of hire tunge ho nom red:
“Wel fiȝt þat wel specþ,” seide Alured.

(1067-74)

Here the simple wisdom of the old saw underlines a humorous comment. Angry enough to “fight like a man,” the Nightingale, after all, is only a bird. And possessing neither arms nor martial vigor, she decides on the next best course—talking, one which, however, is itself hardly avian. Here the narrator, as at the poem's beginning, calls attention to the birds' incongruous burlesque of human action. The tongue is indeed often mightier than the sword, but the narrator is not seriously offering this lesson. He uses it instead to underline the fictionality of the debate's playful surface.

His ironic tone, moreover, serves to deflate the importance of the issues raised at this point. The Owl maintains that even dead she continues to help man, hanging on a hayrick to scare off magpies and crows from newly planted fields. The Nightingale, however, boasts that she has won because the Owl speaks of her own shame. Making no claims about either the Nightingale's or the owl's “riȝt” or “red,” the narrator turns his attention instead to the birds who assemble happily, thinking the Nightingale victorious. All argument is at this point abandoned as the Owl must respond to ad baculum persuasion. As the dialogue sinks again to threats and invective, the narrator's role becomes the underlining of the scene's absurd disorder:

Þeos Hule spac wel baldeliche,
For þah heo nadde swo hwatliche
Ifare after hire here,
Heo walde neoþeles ȝefe answere
Þe Niȝtegale mid swucche worde.
For moni man mid speres orde
Haueþ lutle strencþe, & mid his chelde,
Ah neoþeles in one felde
Þurh belde worde an mid ilete
Deþ his iuo for arehþe swete.

(1707-16)

A squawking crowd of birds is no true analogy for the grim encounter of war. Thus the narrator's juxtaposition of images does not teach, but amuse. The Owl's feistiness is merely a comic distortion of human bravery.

The arrival of the Wren, however, threatens this comic scene with interpretation. To decide which of the debates has the upper hand would be to suggest that her outlook on life is correct and, correspondingly, which way of reading the text is appropriate. With a represented judgment, the poem would fulfill the traditional didactic purpose of fable literature, a purpose that is obviously incarnated in the wisdom of the Wren as the narrator describes her:

Þe Wranne was wel wis iholde,
For þeȝ heo nere ibred a wolde,
Ho was itoȝen among mankenne
An hire wisdom brohte þenne.
Heo miȝte speke hwar heo walde,
Touore þe king þah heo scholde.

(1723-28)

Even though she is wise, the Wren cannot resolve the dispute judiciously because she is the Nightingale's friend.

The birds then decide to take their case to Master Nicholas, but he would be a judge with hopelessly divided sympathies, someone very much like the poem's narrator, in fact. As the Nightingale tells us at the very beginning (lines 192-98), Master Nicholas is a moralist and music critic par excellence. The Owl adds that, in passing from youth to maturity, he has moreover learned to appreciate not only the Nightingale's pleasant harmony but the Owl's serious message:

Vor þeȝ he were wile breme,
& lof him were niȝtingale
& oþer wiȝte gente & smale,
Ich wot he is nu suþe acoled.

(202-05)

Because of the Nightingale's enthusiasm for Nicholas, however, we cannot be certain that the Owl is correct in assuming he will judge in her favor. More important, the narrator in effect decides that the reader will never learn the result of Nicholas's deliberations. The poem ends with the birds flying off to seek a resolution of their dispute. The narrator, however, must remain behind, for, like the reader himself, his search for correct understanding is limited by his role as witness to an extraordinary event. Nicholas, the poem's exemplar of human nature, resolves within himself the attraction to pleasure and the need for instruction. But any account of a judgment that would settle the contradictions of human nature (or the contradictions of a human “song” such as the poem itself) would exceed the boundaries of fiction as the narrator wisely defines them:

Au hu heo spedde of heore dome
Ne can ich eu na more telle.
Her nis na more of þis spelle.

