Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative

by John M. Ganim

Overview

John M. Ganim presents a revised theory of late medieval literary history based on the relationship of the poet to the reader. His work shows how the increasingly compromised exemplary intent of later medieval poets led them to dramatize the reader as a character in the text and to develop complex forms of narrative characterized by discontinuity, distortion, and disorientation.

Originally published in 1983.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691640983
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #120
Pages:	190
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d)

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Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative

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By John M. Ganim

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06580-9

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CHAPTER 1

Community and Consciousness in Early Middle English Romance

A number of scholars have described the change in society, sensibility, and form that surrounded the transformation of epic into romance. Most studies, however, have concerned themselves with the elegant Old French productions of the twelfth century or have debated the degree of overlap and continuity between the two genres. The shift from heroic to chivalric values, from social struggle to individual quest, from concern with the survival of the entire community to concern with the perfection of specific class ideals, all these have been documented and explained. The road that takes us from the gloom of Beowulf to the glitter of Chretien's romances crosses barriers of language, social structure, taste, and historical change, but it is a road that has been mapped in some detail.

One reason why the early Middle English romances have not as often been taken seriously is that in most respects they seem to represent a decline in literary history:

Beowulf was composed for persons of quality, Havelok for the common people. Old English narrative poetry was, in its day, the best obtainable; English metrical romances were known by the authors, vendors and consumers of them to be inferior to the best, i.e. to the French; and, consequently, there is a rustic, uncourtly air about them. Their demeanour is often lumbering, and they are sometimes conscious of it.

I do think that the poets were often "conscious of it," even to the point of playing with an occasional sophisticated air and sometimes contrasting a rapid and deftly constructed narrative with details and phrases that, though they were perhaps striking, were also rustic and quaint. This is not to argue that the Havelok-poet was nearly as sophisticated as Chaucer in such a respect. But he thought he knew what he was good for, and he liked to show it.

From a broader point of view, this note of rusticity, even of naiveté, has a certain rhetorical function, and it is this function that I want to explain here. These romances announce potentially epic themes and then retreat from the implications of those themes. They seem to manifest a sense of history, growth, and change and suddenly retreat into a timeless utopian vision of existence. They sometimes represent the dimensions of physical and social reality in profoundly disturbing detail and then counter that sense of reality with comic or grotesque devices. The conceptions of time and space implicit in the narrative structure of these romances differ from such conceptions in either chivalric romance or in epic. They borrow the conventions of courtly romance but use those conventions to appeal to the reader in a radically different way.

There is no question that French courtly romance was the most characteristic genre of high medieval culture, in much the same way that Gothic architecture was the dominant architectural mode. But in twelfth-century France, romance had flourished in a rarefied atmosphere, that of court patronage, with an elite audience capable of comprehending an often esoteric code of social values. Indeed, the very source of courtly literature is in its insistence that its audience is exceptional and could understand things that a larger audience could not. It was an art of delicate balance — on the one hand, hints and cues that serve as signs to the initiated; on the other, long and sometimes tiresome exploration of states of consciousness, fused in an action of fantastic adventure. In a totally different social and literary situation, that of thirteenth-century England, in which class distinctions, though clear, seemed to require less elaborate markings and in which, in comparison, the flowering of provincial courts had never advanced that far, this art was under strains that threatened to transform it beyond recognition. This is not merely to repeat the observation that English romances are less refined and therefore more popular than their French antecedents. Rather it is to describe an entirely different literary and rhetorical situation. Far from confirming the elite nature of a court audience, early Middle English romance speaks to a larger community, and the narrating voice makes an attempt to include itself and its audience in that world. The "flaws" that result are only contradictions if we abide by whatever generic standards we draw from French romance. The result is a form in Middle English romance that borrows widely from many different genres in an attempt to establish its own authenticity and that moves towards a form less courtly and exclusive and more encyclopedic and inclusive, a combination that has considerable implications for the development of later Middle English poetry.

Not only does English romance borrow from a wide variety of genres, which in themselves each imply a specific audience, but it borrows from a wide spectrum of romances. During the high point of Middle English romance, romance as a genre in France was already two hundred years old, and without too much exaggeration one could point not only to clearly aristocratic but also to popular romances, as well as to those that combined such elements. Often the earliest English romances have the quality of anthologies; consistency of tone is one of their problems. Elements that derive from lyric or epic, from delicate lai, from chanson de geste, from chivalric romance, are found together, as if jerked from their original historical context. But this problematic situation also leads to Middle English literature's greatest strengths — the multiplicity of perspective and wide appeal of such works as The Canterbury Tales — as well as to a kind of included criticism of an entire tradition that I, along with other critics, believe is found in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

As I argued in my Introduction, this inclusive but contradictory attitude towards the action is most clearly evidenced in those passages that create the sense of time and space in the poem. Hence the following description of Havelok the Dane, the most interesting of these early Middle English romances, concentrates on such transitional scenes. After some conclusions about the effect of these scenes I move to a discussion of King Horn in light of these conclusions, and then to an attempt to characterize the mentality of the early Middle English romances.

