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Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality in Dante, Chaucer, and Naylor

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The Black Middle Ages

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

Abstract

This chapter moves to consider more abstract questions of inheritance, by examining how an African-American writer can position her own work in relationship to a larger literary tradition, derived from the Middle Ages. It focuses on Gloria Naylor’s use of Dante and Chaucer in her sequential novels Linden Hills and Bailey’s Café. Naylor encountered both of these authors in a college “Great Literature” course and struggled with treating them as her literary antecedents. Their position within the literary canon and the lineage of texts that followed them seemed to chart a trajectory that would not incorporate her authorial voice. The rewriting of these texts, Vernon argues, is Naylor’s way of reading them not as “classics” to which she is beholden and which would prescribe the sorts of engagement she could have with them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, Vol. VII, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 40.

  2. 2.

    Ibid., 24.

  3. 3.

    Matthew Arnold, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: Vol. IX. Edited by Robert Henry Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973) 178–180.

  4. 4.

    Dryden, 594.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 41.

  6. 6.

    Ibid.

  7. 7.

    Dryden, 43; 37.

  8. 8.

    Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s England: Illiterate Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8; Larry Scanlon begins his argument with a definition which admits to how unruly the vernacular can be. He delimits the conversation only to show the plurality of participating voices:

    [The v]ernacular seems to mark a place where disciplines allow themselves to become a bit less than systematic, less than disciplined, where they aspire to speak of what lies beyond them, the unlearned, the predisciplinary, or nondisciplinary, or interdisciplinary, where they desire not only to speak of it but to speak for it, to get beyond their own learned boundaries and speak from it and with it.

    Larry Scanlon, “News From Heaven: Vernacular Time in Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama,” in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003), 221.

  9. 9.

    Cornish, 7. Cornish uses a wide array of words to describe the linguistic action that she studies, a list that dwarfs the one presented by Dryden: “translation,” “version,” “vulgarization,” “vernacular translation,” and “vernacularization.” This chapter will rely on vernacularization. See also, Larry Scanlon’s account of the dynamics of vernacularity and power in his “News From Heaven: Vernacular Time in Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama,” 221.

  10. 10.

    Robert Glenn Howard, “The Transformative Potential of Discourse in the Vernacular Mode,” in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media and the Shape of Public Life, eds. Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 256.

  11. 11.

    Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 147, 148.

  12. 12.

    Cedric D. Reverand II, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 5.

  13. 13.

    Ibid.

  14. 14.

    Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets. Edited by Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 118.

  15. 15.

    In discussing the vernacular as an ideology I am borrowing from Houston Baker’s discussion of “blues ideology” and black migration in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature. See: Houston Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 24.

  16. 16.

    Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 50.

  17. 17.

    Paul Beatty, The Sellout (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 277.

  18. 18.

    See Jerry Gafio Watts’ illuminating discussion of Amiri Baraka’s relationship to Dante in Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 88–89.

  19. 19.

    Robert R. Edwards, “The Metropol and the Mayster-Toun: Cosmopolitanism in Late Medieval Literature,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwader (New York: Routledge, 2001), 33–63.

  20. 20.

    Joyce A. Joyce, “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 18.2 (Winter 1987), 343.

  21. 21.

    Henry Louis Gates Jr., “What’s Love Got to Do with It: Critical Theory, Integrity and the Black Idiom,” New Literary History, 18.2 (Winter 1987), 345–362.

  22. 22.

    John Dryden, “Preface to the Fables,” in Essays of Dryden, vol. 2, ed. W.P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 203.

  23. 23.

    Cornish presents these arguments concisely in her Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy, 3.

  24. 24.

    Paul Fry compares the assemblage of writers in Dryden’s introduction to the congregation of souls in Dante’s Limbo. See: The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 122.

  25. 25.

    This chapter will use the following editions of these novels: Linden Hills (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Bailey’s Café (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

  26. 26.

    Tim Engles, “African American Whiteness in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills,” African American Review 43.4 (Winter, 2009), 661–679.

  27. 27.

    Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Parliament of Fowls,” The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 24–25.

  28. 28.

