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Lee Patterson,Chaucer and the Subject of History.


by Eric Miraglia
Web posted at 12:21 AM on 3/7/96 from xtsd0218.it.wsu.edu.
Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

The outline below covers Patterson's Introduction, pages 1-46. In this section, he lays out the elements of subjectivity which he considers to be crucial to his argument, and presages the direction he intends to take his argument as he proceeds into textual analysis of the Canterbury Tales.

I. Modernity is constituted by the fading of the social and the historical from view in favor of the ahistorical autonomous individual.
A. The Medieval has long been posited as the alternative to the Modern
B. The Modern self is thought to emerge during the Renaissance
C. But actually Modern selfhood is explored throughout the Middle Ages

II. Competing views about Chaucer
A. Dryden: Father of English poetry; a classic; transhistorical; always true.
B. Scogan: Transformer of 14th century conventions; not transhistorical.
C. Chaucer: Entertained both possibilities of selfhood: autonomous and historical.

III. Chaucer's early work attempts to work out these tensions in predictable ways.

IV. Canterbury Tales and modern subjectivity:
A. Example of the parson
B. Chaucer shows us that character is the product of dialectic (see illustration)

V. Chaucer's own selfhood
A. Low servant to the king; friends with the Knights of the Chamber
B. Civil servant/royal servant


ADDITIONAL NOTES (disorganized):

I
Modern selfhood dilemma:
"If the category of the social has faded from view, so too has the category of the historical. Instead of understanding themselves as products of determinative historical processes, modern individuals tend to see themselves as autonomous and self-made. insofar as it exists at all, the past is either a burden to be cast off--within our therapeutic culture a common goal is to "take responsibility for yourself" by dispensing with outgrown cultural and parental precepts -- or an array of items and practices available for nostalgic reminiscence."
"Also not coincidentally, for recent sociologists, the drake secret at the heart of modern individualism is its failure as a mode of life." "Radically empty", isolated from the social...vulnerable, unable to effect resistance.
Social critiques of the modern self conclude with "the paradoxical notion that the very freedom that individualism takes as its central premise, the ability of individuals to separate themselves from the social totality in order to choose or to change the conditions of their lives is being subverted by the ideology of individualism itself."
Started in the Renaissance
Alternative found in Medieval
Patterson argues the latter isn't true; points to Dante's Commedia and other places where the exploration of an interior self read against the social and historical contexts is taking place.
Chaucer was fascinated with what literary criticism has traditionally called 'character,' and he defined it as one term in an oppositional dialectic constituted on the other side by history--by which I mean both the persistent presence of the past and the pressure of social realities. Such a definition is by no means unmedieval. What is striking and important, however, is the fact that this interest in the constitution of the self feels--to us, probably also to his contemporary readers, and perhaps even to the poet himself-- quintessentially modern.

II.
Dryden assumes the modernist model of Ren. humanism: the Ren present posits a definitive break with the past (the Middle Ages) in order to ally itself with a transhistorical realm of self presence (antiquity). Scogan assumes instead a model of continuity , in which both improvement and decline are possible but a transhistorical step out of the process as a whole is not. In trying to understand Ch.'s relation to the subject of history--to history as a topic for poetry, as a material and social world for representation, and as the individual person forged in the dialectic between the subjective and the social-- we must realize that he entertained both of these possibilities.

III.
Early work; conventional, no one else could have written it, but doesn't make great strides toward exploring a modern selfhood.

IV.
Canterbury Tales:
Example of the Parson, who in the GP is "in a realistic spatial and temporal existence, and as not merely acting out a role, but expressing his consciousness of doing so." (Mann).
This fine example to his flock he gave,
That first he wrought and afterwards he taught;
Out of the gospel then that text he caught,
And this figure he added thereunto-
That, if gold rust, what shall poor iron do?
For if the priest be foul, in whom we trust,
What wonder if a layman yield to lust?
And shame it is, if priest take thought for keep,
A shitty shepherd, shepherding clean sheep.
Well ought a priest example good to give,
By his own cleanness, how his flock should live.
Chaucer shows us that the Parson's estate is not the sum total of his selfhood but a social identity that he deliberately adopts, a self-definition he labors to achieve. He shows us, in other words, that character is not an object to be described but the product of a dialectical movement between a socially undefined subjectivity (content, for the moment, unspecified) and a historically determined role. Character is what emerges from the transactions between the given world outside(history) and the unspecified world within (the subject).

V. Chaucer's life
Chaucer as the man caught between the Knights of the Chamber, with whom he arguably was friends, and the King's squires, of which he was one -- very different roles. Also, his role as a King's servant and as a civil servant blurred the boundaries of his own social roles, perhaps feeding his inquiry into the articulation of selfhood.
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