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FACULTY: EXPERT
Carolynn Van Dyke
Photography By Chuck Zovko
CHAUCER’S AGENTS
 long with their obvious vices of gluttony, gambling, and swearing, the three protagonists
of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale practice bad hermeneutics. Hearing that the “privee theef men clepeth Deeth” has  killed their companion, they somehow miss the explicit personification and set out to apprehend the “false traytour.” Later, they prove themselves deaf to metaphor when they ignore an old man’s warning
that the gold under a nearby tree is indeed Death. Their misinterpretations extend to their
own identity: fancying themselves to be autonomous individuals, they become figures in an exemplum.
The Pardoner’s three rioters are not the only Chaucerian characters who miscategorize other agents. . . . Nor is such interpretive nearsightedness limited to Chaucer’s characters: his readers have rung a series of changes on the rioters’ errors. Early in the twentieth century, for instance,
many critics treated the figments
of Chaucer’s imagination as real.
. . . Some readers even invented determining biographies: R.K. Root opined that Alison of Bath developed her “excessive coarseness of speech” because her upbringing in the cloth trade had stunted “the natural fineness of her nature.”
At mid-century the exegetical critics reversed such particularizations and defined Chaucer’s agents primarily as “reflections of a conceptual reality”.
. . . For instance, D. W. Robertson, Jr. wrote that Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale and Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale “are little more than personified abstractions of Patience and Constancy.” Allegorizations have become less popular lately, but they do continue. . . .
Readers in the late twentieth century found yet another focal point. Rejecting both the allegorization and the literalization of Chaucer’s characters, they focused not on character per se but on its formation or representation. . . .
All of those readings illuminate Chaucer’s texts, but they occlude a great deal as well. The biographical speculations of Root enlarge the lifelike individuality of Chaucer’s characters but obscure his use of social and rhetorical conventions. Conversely, exegesis such as Robertson’s can blind us to the interplay between allegorical principles and unruly particulars. For good reason, then, both strategies have lost influence. But even more modern approaches result in one-dimensional readings. In particular, the dauntingly complex theories based on subjectivity and voice often end by reducing a text to the expression of a fictional narrator’s psyche. . . .
Indeed, to ascribe Chaucer’s narratives to any single agent—whether a lifelike character, a doctrine, a fragmented subject, or even an omnipotent author—recapitulates the rioters’ error, blinding us to much of what we seek. Admittedly we can never grasp a text completely, particularly a text as rich and distant in time as Chaucer’s major works. But I maintain that we can see more of any complex text, particularly Chaucer’s, if we shift our focus from the particular governing principles posited by many critics to a wider principal of which they are all variations: agency. . . .
AGENCY AND ITS DOUBLINGS
In calling for a focus on agency,
I cannot claim originality. On the contrary, the term has become a buzzword, not just in literary studies but more broadly. Agency and agent appear in hundreds of recent publications on (for instance) anthropology, archaeology, computer science, economics, history, law, linguistics, political science, philosophy, theology, and such
late-bloomers as cultural studies.
And Chaucerians . . . cite agency as
a central issue, notion, or problem.
But agency is discussed with more enthusiasm than precision. It is seldom defined, perhaps because it constitutes what semanticists call a “natural categor[y],” one of our “universal, presumably innate, concepts.” A philosopher writes of agency that “when everything that can be explained has been explained, there remains something that in a prima facie sense is both indispensable and needs no further explanation.”
Further explanation is needed, however, because we use agency and agent in remarkably inconsistent ways. Indeed, I see two inconsistencies.
The first concerns the kind of thing that can be an agent or can possess agency. For many writers, including most literary scholars, that thing is normally a human being. . . .
