MIP Author Interview: Jonathan Fruoco

Read the transcript of MIP's interview with Jonathan Fruoco, author of Chaucer's Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry:

Hello everyone, and welcome to our first Medieval Institute Publications Author Interview, with Dr. Jonathan Fruoco, author of Chaucer's Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry, published in October 2020 by MIP and De Gruyter.

My name is Becky Straple-Sovers, and I'm the Marketing Coordinator for Medieval Institute Publications. Thanks so much for joining us today. We're celebrating a special occasion with this first interview: a lovely tradition called Whan That Aprille Day, started in 2014 by the persona behind Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog and Chaucer Doth Tweet, found @LeVostreGC on Twitter. April is National Poetry Month here in the United States, and the annual Whan That Aprille Day celebration kicks off the month by calling for us all to take joy in languages that are called "old," "middle," "ancient," "archaic," or even, alas, "dead." Of course, here at MIP we do that all year round, but this month's newsletter has a special focus on Chaucer and other poets working in Middle English.

Just a quick reminder that if you have not yet subscribed to our newsletter, you can do that at wmich.edu/medievalpublications/newsletter-0. We'll put that link in the details below. We send out one newsletter each month filled with fascinating features from our authors, series editors, and staff—like this video—along with news, information on our latest titles, reviews of our books, and more. Plus, each month we raffle off a free copy of one of our books, and you'll automatically be entered into that raffle when you subscribe to the newsletter.

To help us celebrate Whan That Aprille Day, I'm so excited to welcome Dr. Jonathan Fruoco, a research fellow at the Centre d'études médiévales anglaises, Sorbonne University, whose research focuses on the linguistic and cultural evolution of medieval England, with a particular interest in the polyphony of Geoffrey Chaucer's work and its connection with French and Italian courtly poetry.

B: Welcome, Dr. Fruoco, and thank you so much for joining us!

JF: Thank you.

B: So, just a brief, um, explanation of your book... Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer's style. If Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is, however, the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

So, I'd actually like to start by reading a short excerpt from the introduction of your book. Um, "Chaucer has notoriously been defined as the father of English poetry, an assertion that tends to condemn several centuries of oral and written literature in English. If Chaucer were to be the father of English poetry, what could we say about the authors of Beowulf, The Wanderer, or the Battle of Maldon?" So, as someone who specializes in Old English vernacular literature, I of course very much appreciate the acknowledgement of all the poetry that came before Chaucer. Beyond this, though, you also argue that this notion tends to ignore the specificities of Chaucer's style.What do you mean by that?

JF: Well, I've, um, I've consistently tried to make clear in this book that, um... Chaucer's not the father of English poetry. It was very important for me from day one. In fact, I tend to consider Chaucer as the father of English prose, rather, because of the polyphonic nature of his poetry. And, I mean, when you, when you read it, considering this, it's incredibly novelistic. And that's quite clearly the aim of my book, to underline this particular aspect—the novelistic dimension, the dialogic dimension, of Chaucer's poetry. And Chaucer's narrative is, um,well, Chaucer's narrative style is marked by his openness to other voices, other languages, other accents, all these voices from Bakhtin's "marketplace," as he called it. And narratological and linguistic frameworks, quite frankly, allow you to truly see Chaucer's polyphonic practice and its sociolinguistic and philological origins, and for me that what—that's what makes Chaucer's style so specific.

B: Which, um, which of Chaucer's works do you actually, um, talk about in the book? Is it the Canterbury Tales, is it other works beyond that?

JF: It's—well, I've tried to cover all of Chaucer's works, basically.As it's this dialogical process, it's quite clearly, uh, a gradual, progressive evolution, so I've tried to track that down from its beginning, so I go back from... The first chapter is... it's a bit far from Chaucer, if I may say so. It—I'm trying to just explain the linguistic situation in medieval England to try to show that once Chaucer started writing, um, in English—so, Book of the Duchess—he's inherited, uh... an already multicultural and multilingual environment, so I go from that  beginning, uh, and try to track this dialogism throughout his work and to see how it gradually evolves and, and... how it's reinforced. And so I end with The Canterbury Tales, which is the ultimate polyphonic Chaucer experience.

B: So, that segues really well into another one of my questions... um, you call Chaucer one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the "polyphonic novel." What exactly is a polyphonic novel, and are there perhaps other works that people might know? Other than Chaucer, are there other authors who work in that genre that people might be familiar with?

