6 - Fame’s Penitent: Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians

Summary

Chaucer's Retraction, which sums up an impressive span of his literary works while repudiating nearly all of them, fully excepting only ‘the translacion of Boece de Consolacione, and othere books of legends of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun’, has provided readers of all periods with an opportunity both to imagine the penitential outlook that it conveys as Chaucer's final perspective on literature and life, and to take note of the substantial range, quantity and influence of his opus that thereby required such careful admonitions. Its ‘voicing’ is more of a problem even than usual in Chaucer. In all of its medieval copies it appears at the end of The Canterbury Tales, but since it begins by responding to ‘this litel tretys’, presumably The Parson's Tale, the Retraction does not read as though designed to close the unfinished Canterbury Tales as a whole. Possibly, as Charles Owen suggests, The Parson's Tale and Retraction were a completely separate work by Chaucer, a ‘treatise on penance’, imposed on The Canterbury Tales by other hands. All the surviving textual evidence, however, shows that the Retraction's placement and that of Fragment X as a whole was very early, and it may be argued, as Stephen Partridge does, that the rubric introducing the Retraction, ‘heere taketh the makere of this book his leve’, was early or even authorial as well, since its textual variants are best explained as cautious efforts to resolve original ambiguities rather than as the wholesale import of new materials. Even that rubric, therefore, presents a problem of voicing, or rather scripting. Partridge suggests that Chaucer himself there mimed the role of a scribe, and, by encroaching on the scribal territory of a colophon, crafted the ‘fiction of Chaucer's direct supervision and control over the transmission of his text’.

This ‘fiction’ of an author's immediate hand in this – and, implicitly, all further scribal transmissions of his text – epitomizes some of the important problems of his literary presence and absence with which, as is shown below, readers of Chaucer in Lancastrian England grappled.