Living Chaucer

Individual adaptability is not only of the greatest significance as a factor of evolution . . . but is itself perhaps the chief object of selection.

—Sewell Wright, 1932

I’ve been living with Chaucer at least since high school. That makes him one of my oldest friends. True, he is a network of signifiers; but while the textuality of his companionship hardly reduces what is known to philosophers as “the problem of other minds,” it does mean that, in some fashion—the fashion of the signifying process—his words really do live on and in my mind.¹ The literary friendship I feel for Chaucer is an attachment his work actively solicits, to a degree and in ways unique to his corpus but consistent both with premodern and contemporary understandings of the signifier and its role in intersubjective, hence also political and social, process.² The importance of signifying to human community was not lost on premodern thinkers. John of Salisbury defends “the sciences of speech” on the grounds that they ensure “the bond of human community.”³ Richard de Bury says that Boethius's narrator (one of Chaucer's most important textual companions) “beheld Philosophy bearing a sceptre in her left hand and books in her right” because “no one can rightly rule a commonwealth without books.”⁴ We share minds, and hence construct communities, primarily through speech, books, images—signifiers of all kinds. The argument of this essay is that intersubjectivity, and its transmission by the signifier, is central to the ways Chaucer's poetry thinks about change.

Historical and Methodological Considerations

Recent psychological research agrees that the “living on” of the signifier transforms its hosts’ states of mind and body. Attachment theory, for example, links intergenerational transmission of “attachment styles” and theory of mind to the communicative practices of infants and their caregivers.⁵ The now-famous “mirror neurons” are thought to be among the chief organic processors of imitative learning and empathy. (When we see another person perform an action, mirror neurons fire in the corresponding parts of the motor areas in our own brain; i.e., when we observe an action, our brains “do” much the same thing as they would if we were actually performing it.) The firings of mirror neurons, as Brian Boyd puts it, “form the basis for the simulations that underlie our rich social cognition, [which is in turn] so central to narrative.”⁶

The idea of mirror neurons promises to enrich enormously our understanding of the psychology of reading and writing, affect-transmission, and the “embodied” nature of our responses to works of literature. Several studies have confirmed that verbal descriptions affect the motor areas of the brain in the same way that visual images do. The brains of Capuchin monkeys, for example, mirror the action of cracking open peanuts when they hear the sound thereof.⁷ These days, neuroscience posits intimacy, not opposition, between “everyday” acts of imagination and motor activity in the material world. (The power of play to enrich experience rests on exactly this intimacy.) As Doidge suggests in The Brain That Changes Itself, the antinomy between fantasy and reality is thereby greatly reduced. If we couldn’t create castles in the air, neither could we build them in Richmond.⁸ Merlin Donald makes a similar point when he argues that our capacity to invent tools and fire depended in the first instance on our ability to imagine fictional situations.⁹

Contemporary scientists, then, regard the intersubjectivity of “signaling” as a verifiable, material phenomenon that can be mapped in a variety of ways. Does this scientific imprimatur mean that we can now finally be assured of the power of literature to make history? It is not, for me at least, a matter of scientific truth versus humanist intuitions and speculations. Rather, the broadening of interest in “plasticity” across almost all contemporary disciplines should inspire us to ask new (or at least renewed) questions about how literary traditions are made and evaluated. (“Neuroplasticity” refers to the brain's lifelong ability to sculpt itself through its interactions with the environment.) And if we seek, we readily find that ancient...