Helen
Cooper
I: CHAUCERIAN REPRESENTATION
Chaucer's sescentennial year deserves widespread celebration, not least as his poetry is so uniquely enjoyable. Since he has a reputation for being the most naturalistic of medieval writers, it should also be easy to celebrate his world through him, as the topic of this colloquium—celebrating Chaucer's world and work and legacy—invites. Talking about "Chaucerian representation" suggests a marriage of the two, Chaucer as representing, imitating, what he saw around him. In practice, things are much more complicated. His works are never straightforwardly mimetic; and any process of holding the mirror up to nature gets deeply obfuscated, not only by how he writes, but by the six unbroken centuries in which his works have been read and reread in a succession of different cultures and for a succession of different purposes. So far as we know, he left no will, and so we have no way of knowing how his poetic legacy looked to Chaucer himself. The one thing we can be sure of is that it must have seemed very different to him from the way it has looked to his heirs down the centuries, whether he died in the traditional agony of repentance, or unexpectedly, his pens lying ready to pick up again among his unfinished manuscripts.
As for the legacy that he himself inherited, Chaucer gives his
own view of it, and of how his works are indebted to it, in the introduction to
the Parliament of Fowls. He pictures
himself reading an old book,
For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,
Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere,
And out of olde bokes, in good feyth,
Cometh al this newe science that men lere.[1]
It is a description of how a writer responds to earlier
writing; and what it claims is that a writer's "legacy" is not a
matter of acquiring something from the dead, but rather a process of
regeneration, new birth, like the "newe corn.” And it is a statement not
only about writing, but also reading: about how you learn in the present from
books written in the past. The book in question here is one that Chaucer calls
"Tullyus of the Drem of Scipioun:” the last part of
There follows the narrator's own dream, about the walled park
containing the Temple of Priapus (it is Priapus rather than Venus who has the
"sovereyn place" (254), and it is presumably our following the coy
practice of earlier scholars that makes us generally assign it to the goddess);
and about the "parliament,” the talking-shop, at which the birds choose
their mates under the aegis of Nature. It finishes with the dreamer being woken
by the racket the birds make—by the dawn chorus; whereupon he abandons the poem
to return to his books to carry on his reading, all in a single sentence, as if
the spontaneity of the birdsong and the process of reading were in some way
associated.
And with the shoutyng, whan the song was do,
That foules maden at here flyght awey,
I wok, and othere bokes tok me to,
To reede upon, and yit I rede alwey.
(693-6)
It sounds like a contrast; but given that opening association between old books and new poetry, perhaps it is more of a parallel.
It is customary to read the Parliament of Fowls as a poem about love, and of course it is. But
Chaucer does not write introductions and conclusions to any of his works
accidentally; and readings of the Parliament
that focus on the content of the dream alone have largely to ignore the
material on each side of it. The opening and the end, especially the lines
quoted above, give a sharp focus on a set of different issues. First is the
question of, what is it that he is imitating, or representing to us? Then, what
happens in the transition from Chaucer's sense in writing of producing new
corn, to our sense in reading him of surveying old fields? What kind of
relationship does our own new corn bear to those old fields we get it from, or
his legacy to his works? And all such questions finally coalesce into one: what
is it we are reading when we are reading Chaucer?
Those are questions of particular import now, six hundred
years since Chaucer's death, in an age of "Only historicize!" For
that principle tends to assume that reading an author for a reflection of his
age—his world—is comparatively easy; you just need to break away from the habit
(long-lost now, I suspect) of reading for the beauties of language, set aside
the quest for some transhistorical, liberal-humanist "truth,” take a
sceptical line on the author's professed values, and his (or her)
"world" will emerge to view. Chaucer's reputation for naturalism, for
representing life, should make an historical reading of him almost unavoidable.
