The Postmodern Chaucer: A Case Study

Troilus and Criseyde [link is to complete text at Wikisource] functions as a satire, in effect reversing the topoi of the dystopian satires which would come into fashion in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries by locating the dystopia not in a potential future but instead a primeval past. “[T]he language that satire imitates serves or reflects the disturbance of culture” so that “[t]he metalinguistic function in satire articulates the equivalence of meaningless with social disorder” (Knight 35). Chaucer’s explorations of language, then, are part and parcel of his social commentary on “Trojan” values.

Various mechanisms are used by Chaucer to distance himself from the [pagan] authorial persona which narrates the poem—until the end. In the last few stanzas, Chaucer strangely renounces his previous ironic stance and speaks in what is either his true voice or, possibly, yet another ironic shield. Yet neither possibility is a completely satisfactory option. If we see Chaucer as speaking in his own voice, then this switch represents the death-knell of the very ironic stance which made the poem so rich. Instead of a rich web with layers of meaning, Chaucer provides us with a single, “correct” interpretation rendering his poem oddly unidimensional. Religious truth, under this not only Christian but Christianist (in the sense of a system of codified belief rather than transformative religious praxis) reading, is allowed to trump aesthetics, and the richness of the poem is sacrificed as a result to the single, exclusivist Christian vision. As Theodore Stroud notes, "at least one issues seems to defy resolution, that is, the emotional confusion we experience at reading the palinode. Nothing adequately prepares us for Chaucer’s condemning every vestige of the morality not merely by which his characters have acted but in terms of which the narrator comments on those actions" (1).

All of the metalinguistic markers throughout Chaucer’s text invite us to be suspicious of his ultimate meaning, but the palinode asks us to reject that suspicion in favor of a simpler (and, in my opinion, far less interesting) belief in the efficacy of the Christian message. Yet neither is it satisfactory to assume that Chaucer is simply creating another layer of ironic play. To interpret Troilus as a satire in this way would be to assume that the Christian epilogue is at its heart insincere, that the Catholic Church is simply another target of its satire. There is no evidence within the text itself upon which to base such a fairly radical claim, however, and the interpretation of Chaucer as a postmodern nihilist, announcing the impossibility of objective truth, has something of the flavor of anachronism.

However, it may do us well here to draw on semiotician Umberto Eco’s concept of the postmodern moment as something which is

not a chronologically circumscribed category but a spiritual category, or better yet a Kunstwollen (a Will-to-Art), perhaps a stylistic device and/or a world view. We could say that every age has its own postmodern, just as every age has its own form of modernism (in fact, I wonder if postmodern is not simply the modern name for Manierismus as a metahistorical category).

Viewed in this way, the postmodern reading of Troilus and Criseyde no longer seems quite so anachronistic. Eco locates this postmodern spirit in an engagement with the past, an engagement that Troilus has in spades:

I believe that every age reaches moments of crisis[. . . .] The sense that the past is restricting, smothering, blackmailing us. The historical avant-garde [. . .] tries to settle its accounts with the past. [. . .] The postmodern response to the modern consists instead of recognizing that the past—since it may not be destroyed, for its destruction result in silence—must be revisited ironically, in a way which is not innocent. (2-3)

Chaucer revisits the past in this way in Troilus and Criseyde when he, within the text, ironically engages the history of the fall of Troy, the prefigurement of London’s self-identity as Troy Novant, and when he, through the text, engages in the language and form of classical epic. This return is necessary because otherwise one can merely replace the broken idols with new ones (as Chaucer himself is doing under the Christianist reading). Irony provides an avenue for a new type of speech altogether (Eco 2).

Still, there seems to be no textual way to adjudicate between the Christianist and postmodern readings. As Eco points out, “[i]n the case of the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it. With the postmodern it is possible to misunderstand the game, by taking things seriously.” Our best decision in such a situation may be to not decide at all. Perhaps it is best to let both possible interpretations of Troilus and Criseyde stand next to each other, interrogating each other, as an ambiguity which enriches the text, creating its own new web of multi-leveled meaning. The puzzle of the satiric nature of Troilus is, maybe, one which is best left unsolved. 

( works cited )

. . .

As a result of grad school, a lot of thoughts are swimming around in my mind. My impulse, which I think is a good one, is to return to my notes and papers from undergrad and to use them to help me shape my thoughts. A year's passage or more helps me to examine my earlier--sometimes completely forgotten--thoughts with the necessary critical distance.

There's been a lot of talk of postmodernism in this journal, in my grad school classes, and in various discussions to be found on the 'net (such as at Kristina Busse's blog), and I think the above argument about Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde as a postmodern text, made when I was a senior in undergrad (deliriumdriver no doubt remembers the night on which it was written, as we had the same class and we spent the hours of morning IM-ing each other as our page counts slowly grew higher), helps to cast light on it. What does it mean to think of Troilus as a postmodern text, and how is that different from thinking of, say, Speranza's Victors that way? Since many of these conversations are also ones that members of my flist are invested in, I have provided it above. (I have chosen not to subject you to the ten pages of semi-close reading which preceded it.)

This piece doesn't, although I thought it did, draw upon the essay by Eco of which I'm thinking when I talk about Eco describing postmodernism as a mode of reading--that essay was Postlude to The Name of the Rose and I think I had left it home?--but it does, of course, draw extensively on another, different set of statements by Eco about the postmodern. When I originally wrote this, of course, the goal was to understand Chaucer; I return to it now in order to understand the postmodern, and thus it functions as a case study.

"Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable"

I was going to post some of Eco's passage in Postscript to "The Name of the Rose" where he discusses postmodernism, but I was feeling lazy and felt like playing with my new toy besides. And so I offer you a recording of me reading "Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable." Even in translation (or was the Postscript written in English?), Eco's prose is quite pleasing to the ear, I think, even if the recording itself is rather quick and dirty with only the worst slips edited out.

(It occurs to me that Vox, where the recordings are currently hosted, doesn't seem to permit downloads. If anyone is interested in downloading this recording or one of my audiofics, comment here and I'll e-mail it to you or upload it to sendspace or the like.)

One can see how my "postmodernism is a mode of reading" can be extrapolated out of this, but he doesn't actually, on re-reading, seem to make the theoretical move explicit. It all depends, I think, on how we interpret the phrase "transhistorical category" (is a category something which organizes thought, or a natural division?).