Havelok the Dane is based on a nicely merged dual plot. The king of Denmark dies, leaving his heir, Havelok, in the hands of one Earl Godard. Godard, not about to give up such power, imprisons the boy and his two sisters. He slits the throats of the two girls but spares the prince, ordering a fisherman, Grim, to drown the boy. Meanwhile, we are told of a similar situation in England, where a king has died, leaving his daughter, Goldhorn, in the hands of an equally nefarious guardian, one Godrich. Godrich, who dislikes the idea of handing the country over to a mere girl, locks her up in a tower, and prevents her marriage to anyone save the strongest man in England in ironic loyalty to the oath he has sworn to her father. We return to the story of Havelok. Grim, converted by a magic flame that comes out of the hero's mouth, has spared the child, adopted him, and migrated to England. In time of want Havelok travels to Lincoln, where he works as a cook's helper, engages in sports, and establishes a reputation as the strongest man in England. Godrich, delighted that he can break Goldhorn's claim to the throne by marrying her to such a commoner, forces the match. The marriage presumably lacks spark, until she too sees a magic flame shoot from the mouth of her husband, notes a magic birthmark, and recognizes by these signs his royal origins. At any rate, Havelok grows conscious of his position, gathers an army, which becomes larger and larger, overthrows both Godrich and Godard, unites England and Denmark, and settles down with Goldhorn and their fifteen children, who all become kings and queens, to a long and happy reign. The action takes place in slightly over three thousand lines, which assumes a somewhat more leisurely pace than most early Middle English romances.

Whenever the narrator of Havelok shifts the scene of his action, he feels compelled to impress upon us the importance and seriousness of his theme, either through an elevation of style or through outright statement. His perspective is suddenly enlarged, and he comprehends units as large as miles and years:

    Fro londe woren he bote a mile —
    Ne were it neuere but ane hwile —
    That it ne bigan a wind to rise
    Out of the north-men calleth "bise" —
    And drof hem intil Engelond,
    That al was sithen in his hond —
    His, that Hauelok was the name —
    But or, he hauede michel shame,
    Michel sorwe, and michel tene,
    And yete he gat it al bidene;
    Als ye shulen nou forthward lere,
    Yf that ye wilen therto here.
    In Humber Grim bigan to lende,
    In Lindeseye, rith at the north ende.
    Ther sat is ship upon the sond....
    (721-735)

This passage is a good starting point for a study of how the poet constructs and uses the "world" — the time, space, and scene — of his fiction and also of the anxiety the poet feels towards the attitude of his audience to this world, for at the same time that he exerts this effort to shift the locus of his action, he also reminds us that this story is about serious issues, which make a claim to be read as history.

In these few lines the narrator seems especially concerned with establishing a sense of place. He tells us exactly where the ship has gone. The fateful "bise" is more than an accident, for it takes Havelok to the proper place at the proper time, a providence the poet calls to our attention. Yet his geography is schematic. This world is like a map, neither felt nor experienced, nor is it described in the easy and proficient style of the poet's most vibrant local scenes. He provides enough information here to avoid the sense of scene thrown against scene, but at best, the world between remains abstract, though with the convincing accuracy of an annal. More necessary to his narrative, especially a narrative about heroes and heroines growing up, with a theme of succession and a plot device of coincidence, is the establishment of time referents. Within the fairly limited compass of a hundred lines surrounding the passage quoted above, we are given three significant time indications. One deals with plot time, one with the narrator's and audience's sense of duration, and one with historical time. The last lines I have quoted above (728-732) return us abruptly and gravely to the time of the narrator and his audience, hence emphasizing the importance of this journey as a turning point in the narrative. However, we can also feel a qualified note in such narrative self-importance, which tells us a good deal about the relationship of poet to audience, as expressed in the somewhat apologetic line: "Yf that ye wilen therto here." Such humbleness comes, of course, precisely at the moment when the pieces of the narrative seem at their farthest point apart, yet also at the point when they are about to come together, and both author and audience know this. The shift to historical time is contained in those lines that have always attracted critics who praise Havelok's realism:

    And for that Grim that place aute,
    The stede of Grim the name laute;
    So that Grimesbi calleth alle
    That theroffe speken alle;
    And so shulen men callen it ay,
    Bituene this and domesday.
    (743-748)

I do not think that these lines mean the poet of Havelok is a thirteenth-century precursor of local color and regional writing. First, the narrator's elevated perspective seems to work against an entirely local flavor. Second, the passage is part of the entirely conventional time indication, in this case putting all of us — characters, narrator, auditors, and Grimsby itself — into the framework of historical time. The narrator wants to emphasize the drama and importance of this journey for the plot. The brief reference to apocalyptic history is another distancing factor. It puts the story into a larger reality, just as the first time indicator "woke" us up from the fiction itself. Yet this epic appeal is suddenly reduced in the next few lines by the humble and local place names, which neither demand nor display such grandeur. Finally, the plot time indicator tells us that while all these distancing factors have taken up our attention, twelve years have passed, during which, while we have been floating around in history and rhetoric, Grim has been working:

