Marshall Leicester, "The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales."

by D. Michael Kramp
Web posted at 6:35 PM on 3/10/96 from xtsd0305.it.wsu.edu.

Leicester, Marshall. "The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales." PMLA 95 (1980): 213-224.

Leicester's piece provides a good example of a New Critics response to the rising danger of New Historicism (I want to return to this statement). He argues quite vehemently that both Chaucer as narrator/pilgrim/poet, and the tellers of the individual tales, must not be understood as products of medieval society. Rather, he suggests that we must conceive of Chaucer and the work's pilgrims as products of the text--i.e. Chaucer is a product of the general prologue and the individual tales, and the specific tellers are products of their individual tales.

I. Unimpersonated artistry: reading the tale as a dramatic monologue, but understanding that Chaucers attitudes as a poet and an individual inform this interpretation.

II. Unimpersonated artistry as a useful problem.
A. Allows critics of Chaucer to transcend the individual pilgrim narrators of the CT and >identify the poet himself as the source of meaning< (214).
B. Unimpersonated artistry as a theoretical proposition is an unhelpful problem.

III. Leicesters Razor: argues that the CT are >individually voiced, and radically so--that each of the tales is primarily an expression of its tellers personality and outlook as embodied in the unfolding ånow of the telling< (215).
A. Moving against the tendency to interpret the tales on the basis of something external to them-- <usually either some aspect of the historical background of the poems or the descriptions of the speakers given in the Canterbury frame< (215).
B. Moving against the notion of accounting for the poem as a duplicate of the visible narrative of the frame.
C. Objection to dramatic model--the CT is a written text.
D. Ultimate failure of unimpersonated artistry: it attempts to preserve the sense that a real individual is present >at the cost of rendering us permanently uncertain about who is speaking at any given moment in (or of) the text: the pilgrim, the poet, or that interesting mediate entity Chaucer the pilgrim< (216).

IV. Leicester insists that there is only a text and that the CT is a written document.
A. There is a voice of the text and in the text.
B. Speaker created by the text and its multiple relationships.
C. CT as a text which actively engages the phenomenon of voice--exploits it and makes it the center of its discourse--this is a text about its speaker.
D. Must determine the personality from the written tale--tale must specify the portrait and not vice versa.

V. Poet as the creation rather than the creator of his poem.
A. Must determine what Chaucer as pilgrim means and what Chaucer as poet means by what the pilgrim means--double narration.
B. We can only know Chaucer the poet through the text.

VI. Double narration--still only one speaker who is the maker of the poem.
A. >The CT is not written to be spoken as if it were a play. It is written to be read as if it were spoken. The poem is a literary imitation of oral performance< (221).
B. Tales are double voiced: >each of them is Chaucer impersonating a pilgrim, the narrator speaking in the voce of the Knight or the Reeve or the Second Nun. They are his creatures, voices that he assumes; he gives them his life< (221).
C. Poem as the record of an attempt to see from anothers point of view--to speak in the voices of others.
D. Prologue neither does justice to the pilgrims nor the narrator--insufficiency of traditional social classifications in dealing with complex relationships.
E. Chaucer as the speaker of the CT is as fictional as the pilgrims >in the sense that like them he is a self-constructing voice. He practices what I have called the art of impersonation, finally, to impersonate himself, to create himself as fully as he can in his work< (222).

Questions:
1. Leicesters emphasis on the text as well as his advice to ignore social and historical circumstances certainly appears to be a New Critical approach. However, is he ultimately suggesting that we deconstruct the CT?
2. Is it possible as readers to ignore the portraits of the General Prologue? Why then is it extant in the work?
3. How do we respond to Leicesters claim that Chaucer is the poem as well as the poet?
4. If we follow Ls advice and ignore social and historical concerns in our reading of Chaucer, are we tacitly acknowledging that Chaucer was not conscious of such concerns in his writing?

Return to WSU Chaucer Page.