Chapter 5 - Gower’s Poetics of the Literal

Summary

Critics have long worked within a settled, if not wholly satisfying, consensus about John Gower's narrative art in the Confessio Amantis: whatever else he may be as a moralist, social thinker or political theorist, Gower is a poet of narrative economy. Early in the last century, G. C. Macaulay noted Gower's ‘gift of clear and interesting narrative’ and his ‘natural taste for simplicity’. Near mid-century, Derek Pearsall observed that Gower gives ‘local, imaginative truth to general, abstract truth’, while Arno Esch found a ‘directness of description’ in Gower's tales. In recent decades Gower's narrative economy has furnished a rationale for other important approaches. A wide range of comparative studies has catalogued Gower's abbreviation of stories from romances, chronicles and, most especially, Ovid. Narrative economy underwrites our understanding of ‘moral Gower’. Charles Runacres, for instance, stresses the importance to Gower's ethical analysis of ‘the particulars of human behaviour and experience as they are recorded in his narraciones’. The same case could be made for the utility of Gower's narratives as social commentary and what Anne Middleton termed the ‘public poetry’ of the late fourteenth century.

Beneath this consensus runs a paradox that C. S. Lewis identified in describing something like the ground zero of Gower's narrative: ‘In this kind of narrative, so spare, so direct, and so concentrated on the event, it is not easy to distinguish the merit of the telling from the intrinsic merit of the story.’ Lewis has a more practical aim here than the theoretical concerns with plot and story elaborated by the Russian Formalists or with Bakhtin's reflections on genre, chronotope and the world. He delineates precisely the qualities that have offered critics and readers very little interpretative leverage. How are we to give an analysis of Gower's narrative that goes beyond a mere description or restatement of its action? What artistic or conceptual features can we find in the narrow interval between telling and story?