Piers Plowman as Literary Asymptote: The Function of Infinitesimal Advancement Towards an Unattainable End

There are several layers to remembrances in  Piers Plowman: the story as a whole is Will’s memory of his dreams, and his dreams are  stories unto themselves which consist of others’ memories. The friction caused by changes in time, memory, and consciousness, specifically in Passus XVI-XIX, has been frequently considered an enactment of anxieties about the second coming.  However, many critics have undertaken this study of frustration in terms of stasis.  I reconsider these episodes to be primarily concerned with the movements of memory, within eternity, and towards oblivion.

In the constant revisitation of the past and the multiple vantage points of memory, these Passus recall derivation in calculus: ever-approaching a point (the Final Judgment) farther in time (on the x-axis), but by definition (a limit set by God and unknowable to mortals), is unable to arrive (as an infinite function).  This infinite function is called an asymptote, meaning “not meeting.”  Deferral, in this instance, is both the precondition and outcome of the recursive past; memory, therefore, is demanded and created by narrativity, but the foil of the future’s fulfillment. Although I incorporate medieval and modern understandings of memory and time in my reading,  I do not speculate that Langland was aware of this mathematical relationship.  Rather, I use the asymptote as a function by which the narrative movements within these scenes may be expressed.