Chaucerians who call for attention to the “issue” or “problem” of agency mean that we should consider the ways in which Chaucer’s works represent the formation, fulfillment, and contravention of human desires and intentions. When [Lee] Patterson writes that many Americans “agree on a central point: the inefficacy of agency,” he too implies that “agency” follows “human” and means something like “individual autonomy.” But the term has a broader and more fundamental meaning, one that makes nonsense of “the inefficacy of agency.” The first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is “The faculty of an agent or of acting.” An agent is, in turn, “One who (or that which) acts or exerts power. . . . Of things:
The efficient cause; . . . .Hence in mod. Science: Any natural force acting upon matter.” Agency is by definition efficacious—action presumes an agent—and it need not be human, social, or even animate. . . .
I deal with [this first inconsistency] by simply adopting the broader definition of agency, not its limited reference to human beings. . . .
The second definitional inconsistency concerns what it means to be an agent, human or otherwise. On the one hand . . . philosophers and literary scholars use agency to mean something like “the power to execute one’s own intentions”. . . .Under this definition, agency is not far removed from free will.
For legal scholars, on the other hand, agency contrasts with free will: to be an agent is to be bound by the will of another. . . . Rather than instigating action, agents play a secondary role. They act only under compulsion and constraint—the very terms used in moral philosophy to contrast with agency.
Discussions of agency in other fields reinforce the divide between these legal and philosophical definitions. Business, for instance, takes its definition from law: the antonym for agent is principal, and “‘agency theory’ examines how companies can be governed to encourage employees (the ‘agents’) to pursue the goals of the owners, rather than their personal agendas.” . . .
Surprisingly, the difference between these two senses of agency—what I will call primary and secondary agency—is acknowledged by relatively few writers. Among those few are computer scientists, who define “intelligent agents” as delegates of their human creators and users while also exploring the extent to which such programs can act autonomously. And one social scientist has departed strikingly from the tendency of his field to overlook the ambiguity of agency. When political scientist James E. Block calls the United States
A Nation of Agents, he refers to an unstable compound of directing and delegated agency: “initiative without autonomy, . . . the power to move but not to direct movement.” He regards our various attempts to “interweav[e]” those alternatives as “the deepest narrative of American nationhood.” . . . [He argues compellingly] that the ambiguity of agency “operate[s] beneath the level of awareness.” Block shows that even while accommodating and recalibrating their originary and subordinate agency, Americans have acknowledged only the former, imagining that they inhabit an “idyll” of complete or at least growing autonomy.
As if to endorse Block’s point about the unacknowledged ambiguity of agency, English-speakers use the word as inconsistently in ordinary conversation as do academic writers. We say that someone controlled by another is “only an agent” but that someone acting freely is a “sole agent.” We use “mere agency” as
the opposite of mere “agency.”
I . . . resolve this second definitional inconsistency not by adopting one alternative . . . but by accepting both. . . .I see [the] persistence and pervasiveness of [the oscillations between agent-as-principal and agent-as-delegate] as an irreducible ambiguity, reflecting a doubleness in agency itself: any agent may appear, and even be, simultaneously autonomous and determined. . . . The paradoxical meaning of agency suggests further that any cause can
be bi-directional, both controlling
and controlled.
My conception of agency may seem too open-ended to be useful. “Who
or what causes whatever happens”—
a definition of agent that I borrow from the Shakespeare scholar John Freund—sounds more like a question than a statement. In philosophical terms, I am suggesting that the agent is the epiphenomenon of the act. Friedrich Nietzsche made that point, famously, in On the Genealogy of Morals:
[T]he seduction of language
(and of fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it)
. . . conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a “subject.” . . . For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.
And if almost any “doer” may be another’s instrument, the fiction itself always invites reinterpretation.
