The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages

Albrecht Classen, Albrecht Classen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135677817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

The computer revolution is upon us. The future of books and of reading are debated. Will there be books in the next millennium? Will we still be reading? As uncertain as the answers to these questions might be, as clear is the message about the value of the book expressed by medieval writers. The contributors to the volume The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages explore the significance of the written document as the key icon of a whole era. Both philosophers and artists, both poets and clerics wholeheartedly subscribed to the notion that reading and writing represented essential epistemological tools for spiritual, political, religious, and philosophical quests. To gain a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of the medieval book, the contributors to this volume examine pertinent statements by medieval philosophers and French, German, English, Spanish, and Italian poets.

Chapter 8
Chaucer’s Literate Characters Reading Their Texts

Interpreting Infinite Regression, or the Narcissus Syndrome

Jean E. Jost

I hope, ywis, to rede so some day
That I shal mete som thyng for to fare
The bet, and thus to rede I nyl not spare

—Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules, 697–99¹

Fast as this worm told as fast wrote alwey this cursid
Sathanas in a grete paper.
Ful much mysliked me thes wordes and the writing also
me plesyd not.

—Guillaume de Deguileville,
The Booke of the Pylgremage of the Sowie²

Logos: the Word . As Rosamund McKitterick has astutely pointed out, “The most remarkable legacy of Roman civilization to Frankish Gaul was not in fact its content but its form… the written word which was the most vital vehicle of continuity… a fundamental element of Carolingian culture[;]… Frankish society in the Carolingian period was transformed into one largely dependent on the written word for its religion, law, government and learning.”³ The significance of written text from Carolingian and subsequent times, in Frankish and other societies, is boldly evidenced in both written and visual images of readers: art, religious writing, and fiction each depict readers in its own medium. According to Michael Camille, “the act of writing is the ubiquitous image in medieval art.”⁴ Equally prevalent in scribed texts, the reading character embodies fascinating, even enigmatic possibilities. What the modern artist M. C. Escher has created i η image, labyrinthine self-reflective designs and puzzles winding back on themselves,⁵ some artists and writers had centuries ago created through another kind of representation: through the inward-looking contemplation of reading, folding back upon itself. Symbolizing introspection, self-absorption, and self-reflection, the painted or scribed image of reader reading suggests infinite regression, moving deeper and deeper into the psyche. The further inward the subject, and by extension, the audience, looks, the stronger the seductive power luring him or her a step further—into the text, into the character, but most evocatively, into the self. Narcissus-like,⁶ the reader in the outer domain, reading about a character who is reading about yet another character akin to himself or herself, even if the reading is a communal act, effects the ultimate solipsistic activity. Thus audience) reading c(haracter), reading n(ew character), and finding “self”

may epitomize both the Socratic ideal of “know thyself and a deeper Narcissistic solipsism. It signifies the human compulsion to penetrate and understand the self, but also a pleasurable, Narcissistic self-indulgent gratification gained through dwelling on the self in another guise. How authors use this intriguing, cleverly regressive method of self-representation and self-investigation, of finding the self reflected in a textual other through a Narcissus-like pool, varies with their philosophy of introspection, purpose for writing, and their aesthetic vision.

Geoffrey Chaucer, master of characterization at many levels, finds this contrivance of self-reflexive inward-looking mirrors a magnificent device to effect what he does best: penetrate the surface, tease the interior, and unlock the mysteries of human personality through Narcissistic self-recognition in the text for both character and reader. Although other medieval “retrospective writers” well serve as foils to the master, providing the context from which to apprehend his method, Chaucer’s manipulation of what I call the genre of infinite regression achieves supreme fulfillment through his intense penetration of text and character. Here the quintessence of self-reflexivity through infinite regression into the self by means of textual reverberation reaches its apotheosis. Chaucer’s creative use of this technique, the symbolizing of introspection through reading, positions his success among other writers using similar methodologies in their quest for interiority. Exploring the varied types of readers and their processes of “reading themselves” thus illuminates the methods, purposes, and successes of their authors, and ultimately the broader meaning of reading itself and its potential to signify.

Purpose of the Character-Cum-Reader Trope

No doubt literacy was a gradually evolving process, and far from universal even as late as the fourteenth century. But surely it was an ideal. For what purposes were characters depicted in art and literature created as readers, other than to evoke dreams and “fare the bet,” as the Parlement of Foules’ epigraph of this article suggests? Regardless of actual numbers of readers, reading itself was highly extolled by and for those in power. As Camille reminds us, however, “writing functioned not only as origin, anchor, and explanation, but also as the instrument of domination and exclusion”;⁷ text might threaten those who could read, and even more so those who couldn’t, who relied upon others’ literacy. Not surprisingly, the church did not encourage private devotion much less secular reading by the laity, for preserving the distance between a learned clergy, literate in Latin, and a lewd illiterate laity securely protected their ecclesiastical power. Although a sizable number of manuscript depictions of readers reading survive—of St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read, and St. John reading the Apocalypse, for example—devotional representation of readers is limited. The biblical injunction “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you… have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matt.23.23) privileges essential goodness and spiritual inscription on the mind over superficial parchment-lettering on the page for the latter’s potential shallowness and hypocrisy. Similarly, in one sermon by Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), a young cleric in a choir notices a devil weighed down with a sack which the devil explains is full of syllables, slurred utterances (dictiones syncopate) and psalms— improper enunciation of prayers—which the clergy had stolen from God.⁸

