There are a few things I am curious about this work. The first distinction is that it exists as a whole text. Compared to the Canterbury Tales, the story is concerned with a solitary narrative arc, instead of a frame story with smaller tales interspersed (much like the Reinhardt / Renard / Reynard stories.) As such, I feel more comfortable approaching the work in a critical manner. Through the introduction, I have already learned the plot of the tale. What leaves me uncertain about approaching the text is how the story is has been constructed through time. The narrative comes from late antiquity and on through Shakespeare, so how do we consider Chaucer's role as a re-visionary of the tale?
In the intro, it speaks much of how this tale comes from the Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, where "[Chaucer] often matched the Italian text stanza for stanza" (xxiii). This is so much emphasized that there are places where this is drawn attention to, and included in a chart in the text. Thinking in terms of my paper, I am weary about making a claim about authorial intent before I know the context that this should be taken in. As such, it is with reservations that I bring this assertion into the text: the character of Pandarus, which Chaucer created, seems like an analogue within the poem for the poet's own narrative voice. From the reading considered so far, this character is a go-between and facilitator for the love that will perhaps develop between the two main characters. If this character is a Chaucerian invention and not coming from the source texts this is one place where we can speak of the edifice of the poet's creativity. That this Pandarus is friend of Troilus and the uncle of Criseyde places him within a level of intimacy with the characters that only a writer knows.
Although Troilus and Criseyde has areas of direct transcription, there are places where he veers from the source text. The most notable one at this reading is Troilus's song in part one. Again, I know nothing other sources of the text, but this song has been presented as the first use of the Petrarchan sonnet in English poetry. This is not pure invention, as the poem is more an adaptation (362) of the original sonnet from Petrarch, and not a new one all together. This is textually interesting to see how Chaucer is writing a poem in vulgar English, but he is taking source material from two different contemporary Italian sources and making something that while not entirely original, is something that is entirely Chaucer's. What makes me curious is this notion of invention as part of how a modern reader hails an author. If we are able to maintain Chaucer in the canon, why do modern readers know Camus, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and not the unfortunate forgotten who translated them.
It is again a rhetorical leap to claim that Chaucer was nothing but a translator, but it is an interesting subject to me. I have this notion that the ideas of authorship, ideas of genre, and the divide between written and performed where much more fluid than they is now. Modern readers have build walls around ideas. I can remember reading somewhere where the prize-winning novel The Life of Pi was under criticism because its author wrote a story about a tiger and a little boy and a raft. This represents how modern society puts not the craft of versification, but the ideas behind them in primacy.
A final consideration is the fact that I have been raised to recognize what genre a work fits in, and that is the beginning of a description:
"What are you reading?"
"Oh, this, it's a play by Tom Stoppard."
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is not so easily classifiable. There is a narrative arc, creating what might be considered fiction. There's versification, metered lines, and stanza breaks with a regular rhyme pattern within the stanzas. And lastly there is a lot of talking. From what I've read, I can see why Shakespeare made this into a play. He might only have needed to modernize some of the lines and place in stage directions. The fun thing is that it seems Chaucer is self conscious about these ambiguities. Instead of the classic epic invocation to the muse, there is an invocation to a fury. Instead of a love triangle with a jilted lover, there is just the two of them, both free to do as they choose. These subversions show something about Chaucer's own enjoyment of the work he was creating.
Perhaps this poem is also about interpretation and ambiguity. My mind returns to the image of Chaucer at some sort of pulpit or lectern: is he reading, performing, or both?
July 15, 2010
Ours was the marsh country: On Waterland
Negate the ellipsis. Every story is not about the characters, nor are they about the plot. Oftentimes the story is the story of the landscape, the story of the oppressive home. Our history teacher tells us many things, but most of all, I focus on the landscape. He speaks of the flat, oppressive flatness of the country that surrounds the fens, he speaks of the east wind, biting into his soul, and tearing his family apart as the bitter cold eats away at what the young child knows.
Ours is the hill country. The visitor notices the majesty of the explosion of the colors in the fall. They know the rolling hills and the kindly people who wear the badge of "mountaineer" with pride. The native knows how the hills crush around you, breaking up the sky. The mountaineer knows no concept of the horizon. The horizon is the succession of hills receding in the background. It is the distances that one must pass.
The landscape of home is often the landscape of bad memories. It is the land of dead parents, broken hearts, and forgotten friendships. The landscape reminds us of all of the regrets that we have, and the hope that in some way of eternity, that we might do things differently. The homeland is the land of failure.
No one wants failure. We seek out the differences, the lands that might hold some everlasting promise. This is the root of colonialism, the root of manifest destiny. It is the root of space travel. Humans have curiosity; they look to lands that people might not remember them. They yearn for unfamiliar territory to lay down their claim, and thus proclaim, "Hello, I am different, I have succeeded." The problem is that we keep encounter natives of these lands. You roll forth into a new place, and proclaim that all that you can see is taken in the name of the king. Then the natives come forth and proclaim their own right, and represent their own malaise.
For even if the place that we live is repressive, and full of bad memories, they are still our memories. No man can take these from our possession, and they are intrinsically ours. Natives will defend a barren land with their lives if only to prove that their existence is not in vain. The futility of such things is shocking, but men have amazed us for millennia in their course of actions.