JF: Well, um... This notion of, of, yeah—it's, in, in The Principle of Hope, which is uh... written by Ernst Bloch—I'm not sure I've pronounced this—um... Well, in this book he showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured. So you have people living in the same country, at the same time, but who can effectively live in different centuries, some making their alliances with the past, and others, um,  betting on the future, in a way, but all of them at least technically enclosed in this temporal moment.And... but the question is, can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? And can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age? So that's the idea. So what makes Chaucer modern is precisely his perception of these voices, accents, languages that I mentioned before that surrounded him throughout his life. And it's his ability to transpose them narratively. So Chaucer's modernity very much comes from this polyphonic practice which you find throughout his work. I don't know if that answers the, the question, or if I went a bit too far... (laughs)

B: It's—it kind of, um, looked forward to my next question too, which was about the, the subtitle of the book being "The Modern in Medieval Poetry"... and in your introduction, you say that—I think it's your first sentence, actually—Geoffrey Chaucer is in many ways the most modern of the medieval poets.Um, so you started to talk a little bit about that already... is there anything you want to elaborate more on that or... you know, what is the the "modern" that you're referring to there? is there something about Chaucer's work that, uh...might seem more modern than medieval?

JF: Well, um, I think all these questions—and I've had several people, um... talk to me about this point because it's—it's a bit, you know... it's a, the polemic aspect of the work, and so I've tried to revise and realign, in a way, in this book a number of traditional assumptions that we have in academia about medieval literary history, and I've tried to challenge the, the reader to rethink these long accepted assumptions. And a lot of critics tend to resist the application of ideas about the novel and novelistic discourse to literary works composed before the early 18th century. But I try to perceive, uh, each author as modernist in his own way as "making it new"... It's a perception that I think encourages new and fresh thought by reactivating our appreciationof works as fully alive in the specificity of their own moment.

So... Chaucer had no idea he was being "medieval," obviously, and, I mean, as far as he was concerned he was probably trying to be modern in his own time, so, um... it's, it's all these questions of "modernity" and "medieval" and all this partition of literary history that I've tried to, to revise a bit, and... and to see that Chaucer's modernity also comes it—it comes from all this polyphonic practice, which is, technically speaking, something that, if you follow Bakhtin, it comes from the 20th century. Dostoevsky invented it—for him—um, but if you start to look at literature, even from the antiquity, you start to find some elements that will later be what you can find in Chaucer's poetry and which contribute to this dialogism, to this polyphony, which gradually will lead to something that is novelistic and that is "modern" for us, which is the novel as we know it.

B: Yes, you—earlier you said something about fragmentation, which, um, that's one of those things that strikes me as something that people tend to think of as "modern"—it kind of brings me back to some of my graduate seminars, talking about modern, um—modernist literature and how fragmentation  was so important, but... but clearly it's not unique to that time period. (laughs) And so you see that as  something that manifests in Chaucer's work as well?

JF: Mmhm. Yeah.

B: Interesting... So was there anything that you worked on that—during this process, um, that maybe didn't make it into the book? Maybe it didn't quite fit or it lay outside the scope of the book, and if so would you like to talk—maybe talk a little bit more about that now, given the space?

JF: Yeah. Well, um... so the book is an updated version of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended six years ago and started ten years ago, so, um... obviously along the way I've gathered quite a lot of information and data that I've not always been able to... to treat, and one of the elements that I've clearly had to remove from the book, um... was the...urb—urban literature aspect and the fact that, um... the development of Chaucer's dialogism might in a way be connected also to his presence in the city. And, uh, and that's something that is um... quite, um, polemic as well, I mean, you have—Ardis Butterfield wrote, er, edited this wonderful book, which is Chaucer and the City, I think, and, um... which goes throughout all these chapters, uh, that explain quite clearly Chaucer's connection with this "absent" city of London, and I found that you have something, um... in this urban aspect of his literature that is polyvocal and that contributes also to this polyphony. It's one of the aspects of this dialogism and... but that was a big part of a big aspect and I should have... I—it would have taken another book completely to treat that properlyso I've preferred to take that out straight away and keep it for another research project, another book, or...

B: Yeah.

JF: God knows what.

B: That's... that's very fascinating. Another thing that—that maybe seems like a "modern"... (laughs) something modern, is, you know, literature of the city and that kind of urban milieu. So that's very interesting, um... would be an interesting project to see where that goes...

JF: Mmhm.