Another thirteenth-century word-devil like the sack-carrier sits in churches writing down not clerical but lay words, particularly those of gossiping women. Robert Manning places him sitting unseen between two women “with penne and parchemen yn honde” recording their words to use against them.⁹ The message throughout is that precise word treatment is a moral virtue, and word- sloth a form of sin. And the famous word-devil Tutivillus, a gargoyle lurking in stone above gangling, gossiping women, or hiding in carved wooden misericords, is said to write down every eavesdropped slip—chattering during sermons, misspeaking the mass-words, or mumbling prayers.¹⁰ Hence the need for proper articulation of words, lest the mumbler suffer heavy punishment. The Oxford Franciscan John of Wales describes how this Tutivillus, akin to Manning’s devil, appears in choir picking up minutiae and little bits of the psalms, in Camille’s words “An anti-evangelist, whose text damns rather than saves… a visual index of the desacralization of the Word, from Logos to legal document.”¹¹ Preservation of the legitimate word is thus visually impressed upon the observer.

Literary texts as well as visual images reinforce and privilege “reading the word.” Both religious and secular writers use the infinitely regressive image of characters themselves reading to portray realistic or actual events, to delineate character disposition or behavior, to prescribe exemplary conduct, to impart additional information to the reading audience, but most prevalently, to convey a sense of depth, introspection, and inner penetration implied in the introspective and retrospective act of reading within a text.¹² We must also consider Ruth Crosby’s warning “that rede in Middle English has a variety of meanings, and that it sometimes means declare and tell… the two words are apparently used synonymously to indicate any form of oral delivery, whether recitation or reading aloud.”¹³ But some texts do specify a written work read by a reader, silently or orally, and those perhaps offer the most fertile ground of investigation for authorial use of infinite regression: as emblem of inward contemplation by medieval writers in general and Chaucer in particular.

The relevance of reading within fictional and religious literature, like that within the framework of visual imagery, is testified by the sheer number of visual and verbal markers depicting metareaders: readers reading within fictional constructs.¹⁴ Illustrations and incidents of readers abound. Furthermore, “reading” this level of metareading encourages deeper penetration into the psyche of the author and his or her reading character(s) who might be evangelists, narrators, or actors within stories. Further, at one layer beyond, contemplating such fictive, “virtual” introspective exemplars both images and reflects the real reader’s personal introspection in the actual world. The regressive nature of this reading experience in the move to interiority is obvious.

Reading is also performative, for according to Camille, “Reading was a matter of hearing and speaking, not of seeing.”¹⁵ Although the Benedictine Order demanded each monk read one book per year, in most other contexts a reader did not silently and solitarily read his or her book, but often shared the experience, making it oral, and social. As Susan Noakes suggests, “a community experience in which the interpretation of the text any single listener or reader developed was the product, not of his understanding of the text alone, but of a combination of questions and insights supplied by others.”¹⁶ And so reading can be considered a performative, social speech act—depending on the text, either positive or negative—once again fulfilling a communicative function.

Sacral Seeing and Reading of the Word: Logos

In many instances, spoken words hold a magic or sacred charm. Chanting, casting spells, converting infidels, and repeating prayers, for example, are believed to be evocative, potent, and efficacious speech acts. The ultimate speech act, creation by God, is seen by Augustine as an act of “speaking” the universe during the creation.¹⁷ This phonocentric perception expressed the force of the Logos within the medieval worldview. The supernatural power often attributed to the biblical “Word” or Logos, whose salvific powers have aligned the “Word” to the Savior, thereby invest the written word with the authority of Christ.

Furthermore, Jacques Derrida is right in claiming that “reading and writing, the production and interpretation of signs, allow themselves to be confined within secondariness. They are preceded by a truth or meaning already constituted by and within the element of the logos.”¹⁸ Reading and writing the word are thus born from word-meaning. However secondary, they are yet essential aspects of logos if meaning is to be conveyed. Sometimes Biblical images in manuscripts such as the Apocalypse in Trinity College MSR. 16. 2 Cambridge (see figure 1) depict the character of Christ or St. John reading, or holding up a text for its audience to read. No doubt the text, the doomsday judgment of God deciding his or her everlasting fate, is a fearful one for the reader. This illustration and a second of St. John in the same manuscript (see figure 2) explain the text within the image which reads: “And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea and his left foot upon the earth.”¹⁹ Camille says of the second image (figure 2),

St. John is shown again below [seven human heads spitting fire], his head tilted as if attentive to the next stage in his visionary experience, which is at once visual, aural and ultimately scriptural. It has to be in writing: “And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, ‘Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered and write them not.’”²⁰

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