Vision, Pilgrimage, and Rhetorical Composition

Abstract

Vision, Pilgrimage, and Rhetorical Composition Robert M. Jordan University ofBritish Columbia In the popular mind, and indeed in the minds ofmany smdcnts and teachers ofliterature, even some Chaucerians, rhetoric retains much ofthe stigma expressed by John M. Manly when he stated that "the task ofthe artist is not to pad his tales with rhetoric, but to conceive all the events and characters in the forms and activities oflife."1 But those who have learned something from Wayne Booth, Richard Lanham, the Russian Formalists, the European structuralists, and a host of other theorists of the postwar generations can no longer accept the easy dichotomy between rhetoric and life.2 Manly found in Chaucer what Manly and his generation valued in literature, and that was the "forms andactivitiesoflife," not the "padding" ofrhetoric. And as a later generation, living in the "postmodern" age, we too see ourselves in Chaucer's plenitude. But what we see is quite different. It is well expressed, I think, in these words ofa modern critic: "The point of view shifts; the ...style shifts and the tone; characters turn into things; sequences of events abruptly vanish. Images clash; realms of discourse bang together." This description of clashing styles and shifting view­ points- this rhetorical description, ifyou will-is not from a Chaucerian commentary. It is Annie Dillard describing today's postmodern or "experi1 John M. Manly, "Chaucer and the Rhetoricians," PBA 12 (1926): 95-113. Cited from reprint in R.J. Schoeck and).Taylor, eds., Chaucer Cn"ticism: The "Canterbury Tales"(Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1960), p. 285. 2 Wayne C. Booth, TheRhetoric a/Fiction (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1961); Richard A. Lanham, The Motives ofEloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversityPress, 1976), esp. chap. 1. Among many accounts oflanguage­ centered developments in modern literary theory the following are especially useful: Frederic Jameson, The Pnson-House a/Language (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1972); Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); Terence Hawkes, Structuralzsm and Semiotics (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1977). 195 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER mental" fiction, the works ofJoyce, Nabokov, Calvino, Barth, and many others.3 My point is that today's writers and critics-and readers too-are inter­ ested in surfaces, in the artful disposition of the wealth of materials that language offers. We have cultivated predispositions that were anathema to earlier critics. In particular we are prepared to recognize a Chaucerian di­ mension-the verbal surface itself-that is exterior to content and outside the focus of realistinterpretation. And we have begun to sharpen analytical instruments that can help us appreciate both the aesthetic possibilities and the philosophical implications of an artistry that is acutely conscious of verbal surfaces. Rhetorical narrative-known in postmodern parlance as metafiction-recognizes and exploits the ambiguous status of language as both an autonomous system and an instrument of perception. We are more skeptical than post-Romantic and early modern readers-and I think more in tune with Chaucer-about the relation between language and !ife. Does this mean that we are willing to sacrifice life and emotion for artifice and mere virtuosity? It is easy to fall into such dualistic thinking, as Manly did, and regard Chaucer as either a rhetorician or an artist. A rhetorical reading of Chaucer does not dismiss life and feeling but rather redirects attention from the verisimilitude of realistic content and drama­ tized characters to the labor itself of writing and composing poetic nar­ ratives. Life and feeling are discerned not exclusively in imagined content but also on the actual verbal surfaces, where the living poet confronted the awesome challenge of converting what he knew and what he felt into the constraining forms of language. As many recent commentators have noted, Chaucer's art is highly self-conscious. Like postmodern fiction, it betrays in many ways a preoccupation with the nature and the possibilities of the verbal medium, and with the limits of language as well. Thesignsof Chaucer'sfascinationwithhismediumareapparentthrough­ out his works, and they take a variety of forms. The question of the reliabil­ ity of language as an account of reality is an important theme in TheHouse ofFame and in The Manciple's Tale...