They Had Their World as in Their Time: The Monk’s “Little Narratives”

They Had Their World as in Their Time: The Monk's "Little Narratives" Richard Neuse University ofRhode Island [Julian Schnabel's paintings of the female Christ and the black St.Francis} exhibit careful attention to cultural history while interrogating-politically and ethically-the traditional representations of heroic sacrifice.... It is not simply a matter of at last dignifying suffering women and poor blacks, but of decentering classical patriarchy in some of its most moving moments....The doubleness and ambivalence of postmodern pastiche-simultaneously set in and against cultural history-regularly tilts toward social criticism.The poli­ tics here is neither neoconservative nor revolutionary, but nearer to anarchistic. -Vincent Leitch, Postmodernism-Local Effects, Global Flows LIKE BoccAcno's D, ,w;bu, v;ro,um ;//u,t,;um, from which it takes its (sub)title, The Monks Tale is a somewhat disconcerting mixture of a kind of world chronicle and literary fiction. In his Prologue, the Monk leaves it an open question whether his primary concern is with his Tale as fiction-in this case, tragedy, which he, in a manner of speak­ ing, is the first to introduce into English literature1 -or with history. He begins with a definition (of sorts) of tragedy and follows that with an apologia for his ignorance of history in case he "by ordre telle nat thise thynges, / Be it of popes, emperours, or kynges" (MkP 1985-86). Commentators have usually taken this profession of ignorance at face value, partly because of their unsympathetic view of the Monk as, in Renate Haas's phrase, a "sham humanist,"2 and partly because there are indeed manifest violations of chronological order in the arrangement of the Tale's tragedies. Two further possibilities in this connection have not 1 See Renate Haas, "Chaucer's Monk'.r Tale: An Ingenious Criticism ofEarly Humanist Conceptions of Tragedy," Humanistica Loviniensa 36 (1987): 44-70. In all probability, Chaucer "was the first to experiment with tragedy in the vernacular" (p. 44). 'Ibid., p. 67. 415 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER been raised, so far as I am aware. The first is that the apologia is a mere humility formula not meant literally, such as we get a number of times at the beginning ofrales.3 The second possibility, for which I shall argue here, is that the Monk deliberately violates chronological order as part of his agenda of breaking with the "grand narratives" of biblical-Christian history writing framed by Creation, Incarnation, and Apocalypse. What I am proposing, in other words, is that the Monk is not to be seen as a frivolous character or a fraud but as a serious-minded humanist with a bent toward postmodernism4 avant la lettre. His Tale, I suggest, is one in which the distinction between literary fiction and history is tacitly elided and traditional ideas of historiography are subverted in a number ofways. It might be objected that to apply the termpostmodern­ ism to a fourteenth-century text is an anachronism, but as used by Lyo­ tard and others, postmodernism stands precisely for "anachronism" in a literal sense: a break with the idea oftime and history as one thing after another, a diachronic series or progression. Instead, postmodernism pos­ its a historiography ofunique and hence discontinuous events, involving a doubling oftime, that ofthe past and that ofthe present ofrepresenta­ tion/narration. The Monk:r Tale has some of the appearance of a traditional world chronicle, but the tragedies in terms of which it is presented quickly put the lie to any such appearance. It begins with the fall (casus) ofLuci­ fer, followed by that ofAdam, and takes the reader all the way to present times. Yet even if the so-called Modern Instances are placed at the end of the Tale (as they are in some MSS), there is, as already observed, no real chronological order in the arrangement of the casus, and these dis­ play such a variety of frequently contradictory historical paradigms as to undermine any notion of a coherent historiographic perspective or intent. The fa\;ade of a universal history dissolves, and The Monk's Tale·' A familiar example is the Franklin's elaborate apologia for his "rude speche" (lines 716-28...