Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture by Kathleen Forni (review)

As Kathleen Forni maintains, her “study continues the developing narrative of Chaucer’s modern popular reception initiated by Steve Ellis’s Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination and Candace Barrington’s American Chaucers” (p. 2). This statement is only partially true, since the author uses a different approach to the subject matter. Whereas Ellis and Barrington organize their monographs in a largely chronological and thematic fashion, Forni is interested in the modes of intertextual engagement such as adaptation, appropriation, invocation, and citation of Chaucer’s works, especially his Canterbury Tales. These taxonomies enable her to group together texts belonging to a plethora of genres (science fiction, travelogue, romance, melodrama, debate, thriller, detective fiction, historical novel, opera, musical, rap poetry, and dance) regardless of chronology and origin. The advantage is obvious: with the help of this tight methodological grid, seemingly heterogeneous texts can be organized and analyzed in a meaningful fashion. There is, however, one disadvantage: since Forni also distributes the texts under discussion into three comprehensive chapters according to subject matter (“Chaucer the Detective”), presentation (“Chaucer on the TV Screen”), and location (“The Canterbury Pilgrimage and African Diaspora”), some works briefly discussed and presented in the first chapter under the heading of “Modes of Intertextual Engagement” will reappear in these subsequent chapters. Information provided in Chapter 1, where the methodological groundwork is laid out, will thus be reintroduced and elaborated on in the respective chapters, as, for instance, Doherty’s, Devlin’s, and Ackroyd’s murder mysteries in Chapter 2; the BBC’s Canterbury Tales and Jonathan Myerson’s Canterbury Tales in Chapter 3; and Nelson’s travel narrative, The Cachoeira Tales, in Chapter 4, to cite just a few examples.

Since Forni’s study focuses on Chaucer’s contemporary popular afterlife as opposed to academic analysis of the poet’s oeuvre, her approach presupposes a good command of modern popular culture theory, which is brought to bear on the discussion of the individual works. In addition, her profound knowledge of Chaucer scholarship enables her to assess the popular canon with the analytical tools provided by professional Chaucerians. She draws successfully on this critical corpus, a fact that lends an extra dimension to her analysis of the modern Chaucerian. This “Chaucerian is … consistently associated with social satire targeting snobbery of any kind” (p. 4). Moreover, the pilgrimage and tale structure is most often recreated as “a literary space providing the opportunity for confessional chat that fosters communal camaraderie” (p. 4). The poet himself is constructed as “both social aspirant and anti-elitist, a people’s poet, purveyor of the pithy proverb, valued for the very lack of ‘high seriousness’ that Matthew Arnold found wanting in his poetry” (p. 6). Nonprofessionals who adapt, appropriate, invoke, and cite Chaucer’s works prefer “a nice Chaucer, whose optimistic poetic vision embodies inclusivity and social comity, who professes an egalitarian spirit and affirms the promise of social opportunity” (p. 19). With the sole exception of O’Connor’s historical novel, Chaucer’s Triumph, where Chaucer is a largely unattractive person, the Chaucer emerging from modern fiction is a positive, though flexible character, who is seen as both conservative, facilitating the status quo, and progressive, challenging the official worldview.

It is not surprising that Chaucer the man, rather than Chaucer the poet, becomes a major character in Chaucerian detective and historical mystery fiction, which is the subject of Chapter 2. Since detective fiction defends the existing social system by neutralizing those who disturb the social order, Chaucer the detective will act in the best interest of society. The great social upheavals of his age (Schism, Peasants’ Revolt, Black Death, and Lancastrian usurpation) provide the appropriate background for personal crime committed in a time of general disorder, decline of authority, and decay of moral and social order. Set against this background, the journey to Canterbury, featuring an assembly of pilgrims from all walks of life, becomes the ideal locus of crime. As justice...