Debate Poetry: what's the point?

A popular method of discussing opposing views in the middle ages was the literary debate. This was often done through allegory and dream vision, which justified the poet talking about two different sides (he managed to maintain a diplomatic, third person point of view and remained distanced from what he wrote about, much like Chaucer’s narrator persona who pretended to be a naïve idiot). Nicholas Jacobs distinguishes between ‘conclusive debates’ and ‘inconclusive’ or ‘balanced debates’. A conclusive debate would be one like ‘The Thrush and the Nightingale’ where one side wins, and there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ opposing each other in the poem. [The poem is about two birds who argue about the virtues of women, with the thrush opposing, and the nightingale defending them- the thrush draws on a number of different authorities to back up his argument while the nightingale simply responds by speaking of the virtue and charms of women. But finally, the nightingale points out that the Virgin Mary represents all women, and she is pure. This makes the thrush shut up immediately and accept defeat.] In a situation like this, the poet deliberately chooses a topic that audiences would have an opinion on, and it is a topic which has a right and wrong, whether from a Christian’s point of view, or from a woman’s point of view, so the point of the poem does not seem so much to be a debate, as to be a proof of a single authority and a universally accepted conclusion. Balanced debates on the other hand have a resolution in terms of the equal validity or invalidity of the opposed arguments or by a synthesis of the contradictory positions [Jacobs]. Jacobs further argues that this is the reason why inconclusive debates are less frequent in medieval English literature, because such debates sit uneasily with the concept of an absolute authority. At the same time, moderation was thought important in medieval thought, and ‘virtue’ was believed to be the mean of excess and defect. So, the belief was that there is no polarized right, but that the balance between two extremes is what is ideal (“virtue”). I am inclined to go with this latter view, because ME debate poetry certainly shows that a poem was thought to be conclusive even when the argument within it was left incomplete, and when the narrator or the character of the judge within the poem does not seem to favour either view. Both sides are presented equally, and the poem is still seen as conclusive. Chaucer especially plays with medieval ideas of authority and resolution, in the Parliament of Fowls and in the Canterbury Tales. The fact that he needs to have a narrator separate from himself telling the tales, or have the poet go off into a dream vision before he can tell the story of the PMF, shows that there was a ‘norm’ which was generally accepted, and one that Chaucer was tying to break. Before I go too deep into Chaucer, my point is basically that while ME poets were aware of literary traditions and the possibility of playing around with them, the fact that such traditions existed in the first place, shows that authorities and resolutions existed as ‘norms’ in medieval culture. [as opposed to the view that the debates simply represent polarities which existed simultaneously within medieval thought] – Karen Gasser: the concepts of good and bad are traditional; a neutral look at human behavior belongs to a modern world view.

Owl and the Nightingale: some points:

It is a mockery of its own form, mocking the debate poem genre. It is also a mockery of its subject matter, by satirizing its own satire, tempting its readers to spend their efforts in trying to decipher non-existent codes of seriousness. The comic distancing created by the use of animals makes the reader think that the poet doesn’t want any direct seriousness in the poem, but that there actually are allegorical/secret messages. My point: like Chaucer’s poetry, O&N plays a game with itelf and with its readers. The debate fails, the poem succeeds.

Circularity of the poem: the narrator enters the debate in the middle, it has been going on for a while, and its unclear who started it. It also ends inconclusively, and the point is that the debate is a continuous one. The poem’s start and conclusion do not coincide with those of the debate.

Narratorial intervention: the poet often uses narratorial comments for the nightingale, saying that the nightingale put up a brave front, and used her cunning to get her way out of her situation. At other times, the narrator seems to support the owl by say8ing ‘he spac boþe riзt an red’. Is this simply indirect speech, or is it the narratorial judgmental voice? Is the poet not that detached after all?

How does debate poetry of this kind relate to the beast fable, which has generalized animal characters to explain universal morals?