B: Um, so did you want to... to address anything else about... about the book, about the project? Did we cover it all? (laughs)

JF: Well, I think, uh... yeah, we've quite covered the, the book itself, yeah.

B: Great. Well, finally: So, just for fun, before we finish, which of Chaucer's works is your favorite—can you pick one? And why?

JF: I think it's—uh, my favorite is the Legend of Good Women. It's not always people's favorite and it's, I mean... It's been described as, you know, the "ugly duckling" of Chaucer's canon and, um... because it's repetitive, it's incomplete, and  Chaucer himself seems bored when you read it, but—I just love how Chaucer plays with conventions, with our expectations, with the terms of his penance that—that are given to him in, in... the Prologue, and how he just manipulates everything and everyone from the start to the beginning. I mean, the fact that he literally jumps out of the window as Lynceus in the tale of Hypermnestra and leaves us with a condemned woman on her wedding night in an unfinished collection of legends, I mean... it's just brilliant. I just love how he plays with us in this particular one.

B: Yeah. And how about, um... of The Canterbury Tales, which is your favorite (laughs), again, if you can pick one? (laughs)

JF: Um... Probably the Nun's Priest's Tale, because I love a good chicken story... And uh...

B: (laughs) Who doesn't?

JF: Just like that—and uh... no, I—I'm really fond of this particular story... I like the way Chaucer plays with, once again, the conventions of the fable, this time, and you have just this wonderful relationship between Pertelote and Chanticleer and, and... quickly they stop being just chickens and you can hear an old couple just quarreling, and it's just fantastic.

B: Yeah, those voices are so well... well developed and expressed, yeah.

JF: (laughs) Yeah.

B: (laughs) For sure. Well, thank you again so much, uh, for joining us... I hope—I hope you've enjoyed it... um, for joining us—

JF: I did, yes.

B: —great... for this interview for your fantastic book. Um, do you want to tell us where people can find out more about your work, where they can connect with you online?

JF: Yeah, uh... well, I've got a Twitter account, it's @JFruoco. I've got also, um my own personal website; it's, uh, www.jonathanfruoco.com. And so you can find all my all my—all my papers, research papers, all the information about my books, upcoming books, upcoming conferences... Also, there's a couple of filmed conferences on, on it and, um... a few blog entries, uh, so there's quite a few things on that and, um, it's... Between Twitter and my website is the best way to also follow my upcoming project, which is the—a new bilingual edition of Chaucer's work, uh... It's a five-volume edition with brand new translation, and I started working on that last year, so the first volume should be published, um... by the end of 2021 I hope, and so I've, um... invited lots of scholars to, to, to join, uh... and to contribute introductions.

So we've got—I'm just going to name a few,  I'm afraid I'm—I'll forget people... In the first volume, at least, we've got, uh... Ardis Butterfield, David Wallace... um... I think this is also... the first volume, uh... there's Susan Crane and Candace Barrington. So then, lots of people will be joining us for the other volumes as well, and... it's an  exciting new project. It's going to be published by Classiques Garnier and the idea is just to try toget Chaucer back in French classrooms, because he's deserted them a long time ago.

B: Mmhm. So people can look—look for more information about that then—

JF: Yeah.

B: Great.

JF: Twitter and my website, yeah, that's the best way to...

B: Great. So we will put links to those in the details below, as well, so people can—can find them, um, after the video is over. And, again, thank you so much, and—

JF: Thank you.

B: Yeah, have, have a great National Poetry Month, even if it's a U.S. thing... (laughs) Hope you can enjoy it.

JF: Thank you, I will. Thank you very much.

B: Good news for all of you watching: we are raffling off a copy of Chaucer's Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry this month, so if you want the chance to win a free copy of the book please be sure to click the "Enter Raffle" button in the April issue of our newsletter—all the way down at the bottom of the newsletter—or subscribe to the newsletter to automatically be entered into the raffle. The book is also available for purchase, of course, if you don't want to leave it up to chance, and we will link to the product page in the details below. Thank you again, all of you, for watching... Uh, you can also follow us on Twitter @MIP_medpub, like us on Facebook @MedievalInstitutePublications, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out our website.

Links to our website, newsletter sign up, and all of our social channels can be found in the details below.

We hope you enjoyed this first MIP Author Interview and we really look forward to sharing more interviews with you in the future.

Have a great #WhanThatAprilleDay, and enjoy National Poetry Month!