The idea of cultural continuity in G. Chaucer's house of Fame.

Publication: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Adam Mickiewicz University Press

In Chaucer's description of the hail of Fame, we notice a series of figures representing famous ancient authors, most of them writing in Latin. They are shown as titanic, Atlas-like figures standing on columns, and bearing on their shoulders the great weight of the subject matter which they deal with in their work. For example the "Ebrayke Josephus", that is Josephus Flavius, the author of the History of the Jewish War, is shown standing on a pillar made of lead and iron and he bears on his shoulders "the fame of the Jewrye", i.e. the fame of the Jewish people. This burden, however, is so heavy that he needs seven other, unidentified figures to help him cope with it. The fame of the ancient city of Troy is supported by five figures besides "the great Homer", namely Dares and Dictys, Guido delle Colonne, Lollius, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, with Homer being considered, in spite of his "greatness", rather inadequate because he, allegedly, sided too much with the Greeks in the portrayal of their conflict with the Trojans, and indulged in literary fiction instead of reporting. They all are standing apparently on one pillar made of iron, whereas Ovid, "the clerk of Venus", is standing on a copper column, copper being the metal of Venus. The Latin poet Statius is shown, as the author of the poems Thebaid and Achilleid, to carry on his shoulders the fame of Thebes, and also that of the "cruelle Achilles" (cf. Phillips - Havely 1997: 184-187).

The passage described above seems to be a good illustration of the medieval concept of authorship. We should first mention here the tendency to see the medieval authors as essentially anonymous. As has been put by J.A. Burrow (1982: 36):

Many of the writings are formally anonymous, in the simplest sense - the name of the author has been lost ... and even where the name of the author is known, we may think of his work as anonymous in a deeper sense. The authors of this period, we believe, rarely talk about themselves, and their works are most often unmarked by any distinctive personality. Their subjects are traditional, their styles conventional. Like medieval sculpture and architecture, in fact, medieval literature is supposed to be public, impersonal, monumental.

We seem to have to do here with a stereotype that contrasts the collective, impersonal, and traditional nature of the Middle Ages with the individualistic, often egocentric, or even egomaniac, experimental and, at least ostensibly, innovative character of the modem, or modernist writing. The post-modernist literature would, interestingly enough, with its explicitly eclectic nature, and its programmatic distrust towards the grand project of revolutionising culture, veer more towards the supposedly medieval anonymity.

This collectivist stereotype of medieval authorship has actually been questioned by E.R. Curtius, who claims that in the Middle Ages we often have to do with the opposite phenomenon, namely the writer's "unadulterated pride of authorship" (Curtius 1990: 517). The "collectivist" vision of the Middle Ages is clearly a myth that, even though it has some real foundation, led to many misunderstandings and anachronistic interpretations, for instance, G.G. Coulton in his Medieval panorama claims that it was the study of medieval architecture that led William Morris to embrace the ideas of socialism (1976: 571).

We should distinguish now between the situation of the writer's talking, or choosing to be silent, on the subject of his own authorship, and the writer's dealing with somebody else's authorship. In the latter case we can encounter a great variety of attitudes, ranging from a complete neglect of the author's person to a veritable cult of the author. The whole matter seems to be neatly summarised in the following passage from St Bonaventure, who talks about the four modi faciendi librum ('ways of making a book'):

There are four ways of making a book. Sometimes a man writes others' words, adding nothing and changing nothing; and is simply called a scribe [scriptor]. Sometimes a man writes others' words, putting together passages which are not his own; and he is called a compiler [compilator]. Sometimes a man writes both others' word and his own, but with the others' words in prime place and his own added only for purposes of clarification; and he is called not an author but a commentator [commentator]. Sometimes a man writes both his own words and others', but with his own in prime place and others' added only for purpose of confirmation; and he should be called an author [auctor] (cf. Burrow 1982: 29-30).

What strikes the modern reader in this classification is, as J.A. Burrow (1982: 30) rightly emphasises, the conceptual continuum between the mere scribe and the original author:

Perhaps Bonaventure should have added the translator; but otherwise his scheme seems satisfyingly complete. One notices, however, that he does not place the auctor, as the logic of the scheme might suggest, at the opposite extreme from the scriptor or scribe; for even the auctor does not, as Bonaventure describes him, write only his own words.

Indeed, it may seem that the function of the translator does not have to be added to Bonaventure's scheme because what connects all four categories of writers, i.e. scriptor compilator, commentator, and auctor, is that their activity is, in one form or another and in greater...

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