Lavinia Greenlaw’s response to Chaucer and the poetics of memory (2023)
In 1932 C. S. Lewis famously argued how Chaucer medievalized Boccaccio’s story of Troilus and Criseyde as told in Il Filostrato. More than eighty years later, the opposite process is at work in Lavinia Greenlaw’s A Double Sorrow. The aim of my article is to examine what Greenlaw really did to Chaucer’s poem, to paraphrase the title of Lewis’s essay, in her attempt to make the Trojan story ‘more itself rather than less so’. I hope to show how the modern poet distances herself both from ancient authorities and the authorial stance adopted by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, namely that of the storytelling historian who relies on memorised ‘matter’, and – taking images rather than the plot as the starting point – formulates a different model of memory. In this model information is creatively processed rather than merely fixed and stored and thus memory, especially autobiographical memory, emerges suddenly and automatically rather than being effortfully retrieved, as in the ancient model, evoked by Chaucer. Traces of the same model are also to be found in Greenlaw’s novel In the City of Love’s Sleep and Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost, both of which will be referred to for comparison.
Keywords: nauki o kulturze i religii