    For a discussion of Chaucer’s later enlargement of the idea of books used for “commune profit,” see: Alastair Minnis, Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.

  29. 29.

    Chaucer’s use of the word “science” here is provocative. Many scholars have interpreted this word to mean just what it says, that Chaucer is making an argument about technical innovation. In my argument, I am using the more general sense of the Middle English to build an argument about knowledge gained from books more generally. See Patricia Claire Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in the Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 151.

  30. 30.

    John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 118.

  31. 31.

    Margaret Early Whitt, Understanding Gloria Naylor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 2.

  32. 32.

    Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Canon Confidential: A Sam Slade Caper,” in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–16.

  33. 33.

    See Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

  34. 34.

    “Black Women Novelists: New Generation Raises Provocative Issues,” Ebony, 40.1 (November 1984), 64.

  35. 35.

    Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 79.

  36. 36.

    See: Robert Butler, “Dante’s Inferno and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Study in Literary Continuity,” in The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), 95–105.

  37. 37.

    Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 581.

  38. 38.

    Anderson, 56.

  39. 39.

    Dante Alighieri, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 23.

  40. 40.

    Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Classics, 1982), xxiv.

  41. 41.

    Justin Steinberg offers rich discussion of the legal language Dante deploys to explain the relationship between Latin and vernacular languages. See: Dante and the Limits of the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 66–68.

  42. 42.

    Scanlon, 226.

  43. 43.

    Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at the Chehaw Station: The American Artist and his Audience,” The American Scholar (Winter 1977), 36.

  44. 44.

    Cultural Capital, 93.

  45. 45.

    Valuing the Vernacular, 16.

  46. 46.

    Freedom Readers, 3. See also the discussion of Cordelia Ray’s “Dante” in Chap. 2.

  47. 47.

    Linden Hills, 283.

  48. 48.

    In the novel most closely tied by critics to Shakespeare, Mama Day, Naylor goes to tremendous lengths to undo or frustrate expected points in the plot as derived from Shakespeare. See: James R. Andreas, “Signifyin’ on The Tempest in Mama Day,” in Shakespeare and Appropriation, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1999), 110.

  49. 49.

    Peter Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 132.

  50. 50.

    Valerie Traub, “Rainbows of Darkness: Deconstructing Shakespeare in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston and Gloria Naylor,” in Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (University of Illinois Press, 1993), 151.

  51. 51.

    Linden Hills, 42.

  52. 52.

    Linden Hills, 93.

  53. 53.

    Naylor, 120.

  54. 54.

    Here, the glossed Bible is imbued with rich implications akin to a medieval manuscript, particularly the Glossa Ordinaria.

  55. 55.

    Linden Hills, 299.

  56. 56.

    Scanlon, 222.

  57. 57.

    Inferno, XXXIV, 133–139.

  58. 58.

    Linden Hills, 304.

  59. 59.

    Hortense Spillers, et al. “Whatcha Gonna Do?—Revisiting Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35 (Spring–Summer 2007), 300–301.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 301.

  61. 61.

    Ibid.

  62. 62.

    Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987), 80.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 66.

  64. 64.

    John Dryden, The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 526.

  65. 65.

    Ibid. 528.

  66. 66.

    The Works of our Ancient and Learned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. and trans. Thomas Speght (London: Adam Islip, 1601) http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:7609:5/ (Accessed January 26, 2017).

  67. 67.

    Speght, 6.

  68. 68.

    Tim William Machan, “Speght’s ‘Works’ and the Invention of Chaucer,” Text, 8 (1995), 148.

  69. 69.

    Troilus II.i., 22–25. All citations of Chaucer refer to: The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, eds. Larry D. Benson, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987).

  70. 70.

    Troilus, V, 1785–1799.

  71. 71.

    John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, Vol. VI, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 42.

  72. 72.

    Thomas A. Prendergast, “Writing, Authenticity, and the Fabrication of the Chaucerian Text,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602. Eds. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1999), 2.

  73. 73.

    See Micheal Awkward’s discussion of African-American literature reproducing the same patterns of “oedipal linguistic battles” that Harold Bloom identifies in his Anxiety of Influence: Inspiring Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women’s Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 6.

  74. 74.

