Writing remembering orality

Abstract

This essay discusses one way in which literature may ‘remember’ the past, taking as its point of departure the tale of Sir Thopas from the Canterbury Tales (c.1385 – 1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer (henceforth Thopas). Like the ostensibly oral Canterbury Tales as a whole, Thopas is available to us only because ‘preserved’ in writing, even while it incorporates the oral mode of composition which writing is in the process of supplanting; moreover, the comedy of Thopas presupposes the reader's ability to distinguish between orality and literariness, showing its author's acute perception of the difference between technologies of communication both at the composing end and at the level of reception. In preserving the oral mode in writing, Chaucer seems both to acknowledge the tradition that fathered him and, at the same time, to problematise writing as vehicle for preserving oral forms of cultural expression.

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