Chaucer's Literate Characters Reading Their Texts

Logos: the Word. As Rosamund McKitterick has astutely pointed out, “The most remarkable legacy of Roman civilization to Frankish Gaul was not in fact its content but its form… the written word which was the most vital vehicle of continuity… a fundamental element of Carolingian culture[;]… Frankish society in the Carolingian period was transformed into one largely dependent on the written word for its religion, law, government and learning.” ³ The significance of written text from Carolingian and subsequent times, in Frankish and other societies, is boldly evidenced in both written and visual images of readers: art, religious writing, and fiction each depict readers in its own medium. According to Michael Camille, “the act of writing is the ubiquitous image in medieval art.” ⁴ Equally prevalent in scribed texts, the reading character embodies fascinating, even enigmatic possibilities. What the modern artist M. C. Escher has created i η image, labyrinthine self-reflective designs and puzzles winding back on themselves, ⁵ some artists and writers had centuries ago created through another kind of representation: through the inward-looking contemplation of reading, folding back upon itself. Symbolizing introspection, self-absorption, and self-reflection, the painted or scribed image of reader reading suggests infinite regression, moving deeper and deeper into the psyche. The further inward the subject, and by extension, the audience, looks, the stronger the seductive power luring him or her a step further—into the text, into the character, but most evocatively, into the self. Narcissus-like, ⁶ the reader in the outer domain, reading about a character who is reading about yet another character akin to himself or herself, even if the reading is a communal act, effects the ultimate solipsistic activity. Thus audience) reading c(haracter), reading n(ew character), and finding “self”