V.A. Kolve's book, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative

by D. Michael Kramp
Web posted at 8:15 PM on 3/31/96 from xtsd0107.it.wsu.edu.

Kolve, V.A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1984.

I. Interest, Focus, Thesis, and Theoretical Apparatus

A. Kolve is interested in "the visual contexts of the Canterbury
Tales--especially, in how a knowledge of the symbolic traditions current in
the visual arts of the later Middle Ages can clarify and deepen our response to
his [Chaucer's] narrative poems" (1).

B. Kolve's focus is "upon the imagery of narrative: not the passing metaphor
or simile, not the local iconographic detail; but those larger images created
by the narrative action itself, which it invites us to imagine and hold in mind
as we experience the poem, and which later serve as memorial centers around
which we are able to reconstruct the story and think appropriately about its
meaning" (2).

C. Kolve maintains that "Chaucer engages the literary and visual culture of
its time both at the moment of its making (the poet in the act of conceiving
the larger outlines of his poem) and in its public life thereafter, as it is
experienced by an audience and thought about when it is over" (2).

D. Kolve's work is fundamentally historical in theory. While he often works
within a framework of reader response theory and the post-structuralist notion
of constructed meanings and signs, he is most concerned with the historical
acceptance of Chaucer's poem by its author's first audience. In this specific
study, he deals extensively with Chaucer's use of narrative imagery and
narrative visual art, and his audience's knowledge and application of such
material.

II. Methodology, Goal, and Disclaimer

A. After solidifying his approach to Chaucer's CT, Kolve considers the
first five tales of the work, which he argues "formally inaugurate the literary
pilgrimage" (1).

B. In his concluding chapter, Kolve reconsiders the imagery of narrative,
reviews his examination of the first five tales of the CT and suggests
"for the first time the relationship between the pattern they make and the
pattern of the Canterbury Tales as a whole." Kolve concludes that this
pattern is "so profoundly Chaucerian, reflecting both the continuing strength
of medieval culture and the birth of something new, that even in a study
limited to the first of these sequences, the tales that begin the journey, we
may hope to approach the work at something near its imaginative and ethical
center" (7).

C. Kolve works rather specifically with the medium of visual arts. While he
acknowledges both the alteration of such material through time and the
inaccuracy of any claim which maintains that Chaucer and his audience knew the
same identical portraits, he works with the premise that both Chaucer and his
original audience would have known them and "understood" certain examples of
narrative imagery.

III. Kolve Overview

A. Ch. 3: "The Knight's Tale and its Settings: The Prison/Garden and
the Tournament Amphitheatre"

B. Ch. 4: "The Miller's Tale: Nature, Youth, and Nowell's Flood"

C. Ch. 5: "The Reeve's Prologue and Tale: Death-as-Tapster and
the Horse Unbridled"

D. Ch. 6: "The Cook's Tale and the Man of Law's Introduction:
Crossing the Hengwrt/Ellesmer Gap"

E. Ch. 7: "The Man of Law's Tale: The Rudderless Ship and the Sea"

IV. Ch. 2: "Chaucerian Aesthetic: The Image in the Poem"

A. Kolve focuses on Chaucer's use of Medieval mental imagery--Chaucer's art is
"visual" and there is much to "see"--ante oculos ponere

1. Sights, sounds, and smells of daily life

2. Reader/Listener

B. Two main categories of images

1. Mimetic: imitative, constructed, applicable, expandable

2. Iconographic: the symbolic representation of ideas, persons, and history
in pictorial form

3. Kolve maintains that the iconographic image is "characteristically
assimilated to the verisimilar and mimetic texture of the whole; it is
discovered within the images one forms in attending to the narrative action
itself" (60). These are images that the auditor/reader is "invited to
recognize as being like--as being in "approximate register" with--symbolic
images known from other medieval contexts, both literary and visual" (61).
Post-Structuralist Disclaimer: Kolve suggests that these images most
central to the late Middle Ages carried with them "a weight of accumulated
cultural meaning--historical, religious, moral, and psychological." He
considers these factors in both the construction and the reception of the
images and maintains that no sign is independent of its context--i.e. no sign
can function in a neutral manner--e.g. bagpipe images (61).

C. Three Major Categories in Medieval Sign Theory

1. Attribute: "allows the ready identification of certain historical or
pseudo-historical persons" (62).

2. Symbol: "things mean something other than themselves" (62).

3. Allegorical Figures: "abstract ideas expressed in a human form, sometimes
accompanied by conventional symbols" (62).

4. Kolve works with Chaucer's non-allegorical poems and is concerned with how
images bring generalized meaning into highly particularized fictional
scenes--most often secular.

D. Chest Front Carving (ca. 1400) of scenes from the Pardoner's Tale:
evidence free from anachronism, provides insight into the most important
"places" in a literary text for the original audience.

E. Hoccleve's dialogue with the image of a dying man (ca. 1430): Chaucer's
audience would meditate upon such an image in its mind.

F. Chaucer as artist/artisan--"makyng" poetry--wisdom/art

Return to WSU Chaucer Page.