The meaning of structure in chaucerian narrative
Authors:   , Graham Paul Trees 
Published: February 2025

In its larger design, this dissertation investigates the models of narrative brought forth to explain the alterity of medieval narrative and then advances its own. The characteristic in particular which has made medieval narrative seem alien to the modern reader is its strange plotting--the logic of its action or unfolding. Several attempts have been made to describe this logic, and each is reviewed critically in Chapter One. These attempts are represented in rhetorical studies of Chaucer, patristic exegesis, and the quantitative approach that applies the structural principles of Gothic architecture to narrative. Finding these approaches inadequate because of their inability to engage the richness of the literal text, in Chapter Two I advance the categorical proposition, or sentence, as a global model for narrative structure. That is, I argue that the medieval writer sought to adumbrate the structure as well as the substance of a proposition as he narrated his tale, as, in a simple example, a preacher might dispose the parts of an exemplum so as to adumbrate his theme both in part and whole. The paradigm, syntagm, and homology are the chief mechanisms which allow the proposition to make meaning. And besides accounting for the hierarchical character of medieval narrative, these structures allow us to account for the use of the topoi, the leaping and lingering method of exposition, and the literal level of the text. A sentence makes meaning by suggesting the significant similarities and differences between what might have been and what is actually said. This process occurs with each part of speech and proceeds paradigmatically and syntagmatically. Applied to narrative, the sentence structure takes the topos as its place for drawing the story into line with tradition and for drawing out the important, signifying differences between tradition and a particular performance. Chapters Three through Six test this model two ways: historically and practically. Chapter Three follows the genesis and development of the model from Aristotle to Matthew of Vendome. Chapter Four investigates the use of the paradigm as theme in The Knight's Tale. There, the oppositions which threaten perpetual violence politically and despair spiritually are reduced in the paradigmatic perspective to opposites in alternation rather than in tension. This chapter focuses on Theseus's final Boethian address, as it fulfills the Saturnalian perspective of Egbus and explains the meaning of time, change, and apparent corruption. Chapter Five investigates the use of the syntagm as a mechanism for comedy in The Nun's Priest's Tale. There the mechanical intelligence of a beast-like man is shown to be the theme and the basis, in part, of the tale's humor. Chapter Six, finally, investigates the use of the whole model, with its deliberate disjunctions, for instruction and consolation in The Book of the Duchess. There, I believe, Chaucer makes the difference between memory and present fact thematic and forces his auditor to face his grief directly. But at the same time, he shows his own sense of the loss and offers his companionship in this sorrow.