The Phenomenology of Frames in Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Oregon Scholars' Bank THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF FRAMES IN CHAUCER, DANTE AND BOCCACCIO by TIMOTHY M. ASAY A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Timothy M. Asay Title: The Phenomenology of Frames in Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Warren Ginsberg Chair Anne Laskaya Core Member Louise Bishop Core Member Benjamin Saunders Core Member Regina Psaki Institutional Representative and J. Andrew Berglund Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded December 2014 ii © 2014 Timothy M. Asay iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Timothy M. Asay Doctor of Philosophy Department of English December 2014 Title: The Phenomenology of Frames in Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio When an author produces a frame narrative, she simultaneously makes language both a represented object and a representing agent; when we imagine framed speech, we imagine both the scene its words represent and a mouth that speaks those words. Framed language is thus perfectly mimetic: the words we imagine being spoken within the fictional world are the same we use to effect that fiction’s representation. Since its first function is to represent itself, the framed word acts both to push us out of the frame into our own temporality and to draw us into fictional times and spaces. This dissertation explores how first Dante and subsequently his successors, Boccaccio and Chaucer, deploy this structural feature of frames to engage difficult philosophical and theological disputes of their age. In the Divine Comedy, framed language allows Dante to approach the perfect presence of God without transgressing into a spatial conception of the divine. Intensifying Dante’s procedure in his House of Fame, Chaucer forecloses the possibility of representation; he transforms every speech act into an image of its utterer rather than its referent, thus violently thrusting us back into the time we pass as we read. Boccaccio —first in his Ameto then in the Decameron—eschews this framed temporality in favor of the temporality of the fetish: while his narratives threaten to dissolve into their basic iv linguistic matters, the erotic energy of the people that populate those narratives forces them to cohere as fully imagined spaces and times. Finally the Chaucer who writes the Canterbury Tales fuses his initial reading of Dante with Boccaccio’s response to it; he constructs the Canterbury pilgrims as grotesques who each open up a limited angle of vision on the time and space they collectively inhabit. These angles overlap and stutter over one another, unsettling the easy assignations of identity any given pilgrim would enforce on a tale or agent within the narrative. In doing so, Chaucer makes the temporality within his Tales strange and poignant in a way that fully mimics our own experience of extra-narrative time. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Timothy M. Asay GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR Westminster College, Salt Lake City, UT DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2014, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2008, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, 2005, Westminster College AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Medieval Literature Medieval Theology Poststructural Philosophy Phenomenology PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2013-2014 Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of English, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2007-2013 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Dissertation Defense, Orals Exam, Breadth Exams all completed “with distinction” Ernst Fellowship, 2012-2013 John L. and Naomi M. Luvaas Fellowship, 2012-2013 vi Margaret McBride Lehrman Fellowship, 2009-2010 Sarah Harkness Kirby Prize, best essay written for a seminar, Spring 2009, Spring 2007, Fall 2007 Summa cum Laude, Westminster College, 2005 PUBLICATIONS: Asay, Timothy M. “Rhetoric Renouncing Rhetoric: Contemplating Conversion and Persuasion in the Confessions.” Philosophy and Rhetoric (forthcoming). Asay, Timothy M. “Image and Allegory: The Simulacral Logic of Truth in Piers’s Pardon.” Exemplaria 25.3 (2013): 173-91. Asay, Timothy M. “The Shimmering Scales of the Dragon: Bruce Lee’s Cinematic Surfaces.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26.4 (2009): 312-30. vii For Andrea, who taught me what I know of grace, and for Grace, who is teaching me again. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1 II. IMMEMORABILITY ON THE CUSP OF PARADISE ........................ 77 III. CHAUCER’S HOUSE OF FAME AND THE POETICS OF TEMPORALITY ..................................................................................... 147 IV. BOCCACCIO’S DISTRACTIVE EROTICS ......................................... 251 V. GROTESQUE TEMPORALITY IN THE CANTERBURY FRAME ................................................................................................... 340 REFERENCES CITED ....................................................................................... 417 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Imagined Linguistic Timelines in The Canterbury Tales ....................... 58 2. Chaucer’s Linguistic Phenomenology .................................................... 74 x CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In many ways, narrative frames are erected around texts in order to avoid the sort of theorizing in which I’m about to indulge. Frames help to bridge the gap between reader, author and the characters and events internal to a narrative; they imagine stories, and they build responses to those stories directly into their overarching fiction. Authors are thus able to overtly direct readers’ responses to their texts by showing how others, who are in virtually the same position, respond to the text. Though most frames are still fictional, they thus possess a mimesis that differs from that of most fiction: by making the procedures of fiction-making part of their fiction, they seem more proximal to reality;1 their fiction is designed to resemble our reality, wherein we assemble letters and words into imagined spaces and times while self-consciously existing outside of them. Frames are fictional, but they position themselves outside other fictions in the same way we position our own reality outside of the fictions we produce within it; realities are those nodal points from which multiple fictional spaces can be composed and divergent historical trajectories imagined. It is the flexibility of reality that makes it real: from it, we can imagine spaces and times that differ from our own; the real does not insist on its own identity, but rather allows itself to be refashioned in the conscious mind to something else. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that the presence in which reality inheres does not insist on its identity; as will become clear in the following discussion, presence is presence not by virtue of the things that exist within it, but rather on its persistent novelty, its capacity to constantly remake itself as something new. From 1 Most Arabic frames, for instance, actually serve an authenticating function—they attempt to link a story to a historic personage, and thus make it non-fictional. See Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 78-79. 1 the present moment in which we always read, we can shape any number of imagined histories tangential from our own. Framed narratives are one such tangent, but a tangent bearing a special relationship to the real reader’s mind from which they proceed, for they are the nodes from which further tangents stem; even as they narrate themselves into a defined, sensible space and time they simultaneously imagine the malleable present moment from which the procedures of fiction making can proceed. While frames are often designed to circumvent the sorts of interpretive problems that critics pose about other texts,2 they orient us more directly to the sorts of philosophical—and specifically phenomenological—questions that we face about our own reality. In particular, they force us to meditate on the temporal conditions of presence from which we are able to compose other spaces and times. The concept of presence offers one of those strange philosophical problems that everyone constantly lives, but nobody can adequately describe. It is the foundation of ontology—anything that “is” is in the present moment—and yet a thing’s being only becomes evident as it slurs from that present into the past; present being is, ironically, only made legible by a persistence that relies on a past state of being. As St. Augustine famously diagnosed, the past—like the future—has no being in itself;3 it has already been sloughed through the oculus of presence, and so, even if some vestiges of it remain, the totality of circumstances that presence describes has already mutated into something else equally fleeting. Yet though presence is the foundation of being and so the intelligibility 2 Though, of course, the very means by which frames circumvent interpretive problems can easily be made the target of