Ours is the hill country. The visitor notices the majesty of the explosion of the colors in the fall. They know the rolling hills and the kindly people who wear the badge of "mountaineer" with pride. The native knows how the hills crush around you, breaking up the sky. The mountaineer knows no concept of the horizon. The horizon is the succession of hills receding in the background. It is the distances that one must pass.
The landscape of home is often the landscape of bad memories. It is the land of dead parents, broken hearts, and forgotten friendships. The landscape reminds us of all of the regrets that we have, and the hope that in some way of eternity, that we might do things differently. The homeland is the land of failure.
No one wants failure. We seek out the differences, the lands that might hold some everlasting promise. This is the root of colonialism, the root of manifest destiny. It is the root of space travel. Humans have curiosity; they look to lands that people might not remember them. They yearn for unfamiliar territory to lay down their claim, and thus proclaim, "Hello, I am different, I have succeeded." The problem is that we keep encounter natives of these lands. You roll forth into a new place, and proclaim that all that you can see is taken in the name of the king. Then the natives come forth and proclaim their own right, and represent their own malaise.
For even if the place that we live is repressive, and full of bad memories, they are still our memories. No man can take these from our possession, and they are intrinsically ours. Natives will defend a barren land with their lives if only to prove that their existence is not in vain. The futility of such things is shocking, but men have amazed us for millennia in their course of actions.
The Dreams of the Cartographer, on Nations and Nationalism
Hobsbawm's thesis here is that with the emergence of a stable dual-polar national power structure, the influence of nationalism based on mythological ethno-linguistic `nations' will fade in the late twentieth century. Writing now, I have perspective on European and Asian nationalisms that give lie to his thesis based on the fracturing of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. His historical description and analysis are interesting as he develops further the ideas of Gellner and Anderson. However, one has to doubt his predictive powers:
"For instance, let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that a new `Europe of nations' in the Wilsonian sense were to emerge, or an Asia or Africa of nations. (The scope for a Latin America of ethnic/linguistic nations is considerably more restricted.) Spain would be diminished by the secession of Euskadi and Catalonia, Britain by that of Scotland and Wales, France by that of Corsica, Belgium would become two countries, while further east the states of the present Soviet sphere of influence would go their own way, perhaps with Slovaks separating from Czechs, and the Balkans would be redivided among Slovene, Croat, Serb and enlarged Albanian states, with an independent Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania re-emerging along the Baltic. Can it seriously be supposed that such a Balkanization, extended on a world scale, would provide a stable or lasting political system?" (176-177)
As far as that has happened, and it has happened far enough to make Hobsbawm seem prescient in the opposite direction he intended, I would say that this has provided for a stable system. Although it has created conflicts along the lines that are predictable as there is heterogeneous mixture of `nations' everywhere, the system is relatively stable. While I await a post-`national' world of a singular state and not a singular sphere of influence creating villains from the ether, at least it provides a decent organizing principle behind international football matches. As long as we can keep our imagined differences in the realm of sport, humanity should be fine. Instead we keep creating difference. Hobsbawm asks: "What else but the solidarity of an imaginary `us' against a symbolic `them' would have launched Argentina and Britain into a crazy war for some South Atlantic bog and rough pasture?" (163). He denigrates Falklands, but all conflicts are at best over bog and pasture. At least they have a material and not an ideological basis. I hope that the shocks to the cartographers over the years between the writing of this text and my review are world-historical abnormalities outside of Hobsbawm's thesis and not refutations of it.
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"For instance, let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that a new `Europe of nations' in the Wilsonian sense were to emerge, or an Asia or Africa of nations. (The scope for a Latin America of ethnic/linguistic nations is considerably more restricted.) Spain would be diminished by the secession of Euskadi and Catalonia, Britain by that of Scotland and Wales, France by that of Corsica, Belgium would become two countries, while further east the states of the present Soviet sphere of influence would go their own way, perhaps with Slovaks separating from Czechs, and the Balkans would be redivided among Slovene, Croat, Serb and enlarged Albanian states, with an independent Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania re-emerging along the Baltic. Can it seriously be supposed that such a Balkanization, extended on a world scale, would provide a stable or lasting political system?" (176-177)
As far as that has happened, and it has happened far enough to make Hobsbawm seem prescient in the opposite direction he intended, I would say that this has provided for a stable system. Although it has created conflicts along the lines that are predictable as there is heterogeneous mixture of `nations' everywhere, the system is relatively stable. While I await a post-`national' world of a singular state and not a singular sphere of influence creating villains from the ether, at least it provides a decent organizing principle behind international football matches. As long as we can keep our imagined differences in the realm of sport, humanity should be fine. Instead we keep creating difference. Hobsbawm asks: "What else but the solidarity of an imaginary `us' against a symbolic `them' would have launched Argentina and Britain into a crazy war for some South Atlantic bog and rough pasture?" (163). He denigrates Falklands, but all conflicts are at best over bog and pasture. At least they have a material and not an ideological basis. I hope that the shocks to the cartographers over the years between the writing of this text and my review are world-historical abnormalities outside of Hobsbawm's thesis and not refutations of it.
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