Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe

Gerd Bayer, Ebbe Klitgard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415879484
• eBook ISBN: 9781136821240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18th century. Taking Chaucer's influential Middle English works as the starting point, the original essays in this volume explore diverse aspects of the formation of early modern prose narratives. Essays focus on how a sense of selfness or subjectivity begins to establish itself in various narratives, thus providing a necessary requirement for the individuality that dominates later novels. Other contributors investigate how forms of intertextuality inscribe early modern prose within previous traditions of literary writing. A group of chapters presents the process of genre-making as taking place both within the confines of the texts proper, but also within paratextual features and through the rationale behind cataloguing systems.

A final group of essays takes the implicit notion of the growing realism of early modern prose narrative to task by investigating the various social discourses that feature ever more strongly within the social, commercial, or religious dimensions of those texts. The book addresses a wide range of literary figures such as Chaucer, Wroth, Greene, Sidney, Deloney, Pepys, Behn, and Defoe. Written by an international group of scholars, it investigates the transformations of narrative form from medieval times through the Renaissance and the early modern period, and into the eighteenth century.

Part I

The Growing Sense of Self

1 The Encoding of Subjectivity in Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale”

Ebbe Klitgård

In his study of medieval narrative from 2005 entitled Textual Subjectivity, A.C. Spearing has raised serious criticism against the predominant modern conception of medieval narrative technique in, among others, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, particularly against the idea of assuming a narrator or, in some cases, a persona that is the butt of systematic irony on the part of the implied author. Spearing’s own example from Chaucer is a penetrating analysis of Troilus and Criseyde, supplemented by a thorough demonstration of how most critics since the 1950s, including himself, have been fundamentally wrong in their approach to medieval narrative technique in general and to Chaucer’s in particular. In this chapter I want to take up Spearing’s challenge of encoding subjectivities by considering stones he has left unturned. Specifically, I would like to ask how we read subjectivity in the two tales traditionally seen as most marked by their narrators, those of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. It is my contention that these two tales and, in particular, their prologues can still be perceived both as dramatic pieces fitted to a persona narrator and as incorporating subjectivities of different kinds, including those associated with other works by Chaucer. I will consider some other recent work in the field of Chaucerian narrative technique and analyze examples of narrative techniques employed in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale” through the filters provided in Spearing’s study, but I also want to demonstrate that the two tales, and in particular their prologues, raise some questions about the validity of Spearing’s otherwise well-taken general point.

From the point of view of developments in narrative technique from Chaucer to Defoe, it is of particular interest whether Spearing is right in claiming that late medieval literature has not yet developed a fixed narrative model of the type that, to take an influential example, Seymour Chatman proposed in his Story and Discourse from 1978:

Narrative text

Real author → Implied author → (Narrator) → (Narratee) → Implied audience → Real audience

This model, which is based on earlier work by Wayne Booth and French narratologists such as Gérard Genette, operates with narrative meanings being created through the relationship between the implied author and the narrator. A clear example is that of the unreliable narrator or persona, where there is a consistent difference, often an opposition, between the narrator or voice and the implied author or presence behind. To illustrate this with a well-known modern example, Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is such an unreliable narrator gradually revealed through his narrative.¹ As opposed to this, the narrator may also be a so-called mouthpiece narrator, expressing the exact opinions and beliefs of the implied author. One classic example of that is Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, whose narrator even occasionally breaks the fiction and speaks out directly to the reader against the social injustice marked in the novel as a fundamental part of the implied author’s values. Often in fiction the situation is somewhere in between the unreliable narrator and the mouthpiece narrator and thus more complicated. An example of this is Joseph Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness, a narrator who is, on the one hand, felt to be connected closely to the implied author, but whose subjectivity as a narrator and thus his potential unreliability is also foregrounded. The unstable relationship between implied author and narrator will of course be especially prevalent if, as Spearing claims, medieval authors simply did not operate within a tradition in which the narrator was thought of as an instrument to be played with in the production of fiction.

Spearing’s main objection—and he does mention Chatman—is that there is simply no stable narrator, let alone a persona, in late medieval literature, and that the claim made by Chatman and others that there is always a narrator as different from the author is simply false, because it does not take an historical dimension into account, operating mainly on the background of theories of the novel. Interestingly, Spearing traces the history of novel-based literary theory and stops in one particular year, 1966, where seminal works were published on both sides of the Atlantic. Scholes and Kellogg claimed in The Nature of Narrative that “[b]y definition, narrative art requires a story and a story-teller” (240), and Roland Barthes said in his Communications 8, translated as Image-Music-Text, that “there can be no narrative without a narrator” (109).² Second, Spearing draws up a more specific history (102–6), that of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales criticism with a tradition going back to the work of the early American critic George Lyman Kittredge, who in 1915 published his influential Chaucer and His Poetry. I will illustrate Kittredge’s main point with a central quotation from his slightly earlier article “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage”: “Structurally regarded, the Canterbury Tales is a kind of Human Comedy. From this point of view, the Pilgrims are the dramatis personae, and their stories are only speeches that are somewhat longer than common” (435). Kittredge’s dramatic theory, as Spearing amply demonstrates, is still today implicitly endorsed by a majority of Chaucer critics, although it has in fact been effectively refuted, the most notable proof among several being that there is no way that the characters from the lower estates could speak in character and demonstrate such learning and eloquence as their tales suggest.³