    Thusgate Grim him fayre ledde:
    Him and his genge wel he fedde
    Wel twelf winter other more:
    Hauelok was war that Grim swank sore
    For his mete, and he lay at horn:
    He thou the, "Ich am nou no grom...."
    (785-790)

And while Grim has been working, Havelok has grown up. It is an important fact, though thrown out at us indirectly. The passage of those twelve years is not at all indicated to us by the wonderful scenes of Havelok eating and Grim fishing. They are indeed splendid scenes in their own right. But they are static and separable rather than dynamic parts of the narrative. The poet has to provide essential narrative information in scenes other than those in which he describes the most distinctive actions of his characters.

The smaller transitions are handled more deftly. An excellent example of the proficiency of the poet in these smaller units is the scene in which Havelok leaves Grim to go out on his own. Starving, barefoot, unemployed, it is his social nadir, the king as lumpenproletarian:

    He tok the sheres of the nayl,
    And made him a couel of the sayl,
    And Hauelok dide it sone on.
    Hauede he neyther hosen ne shon,
    Ne none kines other wede;
    To Lincolne barfot he yede.
    Hwan he kam ther, he was ful wil:
    Ne hauede he no frend to gangen til;
    Two dayes ther fastinde he yede,
    That non for his werk wolde him fede;
    The thridde day herde he calle:
    "Bermen, bermen, hider forth alle!"
    Poure that on fote yede
    Sprongen forth so sparke of glede.
    Hauelok shof dune nyne or ten
    Rith amidewarde the fen,
    And stirte forth to the kok,
    Ther the erles mete he tok
    That he bouthe at the brigge:
    The bermen let he alle ligge,
    And bar the mete to the castel,
    And gat him there a ferthing wastel.
    (857-878)

There is, I think, no need to emphasize the Christie paradigm of Havelok's ordeal. We could search through a thousand literatures and always find a heroic ordeal similar to Havelok's. As Auerbach has shown, Christianity, and the specifically devotional intensity of this period, allowed the mixture of the humblest details with the highest spiritual and literary aspirations. All I would maintain at this point, however, is that the first half of this passage is clearly of a mythic dimension.

Our interest is in the way in which this passage, clearly a transition from Grimsby — on the road to Lincoln, to the town, over the Witham bridge, and on to the castle — organizes the space of the narrative for us. When Grim and his family mi- grated from Denmark, the journey was narrated in an almost epic conventional voice, from a distance, in a way that involved a good deal of strain on the poet's style. The shorter movement of Havelok to Lincoln in the first half of this passage is handled with a good deal more confidence, though it is an aspect of the mythic dimension of the story: the deposed king, barefoot, starving, alone, clad in the sail which Grim takes from his ship. He fasts for two days and is saved by a voice on the third, a time period that owes less allegiance to narrative realism than to mythic resonance. Suddenly, in a stylistic moment that reminds us of Langland, we are brought down to earth with a markedly earthly and unmistakably naturalistic cry: "Bermen, berm en, hider forth alle !" And we are in a world, and a specific street, filled with a social reality of great and almost poignant detail. That the cook who calls for help should be so rushed suggests the quite awful reality of famine, in an image that would not be all that exotic in some parts of the world today. And as Havelok bowls down his fellow workers, we wonder what happened to the aura of Christian humility that surrounded his journey to Lincoln.

The mythic sobriety of his journey in the first few lines of this passage disappears. The spatial organization of the second half is specific and moves us quickly along from city to bridge to castle. The tempo reflects Havelok's own energy, I suppose, his willingness to work, and the fact that his fortune has changed. In addition, we now know that the larger theme of union with Goldboro and revenge upon their usurpers has some realistic basis since Havelok is in the employ of Godard and has access to him. The bustle of the street is suggested but not described in detail. The careful "three days" of Havelok's starvation was mythic and otherworldly. But the carelessly accounted nine or ten battered porters are paradoxically more likely to convince us of the "reality" of the scene. Havelok, carrying the food to the castle, becomes more tangible then the figure who "To Lincolne barfot ... yede." The movement to the castle is more comprehensible and more able to suggest literal life than Havelok's outlined journey to Lincoln.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative by John M. Ganim. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. 1
• Chapter 1. Community and Consciousness in Early Middle English Romance, pg. 16
• Chapter 2. Disorientation, Style, and Perception in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, pg. 55
• Chapter 3. Consciousness and Time in Troilus and Criseyde, pg. 79
• Chapter 4. Mannerism and Moralism in Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, pg. 103
• Chapter 5. The Limits of Vision in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, pg. 123
• Epilogue, pg. 142
• Notes, pg. 155
• Index, pg. 173