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Chaucer The Man*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Donald R. Howard
Donald R. Howard*
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Extract

So much study has gone into the rhetorical workings of Chaucer's satire that almost anyone who reads Chaucer is now acutely aware of the persona or narrator in each poem. The fact of a disparity between the narrator and Chaucer himself has become a kind of premise or dogma of Chaucer criticism; we have become accustomed to phrases like “the fictional Chaucer,” “the postures of the narrator,” or “the finiteness of the narrator-role.” And yet because his major poems confer upon him the status of a major figure, we continue to be interested in Chaucer the man despite the prevailing formalism of Chaucer criticism. We read minor works by him for which, were they anonymous, we should not take the trouble to turn a page. We talk about his education, thought, “development,” “mind.” And in his best poems we feel him as a “man speaking to men.” As for the man himself, we have a few records, though none of these really proves that civil servant and poet were the same person. Mostly, we believe in him. Of course it is entirely possible that someone will come along and argue that the Canterbury Tales were an instance of group authorship, or were really written by John of Gaunt; but if someone did, we should all pooh-pooh him and ostracize him and direct plenty of irony at him.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965 , pp. 337 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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Footnotes

*

This article was presented in a shorter form to the Chaucer section of the Modern Language Association, 1963.

References

1 E. Talbot Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA, lxix (1954), 928–936.

2 Bertrand H. Bronson, In Search of Chaucer (Toronto, 1960), pp. 25–32.

3 Cf. Robert M. Jordan, “Chaucer's Sense of Illusion: Roadside Drama Reconsidered,” ELH, xxix (1962), 19–33.

4 “Makers and Persons,” Hudson Review, xii (1959–60), 487–507. The idea is developed by Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), esp. pp. 16–20, 67–77, 396–398.

5 Cruttwell, pp. 497–500

6 See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series xxxvi (New York, 1953), pp. 515–518. Leo Spitzer, “Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio, iv (1946), 414–422, argues that medieval readers had little interest in the empirical person behind the “I,” and tended to regard him as representative, though the autobiographical touch might add poignancy. R. W. Chambers, on the other hand, argues against the idea of “personas” in medieval poetry, showing with many examples that the dreamer or narrator in a medieval poem is the author; see “Robert or William Longland?” London Mediaeval Studies, i, 3 (1948 for 1939), 442–451.

7 Curtius, pp. 476–477, 485–486.

8 Jacob Burckhardt, in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London and New York, 1928), pp. 139–153, dealt with the idea of fame. Owing in part to Burckhardt's influence, many would say that the sense of the author was shaped largely by the rise of humanistic individualism and by the imitation of ancient writers like Horace who boasted that their works would outlast their own times; hence they might say that Chaucer's awareness of himself as a writer is a harbinger of the Renaissance. But in fact the sense of the author antedates the revival of the classics and the rise of humanism; it is quite as possible to regard it as a cause, rather than a result, of the “revival of learning.”

9 See The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 837. All quotations are from this edition.

10 The OED reports the earliest uses of the word in the fifteenth century, and in this sense only in the sixteenth century.

11 Dorothy Bethurum, “Chaucer's Point of View as Narrator in the Love Poems,” PMLA, lxxiv (1959), 511–520.

12 On the tradition of oral delivery and its influence on Chaucer, see Ruth Crosby, “Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, xi (1936), 88–110; “Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery,” Speculum, xiii (1938), 413–432; and Bertrand H. Bronson, “Chaucer's Art in Relation to his Audience,” Five Studies in Literature (Berkeley, Calif., 1940), pp. 1–53. For an excellent analysis of Chaucer's estimate of himself with relation to his audience, see Rosemary Woolf, “Chaucer as a Satirist in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” Critical Quarterly, i (1959), 150–157. It is not necessary to suppose that the printing press and silent rapid reading caused modern writers to stop thinking in terms of oral delivery. Writers still read orally, if only to their wives, and they may well imagine themselves speaking aloud as they compose. We write “I should like to say” and similar expressions without implying oral delivery. Language is by nature spoken, and a writer who writes with any degree of fluency is bound to “hear” spoken discourse as he writes. The difference between medieval and modern in this respect, as in others, is a matter of degree. Cf. Jordan, “Chaucer's Sense of Illusion,” p. 21, n. 3. On the oral-aural component in western culture, see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, 1962); Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), and The Barbarian Within (New York, 1962), esp. pp. 68–87, 220–229.

13 See Bernard of Morval, De contemptu mundi: A Bitter Satirical Poem of 3000 Lines upon the Morals of the XIIth Century, ed. H. C. Hoskier (London, 1929), pp. xv, xxii, xxxv–xxxix.

14 See Ruth Nevo, “Chaucer: Motive and Mask in the ‘General Prologue’,” Modern Language Review, lviii (1963), 1–9.

15 On the early development of the device, see Bethurum, esp. pp. 511–516; Alfred L. Kellogg, “Chaucer's Self-Portrait and Dante's,” Medium Ævum, xxix (1960), 119–120; David M. Bevington, “The Obtuse Narrator in Chaucer's House of Fame,” Speculum, xxxvi (1961), 288–298; and Charles A. Owen, Jr, “The Role of the Narrator in the ‘Parlement of Foules’,” College English, xiv (1953), 264–269.

16 Morton W. Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde,” PMLA, lxxii (1957), 14–26. Cf. E. Talbot Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry (New York, 1958), p. 966.

17 Robert M. Jordan, “The Narrator in Chaucer's Troilus,” ELH, xxv (1958), 255.

18 On the narrator's stance in the General Prologue, see Ralph Baldwin, The Unity of the Canterbury Tales (Copenhagen, 1955), pp. 55–57, and Edgar Hill Duncan, “Narrator's Points of View in the Portrait-sketches, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (Nashville, Tenn., 1954), 77–101.

19 Robert O. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer's Poetics (New Haven and London, 1963), pp. 227–232.

20 The point is anticipated by Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” p. 936.