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U n iv ersi^ MicnSilms Intemationcil 300 N. Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 8425533 Arbuckle, Nan CATEGORIES OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATOR IN WOLFRAM, DANTE, AND CHAUCER The University of Oklahoma Ph.D. 1984 University Microfilms I nternstion si300 N. zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 Copyright 1984 by Arbuckle, Nan All Rights Reserved THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE Categories of the Self-Conscious Narrator in Wolfram, Dante, and Chaucer A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY NAN ARBUCKLE Norman, Oklahoma 1984 "Categories of the Self-Conscious Narrator in Wolfram, Dante, and Chaucer" Approye^r^: y.J Ct-L^-Oj i<siÀ/Jh<jL C. - // / ) y o S r i ^ Copyright by Nan Arbuckle 1984 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements As with any work this size, many people besides the writer have been involved in the completion. First I must thank Mrs. Marjorie Bradley and Dean.Marilyn Affleck of the' Graduate College formerly Dean Kenneth L. Moving formerly of the University Research Council. My participa­ tion in the New Chaucer Society Convention in 1980 and the MLA Convention in 1981, allowing me to hear papers related to my study, were due to support of the Graduate College, as was financial support for original typing. Most important, my fellowship in 1980-81 from the Research Council made it possible for me to devote full time to research and so to complete the dissertation with much more care than would have been pos­ sible had I been teaching that year. I would also like to thank those of my professors who have been important in inspiring and in helping the completion of this work. Pro­ fessor John Paul Montgomery, of Middle Tennessee State University, first introduced me to the idea of process literature and later served on my thesis committee. From him I learned much that informed this longer study, I should also thank Professor William Connelly of Middle Tennessee State University for arousing my curiosity about the medieval narrator by assuring me that the concept of self-consciousness could not be applied to it. His aid in my transfer to the University of Oklahoma to study with Professor Ruggiers insured that I would be able to make that ap­ plication with just the right person. I must also thank my disserta­ tion committee: Professors Rudolph C. Bambas, Gwenn Davis, David Freanch, and Roy R. Male of English and Mervin Barnes of Modern Languages. iii av Their helpful suggestions, kind criticism, and patience made the whole process much less painful. Both professionally and personnally I want to thank my Director, Professor Paul G. Ruggiers, for his unflagging insistence that my idea was both solid and important enough to devote extensive time and pages to develop. As a disabled student, I also have many particular thanks to ex­ tend. I could not have come this far without the support of many peo­ ple. To those I cannot list here I must say a general thank y>u. Some, however, deserve special mention. First I should mention Linda Zinner of Handicapped Student Services who during my last years as a graduate student helped me to arrange my living situation and became a good friend in the process. I must also pay special thanks to my three typists, Susie George, Jenny Nieb, and Sammi Fields, and to Susie's boss Diane Dennis for her support. These women have dealt with an often rough and generally alien, confusing work and have done a beautiful job in many short time limits. From the original in my longhand to the final in Sammi's clean type, I have been most appreciative for the skill. My graduate school colleagues and friends, J. Lane Goodall and John C. Orr, I thank for listening to my strange and often confused discussions in those especially trying processes of beginning and concluding such as study as this. Anne Phelps Reed and Melissa Hearn get much credit for helping me maintain my sanity through many stages of graduate work; they kept me in touch with something in my life other than bibliographies and antique langauges. Sherrie Jarvis needs a special separate thanks for listening to unusual theory, for rescuing me from disruptive living situations, and, most of all, for being such a good friend and encouraging me to plan for life-after-dissertation. Tammy Mason was more family than an aide dur­ ing both the beginning and ending of this study and can never be thanked enough for her calming laughs at me. In the last hectic stages my sis­ ter Katy Arbuckle Grant and my new, but valued, friends Suzette Bacon and Georg Argentos gave those crucial little connections to a real life audience that a self-conscious scholar, as well as narrator, needs in order to remember the humanity for whom art is created. My last thanks are particularly special. These must go to my father J, W, Arbuckle for letting his "little" girl go where she wanted to find the career she dreamed. He always believed that I could do whatever I wanted despite the obstacles and most of all gave me the stubborn streak and the loving support I needed to do just that. Not even a self- conscious poet can create thanks enough for all that. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction vil Chapter I. THE SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATOR AND MEDIEVAL NARRATOR............. 1 II. ATTESTATIONS OF TRUTH: THE POET AS HISTORIAN................ 28 III. DIDACTICISM AND THE INTRUSIVE MEDIEVAL NARRATOR............. 77 IV. THE NARRATOR AS GUIDE. ..... 138 V. THE VOICE OF THE POET............ 198 VI. CONCLUSIONS.......... 1 . ... 254 INTRODUCTION With the virtual disappearance of the narrator in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the basic situation of narration, that of a storyteller addressing an audience became easy to overlook. Indeed, the elimination of the intrusive narrator was considered such an advance in nar­ rative technique that those earlier narratives which did include an obvious narrating voice came to be judged as merely primitive or unsophisticated and poorly developed. Since such seminal studies of narrative as those by Scholes and Kellogg in The Nature of Narrative and Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, however, a much broader view of narrative technique has been possible.”* Much has been written, for example, in the last two decades about the narrative as a linguistic process with examination of its smallest structural d e t a i l s . ^ The current trends in the study of narrative may, nevertheless, once more be leading away from an understanding of the act of storytelling with their emphasis on narratives as systems. The separation of the author from the work and, therefore, the narrator's voice that was begun by the New Critics has been carried even further in structuralist criticism. For example, Lubomir Dolozel's opening remarks to "The lÿpology of the Narrator: Point of View in Fiction" explain the necessary elimination of the "author" and along with it any reference to the author's intent, his approach, his subjectivity, his impersonality, his telling or showing, and so on.^ For the structuralist, he goes on to explain, the narrator is only a function, "a purely structural factor" (p.54-2). This reduction of the narrator to a functional element is no doubt useful vii v a i l for avoiding the mistakes of earlier criticism which saw the author himself in every intrusion, but it too has its limitations. The tendency that it creates is just the opposite of that earlier evaluation of intrusive narration as an example of technical naivete" on the part of'the author. This interpre­ tation may create the impression of an authorises, audienceless work pro­ duced for the sake of narration alone.

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