A second major influence in the history of Chaucer criticism, to which Spearing draws our attention in his important book, is the 1950s work of New-Criticism-inspired American Chaucerians Muscatine and Donaldson, who both proposed ambiguities and irony as the fundamental principle in Chaucer’s narrative technique. A telling example is Donaldson’s famous article “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” in which he identifies a later counterpart from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: “The pilgrim belongs, of course, to a very old—and very new—tradition of the fallible first person singular. His most exact counterpart is perhaps Lemuel Gulliver” (8). The idea is in short that Chaucer creates a naïve and enthusiastic persona called “Chaucer,” who in “The General Prologue” and in his own failed attempt as a narrator in “The Tale of Sir Thopas” is a continuous vehicle for both self-irony and ironic portrayal of the other pilgrims. Clearly Donaldson has a point, with the satirical portraits of the Prioress and the Miller as notable examples, but the problem, according to Spearing, is one of becoming too anxious to separate the poet Chaucer from the narrator Chaucer. This was actually acknowledged by Donaldson himself in his later book The Swan at the Well (75). As a consequence of operating with a sharp distinction between two Chaucers almost everything in The Canterbury Tales becomes unstable, ambiguous, and ironic.

It is clear to me that Chaucer’s narrator in “The General Prologue” is no Gulliver and far from fallible in the modern sense. I follow Spearing in claiming that Chaucer, as well as other late medieval poets, sometimes creates narrators, and I would add even narrator characters that come close to personae. However, there is hardly ever the consistency of character in narrators that we know from the period of the rise of the novel. Spearing furthermore draws attention to the typical role of the medieval poet as re-teller and commentator (22), and again I will add that this has further implications. In the modern world of copyright and an ideal of originality, we tend to forget the very different storytelling ideals of the late medieval world. Stories had invariably been told before, albeit in very different variants, and this of course is the case for more or less all of Chaucer’s work. It is in the re-telling or perhaps more precisely through the exceptional poetic and compositional techniques that Chaucer becomes the father of English literature, as witnessed by some of his first readers and fellow poets who invariably praise him for rhetorical and poetic skills as well as mastery of language, not for originality in storytelling. In other words, it is at the level of discourse that Chaucer excels, not at the level of story. A case could be made that, for example, some of the refined tales composed on the basis of several sources, such as “The Miller’s Tale,” also contain original storylines, but still we should regard them as a kind of adaptation of existing stories. As modern theories of adaptation have shown, adaptation does not make works of art inferior in any way but, on the contrary, keeps them in dialogue with earlier works of art.⁴

CHAUCER’S VOICES

Re-telling stories in a new and exciting way through poetic mastery is in other words the chief ideal for the late medieval narrative poet. The narrative composition involves not only plot editing and poetic efforts but also a kind of story editor’s remarks in the form of comments on the ongoing storytelling. The commentator role is important to consider in the case of Chaucer, since he develops this to perfection in some of the more troublesome stories he deals with. Clear examples of this occur in Troilus and Criseyde, where the narrative voice is able to offer some comfort in the case of Criseyde’s deceitfulness, and in “The Clerk’s Tale,” where Griselda’s sufferings under her cruel husband Walter the marquis are presented to us with gentleness and sympathy in the narrative voicing. Still, if anything we recognize in these and indeed throughout the works of Chaucer, not a drama of different narrators, but first of all a fairly consistent narrative voicing that for convenience may simply be called Chaucer’s narrative voice. In my book Chaucer’s Narrative Voice in The Knight’s Tale, I provide a fuller treatment of this commentator role and argue that Chaucer’s narrative voice is the chief key to interpreting his poetic narratives.⁵

Spearing very sensibly draws on the works of the few Chaucer critics, such as Brewer, Pearsall, Cooper, and Lawton, who have not fallen into the traps of the dramatic theory and the irony and ambiguity assumptions.⁶ However, he mentions only in passing the perhaps most significant critic to raise a warning forefinger, C. David Benson, who both in Chaucer’s Drama of Style from 1986 and in a chapter in the Cambridge Chaucer Companion from the same year, with a revised version in the second edition from 2003, develops a remarkably straightforward attack on persona-oriented readings. The following quotation from the latter, which I find so telling that I will quote its two versions, is illustrative of Benson’s main point: “The special genius of the Canterbury Tales is not so much its frame narrative, fascinating as that can be, as it is Chaucer’s radical literary experiments. We must look beyond the supposed personalities of the pilgrims to the poetic individuality of the tales themselves” (95). This point is revised in the second edition, which puts the case slightly differently: “The special genius of the Canterbury Tales is not so much its frame narrative, fascinating as that may be, as it is the radical poetic experiments of the individual tales” (129). Finally Benson repeats and expands his important point in another 2003 article with the D.H. Lawrence-inspired title “Trust the Tale, Not the Teller.” I have chosen to quote a passage in which he regrets that his work and that of Cooper, Pearsall, and Lawton seem to have had little effect in Chaucer criticism. He uses a remarkable simile...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The Growing Sense of Self
• Part II. The Force of Intertextuality
• Part III. The Consolidation of Genre
• Part IV. The Presence of Social Discourses
• Contributors
• Index