Abstract
Scholarship on postmodern literary experiments tends to hail modes of textuality that deviate from the contemporary norm of the printed page and the codex as new and revolutionary. But such attitudes to emergent literary forms fail to recognise medieval precursors to these apparently new developments. Indeed, regarding these works as an experimental—and therefore novel—aspect of (post)modern literary production contributes to a larger trend, ultimately a function of the periodisation of literature, in which the medieval is seen as entirely Other to the modern. As a result of this conceptual break, postmodern literary experiments tend to enact, and embody, an unwitting return to medieval modes of textuality.
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Notes
See, for example, the essays collected in The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012) which tend to exemplify this position.
As Roland Barthes notes, “It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts.” (Barthes, 1977, p. 156).
This could either be seen as part of Chaucer’s open structure, or as evidence that it is was left unintentionally incomplete. Regardless, the effect is a text which is undoubtedly open.
As also suggested by Kiser (1991, p. 137).
For a discussion of the pecia system, see Andrew Taylor (1999, p. 354).
One could also argue that their actions are a violence against the text, perhaps motivated by fear of the open text. To bind such a text is, logically, as absurd as it would be to unbind a murder mystery, and having ‘the butler did it’ relocated to the first page.
Indeed, given medieval authors’ own biases and the fact that medieval authors frequently reworked their texts, to suggest that the authorial text would, without question, carry more authority is fallacious. With regard to the Hoccleve autographs, for example, Roger Ellis notes their inherent untrustworthiness (2001, p. 1).
Although stemmatics may attempt to recover an earlier version of the text, this is not to say that the earliest version recoverable resembles closely an authorial text. For a discussion of the problems inherent with this form of editing, see Moffat and McCarren (1998).
It is undoubtedly true, as Tom Uglow notes in the ‘Introduction’ leaf to Composition No. 1, that “the instinct not to manipulate the ‘deck’ is almost overwhelming. There is nothing as disconcerting as the sensations of holding a loose sheaf of papers, with no numbers, no chapters, with a hundred and fifty beginnings and a hundred and forty nine endings” (n.p.).
Although as McHale (1989, p. 180) notes, a “simultaneous reading of two or more texts at once is, strictly speaking, impossible”, this does not hinder many postmodern texts from being characterised by an attempt to produce such a condition.
McHale (1989) similarly argues that “parallel texts […] force the reader to improvise an order of reading” (p. 180). Although speaking of glosses in postmodern works, his suggestion that “the various formats of glossing a text […] foreground the materiality of the book” (p. 192) still holds true.
Jonathan Safran Foer uses images in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example, to convey the effects of traumatic events caused after the September 11th terrorist attacks (as discussed by Pabst 2008). Other postmodern works use what McHale calls “anti-illustration” (1989, p. 189), that is, illustrations and photographs which are unrelated to the main body of the text and signify nothing, in order to disrupt narrative. Illustrations of Chaucer manuscripts, while of course not so theoretically grounded, also disrupt the linear narrative. The illustration of the Wife of Bath in the Ellesmere Manuscript, for example, does not reflect the narrative content of her tale, but is a character portrait, showing her with whip in hand sitting astride her horse (Kennedy 1997, pp. 34–35). The reader is encouraged by the illustration’s presence to read the image against the text, which means that the text is not read without distraction.
As Greetham (2002, p. 42) notes, “it is only through the invocation of some Middle Ages that we keep ourselves modern.” Indeed, the ‘modern’ is always formed through an Othering of an earlier period.
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Evans, G.L. An Unwitting Return to the Medieval: Postmodern Literary Experiments and Middle English Textuality. Neophilologus 100, 335–344 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9446-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9446-4