A stress on naturalism is still an immensely useful way of approaching him, not
least when it comes to teaching. It is itself associated with habits derived
from our own familiarity with later forms of fiction, and tends to bring with
it an accompanying assumption that literature follows a Darwinian evolutionary
path towards the nineteenth-century novel. Our admiration for the psychological
depth Chaucer portrays tends to go hand in hand with the idea that character
study is the end and aim of all literature: that is why we find Troilus and Criseyde, or many of the
Tales, so moving. And even if we are too sophisticated to accept the naturalism
of psychological verisimilitude at face value, as good postmodernists we are
still finding ways to practice such readings, in the guise of studying the
emergence of the Subject. The social and ideological concerns of the New
Historicists similarly assume some kind of process in Chaucer of his holding a
mirror up to own historical moment—and indeed it would be surprising, if not
impossible, for a writer not to mirror the concerns of his age to some degree.
Reading for context, approaching Chaucer not as "universal" in the
Aristotelean or liberal-humanist sense but as a representative of his age, is
probably the most common scholarly way of approaching him now: we look for
reflections of social and political and religious change in him, and write
about Chaucer and the court, or Chaucer and the 1381 Rising, or Chaucer and
Lollardy. The principle behind such scholarship can sometimes seem like what I
once read in an exam script, that "Chaucer was more typical of his age
than any other person then living." It is, however, extraordinarily
difficult to make such approaches inhere in Chaucer himself Arguments of this
kind tend to be grounded in texts outside Chaucer: we have to find what we want
somewhere else first. And when we move on to applying those arguments to him,
they all too often acquire an air of special pleading—sometimes more so when we
claim to be reading him historically than when we read him overtly for our own
agendas, as a forebear of our interests. For we do plenty of that too: Chaucer
and colonialist discourse; Chaucer and queer theory; Chaucer and feminism. It
is, however, worth remembering that that is itself a style of reading that has
a long and distinguished history, to the Middle Ages
and beyond, when there were the medieval equivalents of New Ovid Society
conferences on Ovid and moral action, Ovid and the Old Testament, Ovid and
Christian doctrine.
I do not for one second intend to deny the value of
approaching Chaucer in the ways that we do. Most of it is hugely valuable—and
we must not forget that those medieval approaches to Ovid were likewise hugely
valuable for the Middle Ages, a fertile field that produced an abundance of new
corn. We have been uncovering things in Chaucer that forty years ago nobody
ever dreamed were there, and he has emerged as a writer of greater range and
power than even his most ardent fans imagined he might be. Some of our modem
concerns and methodologies have brought to the front of our attention things
that it is simply astonishing were not seen before, such as the debate on women
embedded in so many of the Canterbury
Tales and beyond: a much further-reaching and urgent issue than the
"marriage debate" identified by Kittredge and for so long regarded as
Chaucer's final word on such matters. But our practices of reading for culture
or multiculturalism, for history, for context, still tend to skip over that
question of what it is we are reading when we are reading Chaucer; because one
thing he is evidently not giving us is a straightforward portrayal of
fourteenth-century life. The Parliament
of Fowls illustrates the point forcefully. Birds do not talk; and that a
duck swears by its hat is not an example of naturalism in any form. If it is
meant to serve as an allegorical reflection of some political occasion, it is
impossible to deduce from the text just what that might have been, and none of
the occasions proposed fits very easily with the work as it stands. The poem is
rooted, as its introduction stresses, in a mixture of translation, summary and
adaptation, partly of
We are thoroughly familiar now with ideas of conventionality,
intertextuality, horizons of expectation and the rest of it; but Chaucer's
works present us with some peculiarly difficult problems of reading
historically. He seems to go out of his way to avoid reflecting his own age.
The books that were the seedbeds of his writing were frequently old (fifteen
hundred years or more), or, if they were up to date, as many of his French and
Italian sources were, then they emanated from cultures somewhat different from
Chaucer's own. So our desire to read off his own age from his works, to use
them to reconstruct an "age of Chaucer,” presents obvious problems; which
is why conference papers on the Age of Chaucer that attempt to go beyond the
kind of antiquarianism encouraged by the portraits of the pilgrims can actually
find Chaucer himself something of embarrassment, in a way that does not happen
to such an extreme, I think, with any other major English writer: not Spenser,
or Milton, or Wordsworth, or Yeats, or even Shakespeare.
[. . .]