(1792-94)

This ultimate refusal of closure, however, hardly comes as a surprise to the attentive and responsive reader of The Owl and the Nightingale. For through the agency of the narrator strategies of interpretation are identified through the poem with the opposed positions/natures of the two birds, and neither strategy is endorsed as sufficient to the nature of the debate. The narrator quickly realizes, once the Owl raises the issue of the birds' relationship to man, that the simple comic view of the animals, derived from the tradition of beast epic, is clearly inadequate because it can only underline the incongruity of birds functioning as characters in human discourse. Sympathizing with the Owl, he then attempts, in the manner of the fable, to write out the meaning of the proceedings according to those elements of proverbial wisdom which ordinarily constitute the content of the fable's moralitas. This interpretative move, however, also fails, as the narrator's commentary moves us not beyond the narrative into some realm of moral deliberation with only a tenuous connection to the story but rather leads us inexorably back to the unfinished debate itself. The poem's end balances off both dulce and utile constructions of the text. On the one hand, the narrator himself resumes a comic view of the proceedings, once again emphasizing the lack of fit between animal characters and human concerns/language. On the other hand, the debate projects itself toward judgment, toward the prospect of interpretation and rewriting which the Owl herself, in introducing the notion that the birds' natures are not so important in themselves as they are to mankind, has offered us as a means of understanding their dispute.

The Owl and the Nightingale, in short, presents itself as an interrogative text resistant to hermeneutic criticism in the sense that it does not permit the horizon of meaning to be raised beyond the limits of the fiction itself; like the narrator, the reader must be satisfied with not knowing and with not being able to produce the fictional experience of the debate as something final or closed. The poem does not authorize us either to name its subject or its conclusions, but rather forces us to experience partial and unsatisfactory attempts to do so. Earlier I suggested that one of the problems with Hume's reading of the poem is that it does not offer a firm connection to the contemporary world of texts into which The Owl and the Nightingale was inserted. Focusing on the narrator figure, however, we can see that one of his primary functions is to recall to the reader a repertoire of reading strategies gleaned from the consumption of similar kinds of literary works. In that sense the Middle English poem is “about” the tradition of which it has become a part.

It is precisely this aspect of the poem which further, hermeneutically oriented work needs to probe, especially with a view toward rewriting its intent and effects within the larger social and literary horizons of the Middle Ages. The metafictional structures and yet socio-intellectual content of the work suggest a connection with what Bakhtin has termed the “dialogically imagined” works of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the primary example of which are the texts of Rabelais.²⁰ In Rabelais, as Bakhtin points out, social contradictions are displayed by a literary representation that parodies the mechanisms of literary discourse. Much the same can be said of this early Middle English poem, as I hope to have indicated here.

Notes

1. The Owl and the Nightingale: The Poem and Its Critics (Toronto, 1975).

2. “A Full-Length Study of The Owl and the Nightingale,” Mosaic 10 (1976): 149.

3. “How to Read?” in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, 1977), 234-46.

4. Hume, ix.

5. (London, 1980), 96.

6. The criterion of vraisemblance has produced a particularly distorted view of medieval literary production when applied to writers who felt most strongly the burdens of—but also the opportunities made possible by—tradition. For discussion of this question with specific reference to Guillaume de Machaut see R. Barton Palmer, ed. and trans., The Judgment of the King of Bohemia (Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne), Garland Library of Medieval Literature 9 (New York, 1984), xvi-xxvii, and also Kevin Brownlee's important study, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison, 1984).

7. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981), 17-102.

8. This is not to say, of course, that the Robertsonian critique of other “closed” approaches to medieval texts does not continue to furnish valuable insights about the historical nature of this literature. See, in particular, Robertson's analysis of doctrinaire views about “amour courtois” in A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, 1962), 391-503.

9. I would agree wholeheartedly with John Ganim's view that “the gist of the best recent criticism of the poem has been to show how the narrator, the hero, and the philosophical background of the poem all change before our very eyes.” See his Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton, 1983), 79.

10. For a full-scale discussion of these different critical approaches see Hume, 51-83, 101-18.

11. The text is from Albert Pauphilet, ed., Jeux ex sapience du moyen age (Paris, 1951), 452. The translation is my own.

12. Hume, 55

13. Hieatt, 149

14. Hume, 98

15. 2nd ed. (New York, 1972), 73.

16. All quotations from the poem are from E. G. Stanley, ed., The Owl and the Nightingale (London, 1960).

17. For a most enlightening discussion of the uses of the narrator in poetry of this period see Karl D. Uitti, “The Clerkly Narrator Figure in Old French Hagiography and Romance,” Medioevo Romanzo 2 (1975): 394-408, many of the conclusions of which have some application to early Middle English literary structures.

18. See Robert Bossuat, Le Roman de Renard (Paris, 1967), 90-121.

19. Pauphilet, 448

20. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).