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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520367333 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/19/2022 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
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Chaucerian Play
Comedy and Control in The Canterbury TalesBy Laura Kendrick
University of California Press
Copyright © 1988 Laura KendrickAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-06194-2
Introduction
Laughter, Play, and FictionBaudelaire links man's sense of humor to the Fall: "the comic is one of the clearest signs of the devil in man and one of the numerous seeds contained in the symbolic apple." Laughter is man's way of asserting his superiority or mastery in difficult situations, his way of dealing with the F/fall, that is, with his knowledge of his own imperfection, his ignorance and weakness. Laughter denies the reality or seriousness of whatever threatens to immobilize man's mind or body, whether this comes in the form of an aggressive gesture or world or in that of a seemingly unresolvable incongruity or challenging violation of conventions, such as a riddle or a grotesque drawing. Laughter is a metalinguistic sign, a framing "no" that reverses the meaning of all the signs within its bounds. In its assertion "this is not real," laughter is related to play of all sorts, including literary play or fiction, which denies everyday reality in order to replace it with a deliberately distorting mimesis. As Baudelaire observed, laughter is contradictory, acknowledging weakness by its very assertion of strength. Nevertheless, from a hard-line Christian ascetic viewpoint, laughter was worse than indecorous; it was subversive, egotistical, foolish. And so was fiction. Chaucer's Parson, quoting St. Paul, refuses the Host's request for a "fable," because fiction is pretense and lies and thus no better than chaff:
Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me, For Paul, that writeth unto Thymothee, Repreveth hem that weyven soothfastnesse And tellen fables and swich wrecchednesse.
Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest, Whan I may sowen whete, if that me lest? (1 31-36)
The Bible flatly discouraged laughter by associating it with a lack of wisdom or prudence. The fool raises his voice in laughter, but the wise man laughs silently, if at all ("Fatuus in risu exaltat vocem suam: vir autem sapiens vix tacite ridebit," Ecclesiastes 21 : 23). And it is only that archetypally "unaccommodated man," the fool, who denies God (Psalms 13 : 1, 52 : 1).
Yet in spite of the Church's serious doctrinal approach, we find plenty of medieval Christians laughing-and not always when we might have expected them to laugh. Millard Meiss was surprised to find, for example, that "there is no trace of guilt, or persistent sadness, or asceticism in the entire work" of Boccaccio's Decameron, although it was written immediately after the Black Plague destroyed the fabric of Florentine society, as Boccaccio so vividly describes in his preface. After such a chastening experience, why did Boccaccio laugh instead of writing a work that was even more devout than usual, a work to humble man and exalt God and the saints, such as contemporary artists were painting? Why did Chaucer end the "tragedy" of the immobilized lover, Troilus, by giving him one last laugh of superiority as he looks down after death at "this little spot of earth" and men's blind pursuit of their desires there? And why does Chaucer's writing move in the direction it does, toward the "comedy" of the Canterbury Tales, toward laughter? Is he just being devilish or "elvish"-or are we, to perceive humor where we should not-or is it more complicated than that? What are the mechanisms and meanings of medieval mirth, and, more especially, of Chaucer's literary play?
These are the questions I will explore in the present book, which will draw upon analyses of human behavior from modern psychological, psychoanalytic, and anthropological studies as well as upon historical interpretations of medieval culture and descriptions of medieval festive games. Perhaps the best attitude with which to read this book is a quizzical one involving some willing suspension of disbelief. By my incongruous analogies, drawing together phenomena usually treated by various academic disciplines, traditionally considered in different contextual frames, I intend to solve problems, not to provoke a throwing up of hands in self-defensive laughter at such disorienting, "grotesque" comparisons. The questions I am asking are important, even fundamental: what was medieval literature (of the sort that defined itself as fiction or play) for? What did its creators and performers and its audience do with it? What can we do with it? A child given a new toy asks, implicitly, these same questions. First the child explores the toy's given capacities (to roll, to beep...); then it explores further and invents capacities for which the toy was not intended (by stacking blocks on a toy car, for instance); finally the child plays with the car in a sort of compromise between ways it was made for and ways it was not, both making the toy peculiarly the child's own and accepting its given usages. Ought we not to do the same with Chaucer's literary texts? Indeed, I doubt that we could do otherwise, even if we wanted. But what we can do is become more conscious of the re-creational process we go through-and that medieval audiences, including authors re-creating texts, went through-in appropriating the new literary object.
Huizinga in Homo Ludens; Clifford Geertz in his study of cockfighting in Bali; Freud in his analysis of little Hans's game of "fort/da," as well as in Civilization and Its Discontents and other writings; Melanie Klein, Jean Piaget, and other analysts of children's play; Boccaccio, and, as we shall see, Chaucer, in the metacommentaries with which they framed their fictions-all understood, albeit in different terms, something of the meaningful depths of play and how man's creation and identification with unreal, fictional worlds helps him, not only to cope with the real world, but also to change himself and thereby, to some extent, the world. Play enables man to sublimate and channel his dangerous desires and to master his anxieties as he expresses these or sees them expressed in the safe, ordered "other world" of the game via transforming, controlling fictions comparable to Freud's idea of the dream-work or joke-work or, we might add, to art-work. Virtually all types of play turn life temporarily into art. It is, indeed, not too much to claim, as Huizinga did, that culture arises from play, or that civilization rests on fiction.
The legacies of science have not always been comforting. One that we currently live with, the atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race, may produce as much general anxiety as the Black Death did in the late fourteenth century. We have invented fictions to help us deal with our feelings of powerlessness in the face of these weapons that could destroy the future of humanity, just as we have always invented fictions to help us deal with wars and natural catastrophes. As opposed to the legacies of science, those of art-the arts-have always been comforting, although we have not always understood how their consolation works or the degree to which it may protect us from or reconcile us to the very powers we fear. It is essential that artists go on producing art of all kinds, because we are more than ever in need of consolation. However, it is also important to understand how the consolation of different kinds of fictional structures-of play-works.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chaucerian Play by Laura Kendrick Copyright © 1988 by Laura Kendrick. Excerpted by permission.
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