Remembering Canacee, Forgetting Incest: Reading the “Squire’s Tale”

Abstract

We have seen that one of the most intricately structured poems in the language, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, relies upon a highly selfconscious structure for its artistic and narrative complexity.At the same time, this product of self-consciousness reveals its dependence on a textual unconscious in the form of Morgan le Fay. In tracing the structure of late medieval English narrative, this chapter turns from an anonymously authored poem most likely written for a northwest baronial court to the work of the best-known poet of the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer.Yet in moving away from the anonymity that characterizes most early (and some late) medieval productions and the romance genre itself, the division between conscious and unconscious formations—the difference within medieval literary narrative—persists. For all the textual and critical differences between anonymous,“minstrel” romance and sophisticated, London textual production, these works have remarkably similar effects.