    Anderson, 70.

  75. 75.

    Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12.3 (2000), 592.

  76. 76.

    Gloria Naylor, Conversations with Gloria Naylor, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 62.

  77. 77.

    Her choice of a counterpoint to Hughes is a particularly pointed one because of the famous attempts at collaboration between the two authors to produce a play about African-American life that fell apart for reasons that have never been recovered. See: Henry Louis Gates Jr. “A Tragedy of Negro Life,” in Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, eds. George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 15.

  78. 78.

    See Paul Gilroy’s discussion of “intercultural positionality,” the urge to escape national boundaries to access new perspectives for cultural critique in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6. See also the discussion of Langston Hughes and linguistic play during his trips through Eastern Europe in Vera M. Kutzinski’s The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 25–30.

  79. 79.

    For a discussion of the international significance of Hughes’ work see: David Chioni Moore, “Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border: Langston Hughes’ Relevance, 1933–2002,” Callallo, 25.4 (2002), 1115–1135; A. Robert Lee, “‘Ask Your Mama’ Langston Hughes, the Blues and Recent Afro-American Literary Studies,” Journal of American Studies 24.2 (1990), 199–209; Anthony Dawahare, “Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the ‘End of Race’,” Melus 23.3 (1998), 21–41.

  80. 80.

    Kevin Young, trans. “Poems Written in Soviet Uzbekistan, 1932–33: From the 1934 Uzbek Translation of S.[anjar] Siddiq,” Callaloo, 25.4 (2002), 1113.

  81. 81.

    Kutzinski, 30.

  82. 82.

    Of course, Hughes himself was preceded by Frederick Douglass in making this type of strategic journey to reposition himself upon returning to the United States. See the discussion of this in Chap. 2. Moore notes that even while ensconced in Harlem, poets from around the world would make a “pilgrimage” to see Hughes. Moore, 51. Seth Moglen’s “Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso” presents Hughes’ “populist and revolutionary” version of modernism. “Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso,” Callaloo 25.4 (2002), 1189–1205.

  83. 83.

    The text refers to the peculiar logic of the café at several points, noting that all the café’s regulars “all boil down to only one type, or they wouldn’t be in here in the first place,” Naylor, 32; 222.

  84. 84.

    Bailey’s Cafe, 28.

  85. 85.

    This section is called “The Vamp,” which is a term for an improvised section of a composition, particularly in a jazz context, but more generally for an object that has been made new. There can hardly be a more felicitous statement about how Naylor seeks to revisit Chaucer in a modern context.

  86. 86.

    Naylor, 35.

  87. 87.

    Naylor encourages the reader to think of the novel as part of one musical composition. She refers to musical terminology throughout the novel. Most significantly, the chapter introducing the characters is entitled “The Vamp”—an introductory cord progression—and the conclusion “The Wrap.” See Don Michael Randel, The Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

    These references to music as well as the interwoven nature of the serious and the joyful on the pilgrimage trail should also recall The Testimony of William Thorpe, an autobiographical account of heresy proceedings from the year 1407. The text is structured as a dialogue between William and Thomas Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although the veracity of the account is unclear, the Archbishop argues that the music and singing of pilgrims is necessary to “solace þe traueile and werinesse of the pilgrims.” William Thorpe, “The Testimony of William Thorpe,” Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 64–65.

  88. 88.

    Naylor, 174.

  89. 89.

    Naylor, 182.

  90. 90.

    Bailey’s Café, 117.

  91. 91.

    “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 66.

  92. 92.

    He cites Beowulf as his example of a text his professors find him unable to criticize.

  93. 93.

    Bailey’s Cafe, 212.

  94. 94.

    Bailey’s Café, 219.

  95. 95.

    The House of Fame, ll. 823–834.

  96. 96.

    There is perhaps a troubling subtext about African-American paternity that runs parallel to the argument this chapter makes about the vernacular as it relates to literary inheritance.

  97. 97.

    Bailey’s Café, 229.

  98. 98.

    Ellison, 39.

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    Matthew X. Vernon

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Vernon, M.X. (2018). Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality in Dante, Chaucer, and Naylor. In: The Black Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_5

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