Beautiful Persons

Abstract

The idea that attention to individual personhood arose during the European Renaissance is part of what Lee Patterson has called the “pervasive and apparently ineradicable grand recit that organizes Western cultural history.”¹ In Jacob Burckhardt’s famous nineteenth-century formulation, medieval man “was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, or corporation—only through some general category.”² Chaucerians are likely to find themselves wary of virtually every feature of Burckhardt’s assertion, from its notion of a generic “medieval man” and an accessible knowledge of his self-consciousness to the force of its posited general categories. Yet, at the same time, Nancy Partner’s twentieth-century working belief that the “deep structure of human experience has remained essentially the same over centuries of changing culture,”³ implying that such structures persist untouched by child-raising practices or social mobilities, may seem ahistorical from another direction. I have argued earlier that structures of feeling do change over time, sometimes within a generation, but these are not the “deep structures” Partner seems to refer to. This chapter addresses the interpretive and aesthetic effects of allowing the characters of Chaucer’s fictions to appear before us as genuine subjects with rich, complex interior lives on the one hand, or enjoying them for the striking alterity of their presentation as types on the other.

The business of a poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest.

Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

In every wood in every spring

There is a different green.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I was regarding the boat and then the false President-Pasha himself, when I thought to myself that he seemed to be real and that he was beautiful—if these two words can exist together: beautiful and real.

Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book