By William McClellan
Drawing at the paintings of Holocaust author Primo Levi and political thinker Giorgio Agamben McClellan introduces a severe flip in our studying of Chaucer. He argues that the remarkable occasion of the Holocaust, which witnessed the entire degradation and extermination of people, irrevocably alterations how we learn literature from the earlier. McClellan supplies a thoroughgoing examining of the Man of Law’s Tale, commonly considered as one in all Chaucer’s so much tough stories, reading it as a meditation at the horrors of sovereign strength. He exhibits how Chaucer, in the course of the figuration of Custance, dramatically depicts the damaging results of energy at the human topic. McClellan’s intervention, which he calls “reading-history-as-ethical-meditation,” areas reception historical past within the context of a reception ethics and holds the promise of adjusting the best way we learn conventional texts.
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Extra info for Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Example text
That declaration followed by an abrupt dismissive comment transforms what was a rhetorical embellishment into a more argumentative statement. 5 The Man of Law’s clumsy overstatement “excites some suspicion,” that something is going on in the passage that doesn’t quite meet the eye. 6 Chaucer seems to intimate here that the most important of the several reasons he gives for Custance’s anxiety and distress goes beyond the character of her future husband per se and has more to do with its political significance: her imminent exile to a foreign country and the consequent degradation of her status—from free to bound, high to low.
Yet, the subject is not free of the law but is captive, held in thrall to that law, and liable potentially to be killed by the sovereign or others. The state of abandonment is therefore fundamental to the sovereign/subject relation, a state that is pernicious and often destructive. Chaucer, in the Man of Law’s Tale, examines this aspect of the sovereign/ subject relation. Embedded in this tale of woe is a political exemplum of the abandonment of the subject and the effects of that abandonment. 15 Custance exemplifies the victimized subject who is at once excluded and held in “thralldom and penance,” unable to determine her future and condemned to suffer the consequences of the decisions of those in power.
If Griselda is the ideal exemplar of the subject who blindly obeys and who cannot foresee the horrible demands that will be made upon her even after the first demand for death, Custance exemplifies the subject who is aware of what the sovereign will demand of her but who remains unable to mitigate the destructive effects on her body and mind. In some ways, her situation is even more desperate because she is abandoned by the sovereign to the wilds of nature and the violence of men. Griselda is spared that agony, though it is cold comfort indeed.