But “fiction added to the deed” is the province of literature: the ambiguities of agency  drive literary narratives. Narrative’s primary engine is admittedly “the deed,” Nietzsche’s irreducible reality: stories are sequences of events, and Aristotle taught us that a tragedy is the imitation of action. But students of literature can scarcely follow Nietzsche in proclaiming the deed to be “everything.” Equally important is the impulse of characters and readers to identify doers. . . . Not only do readers seek particular causes of crucial events, but they also assume or infer a dominant kind of cause: the human will, the fragmented psyche, social institutions or faceless bureaucracy, allegorical universals or abstractions, gods or God. Indeed we classify narrative genres in part according to their ground levels of agency. Some genres represent agency simplistically—most obviously, detective fiction operates by prolonging and then satisfying our urge to identify a single cause—but others provide fuller and ultimately more engaging “theories of causation,” exploiting the breadth
and bidirectionality of agency.
To be more specific, writers exploit the ambiguities of agency in three ways. First, several agents commonly govern a single narrative event. “The king died and then the queen died” becomes a plot, wrote E. M. Forster, when we add “of grief.” The difference is not simply motivation, as Forster suggested, but compound agency: the second statement suggests at least two agents for the queen’s death, the queen’s grief and its own causes. In representing agency, plot is always thick. More broadly, few narratives—aside perhaps from creation stories—are continuously governed by one level of agency. Perhaps the queen’s heart was already weak; perhaps her culture coerced widows toward early death; perhaps her enemies poisoned the king, foreseeing that her grief would be fatal. To cite a less fanciful example, what destroys the Pardoner’s rioters is not merely Death, cupidity, a bushel of florins, or the young men themselves, but a particular and deadly conjunction of those agents.
Second, writers of narrative can develop the ambiguity whereby “agency” names both originary and delegated causation. That is, they induce readers to reconceive principals as delegates, or vice versa. Donald Davidson discusses our ability to “expand” ordinary accounts of causation; indeed, he says, what Joel Feinberg calls the “accordion effect [is] a mark of agency.” Novels of intrigue turn on such reascriptions—revelations of secret and double agency—but so do more elevated narratives. Closing the Knight’s Tale, Theseus recasts the entire plot as the work of a prime mover. In the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius tells us that the same mover controls a whole series of proximate agents sometimes mistaken for sovereign. Here is his formulation, in Chaucer’s translation:
And thilke devyne thought
. . . of the simplicite of God, stablissith many maner gises to things that ben to done; the whiche manere whan that men looken it in thilke pure clennesse of the devyne intelligence, it is ycleped purveaunce; but whanne thilke manere is referred by men to thinges that it moeveth and disponyth, than of olde men is was clepyd destine. . . . [D]estyne [may] be exercised outhir by some devyne spiritz, servantz to the devyne purveauance, or elles by some soule, or elles by alle nature servynge to God, or elles by the celestial moevynges of sterres, or ellis by vertu of aungelis, or elles by divers subtilite of develis, or elles by any of hem, or elles by hem alle.
The manifestations of destiny multiply but may rejoin; diverse and “moevable” in time, they converge as providence, “an unmoevable and symple forme.”
Narratives seldom reach the
stability of Boethius’ formulation. Rather, the third and most interesting way in which writers represent agency is by keeping the other two, agency’s multiplicity and bidirectionality, in motion. As events unfold, their agents’ identity, level, and relationships shift, sometimes implicitly or retrospectively.
To their peril, the rioters of the Pardoner’s Tale acknowledge only
one kind of agent at a time. Chaucer’s
readers, on the other hand, have an excellent vantage-point on the multifariousness of agency—the diffraction, reconfiguration, and convergence of causes—that . . .
supply writers of narrative with
their greatest resource.
EXCERPTED FROM CHAUCER’S AGENTS: CAUSE AND REPRESENTATION IN CHAUCERIAN NARRATIVE BY CAROLYNN VAN DYKE,
PUBLISHED BY FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF ASSOCIATED UNIVERSITY PRESSES,
2010 EASTPARK BOULEVARD, CRANBURY, NJ 08512, PHONE: 609-655-4770, EMAIL: AUP440@AOL.COM, WEB: WWW.AUPRESSES.COM.
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