Geoffrey Chaucer, I imagine, would enjoy Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media, a loose collection of essays, poems and jokes, followed by a healthy dose of excerpts from Brantley L. Bryant's vastly amusing, pop-medieval blog-by-Chaucer. Some may judge this collection haphazard, but the contents work well as a compilatio of sorts, each item relating to each other to varying degree through the trifecta of medievalism, humor and digital expression.
John Gower begins the volume with what I must assume is a previously unknown poem, "Why Ye Sholde Nat Rede This Booke," warning that, malus bloggus de Chaucer in librum nefandum commutatur ("Chaucer's bad blog is transformed in this abominable tome") and reminding the reader of the old computer programmer's saw: "In proverb men seye, withouten doute: 'Garbage in and garbage oute'" (3). That more is not made of the apparent discovery and publishing of a new poem by Gower is surprising. I can only surmise that this is all deliberate, and encodes a tacit critique of the sad and unfair treatment that Gower continues to receive at the hands of scholars of late medieval English literature, fecklessly bedazzled as they are by Chaucer's tiresome poetic radiance. Following Gower, Bonnie Wheeler introduces the rest of the book ("Go Litel Blog, Go Litel Thys Comedye!") by sketching the recent history of academic medievalists' zealous investment in wit, wordplay and recreational humor. Later in the volume, Robert W. Hanning (a former professor of Bryant) presents tangible evidence of the same in his groan-worthy selection of limericks, puns, jokes, ideas for bumper stickers ("Quyte while you're ahead!") and other musings upon medieval literature and culture.
What links these risible offerings and the digital textuality of online blogs is the communities of desire that both engender. Wheeler's recounting of the exuberance of the late-night limerick writing sessions at Kalamazoo in the 1970's (9) memorializes a connective joy, the byproduct of the yearning of scholars with so much shared knowledge to share more than just that knowledge. In the same vein, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's characteristically thoughtful meditation on "Blogging the Middle Ages" assesses the value of blogs related to Medieval Studies as social, public and personal catalysts for authors and audiences alike, and of "the pleasure, companionship, and even the consolation so many of us bloggers feel through our interactions with our commentators" (34). Blogs, Cohen observes, "reach many more people than any essay or book I could ever compose" (38).
All of the above is a serviceable warm-up for the obvious star of this volume: forty-one excerpts from the still-ongoing Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog (http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/). Written in the voice of Geoffrey "LeVostreGC" Chaucer, along with a few other related figures, including Litel Lowys (his son), Margery Kempe, and Henry Bolingbroke, this text reprises the bulk of Chaucer's main blog posts from 2006-2009. The blog effortlessly and hilariously transforms the fourteenth-century Chaucer and his language through the idiom, popular culture and technology of the twenty-first. LeVostreGC recounts the wonders of spam in his in-box ("A mightie prince of power asketh myn succour yn matirs financiale!"), his favorite video games (Donkeye- Kynge: "Yn thys game, ye playe a peasaunt who hath yn his care a smal donkeye. Ye use the gentil beeste to dryve yower carte and to transporte donge"), and medieval predecessors of modern movies or novels ("Serpentes on a Shippe," "The Cipher of Leonardo"). Other entries blend medieval subjects and what might be called the pop- culture of contemporary Medieval Studies: "Margery Kempe at MLA," where Margery stumbles into a job interview and lands a tenure-track position (everyone is impressed that she already has a book); or "Bibliomania" where Chaucer reviews the Harley Lyrics and other "medieval" books such as Battlestar Ecclesiastica, by Johannes Wycliffe ("Sum oon nedeth to jump on this sucker and turne hit in to a series of television"), and Piers Plowman: the I-Text ("This boke confuseth me"). In one of the most revelatory entries ("Ich and the Perle-Poet on Mount Dorse-Quassee") we learn that in his youth LeVostreGC had a romantic dalliance with the Pearl-poet ("Indede. The makere of Perle was 'with' me"), the narrative of which historically, hysterically, riffs on the film Brokeback Mountain.
The fact that Bryant writes this blog in a largely accessible approximation of Middle English only amplifies the humorous frission of then and now, marrying as it does archaic language with the right here, right now of both academic and popular culture. This marriage also has the effect of introducing aspects of Middle English in a friendly mode to non-medievalists, as the modern content that underwrites the blog provides a ready context for comprehension, producing a simulation of Middle English that reads less as an inaccessible artifact of the past, and more as a rich and storied dialect of the present. Throughout, blog entries are marked by what Chris Jones has termed "optional depth" [1]--the more one knows of Chaucer's literature and history, the richer the jokes can become. This is especially true regarding some later, historically obscurer posts where Thomas Favent and the Lords Appellant assume control of the blog in a transparently propagandistic way. But the beauty of Chaucer's blog is that it is usually as available through present-day culture as it is through medieval specialization. The author function runs to riotous effect here; to start the amusement ride, all one must know is that the Chaucer here is supposed to be that Chaucer, the famous, canonical and medieval one, who is now playing video games, travelling to Las Vegas with King Richard, or with his adolescent son reworking N.W.A.'s iconic song "Straight Outta Compton" into "Straight Ovtta London" ("a balade of hippe-hoppe par Geoffroi Chaucer").
Given the potency (and relative popularity) of Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog in its original, digital form, the question, inevitably, is why bother to turn the blog into a book? The reduced and redacted blog in print occupies a liminal and somewhat cramped position, as the book commutes Bryant's successful post-print phenomenon to an earlier and arguably more limited representational medium. Contained within a book, the blog's content is still funny, but in this remediation it loses some of the spark, the vibrancy, the ephemerality which ironically gave it substance. Gower is correct: bloggus de Chaucer in librum nefandum commutatur. The book does not include the lively record of the comments of readers, several of whom developed into longstanding characters in their own rights--in other words, the book by its nature attenuates the community of practice that helped make the blog so delightful and gratifying in the first place. So, why? A traditional and still trenchant anxiety that pits the durability of the book against the perceived fragility of new media is surely at least somewhat at work here. But in his own introductory essay about the form and function of his blog ("Playing Chaucer"), Bryant suggests a different motive, namely, "to see what happens when the playfulness, and the pleasure, of medieval studies is generously awarded the dignity of print publication" (24). This suggests a new game: querying status in the media of scholarly record, where print traditionally aligns with a sense of institutional and intellectual dignity and digital media (for now) does not. Or, as John Gower complains about Chaucer, using language similar to Bryant's for different effect:
Wers still, he wrote thes thinges en blog,
Which is a maner kind of fog
Composid of electronic words
And ment to fill the mynds of nerds;
O wofull daye! What shal betide
If blogges with books be dignified? (4)
Here redounds a classic Chaucerian dialectic--the hazy and unresolved space between game and earnest through which the majority of Chaucer's poetic corpus finds its social verve and rhetorical groove. When the absurdity of Bryant's blog or Hanning's limericks is sanctioned by Palgrave-Macmillan's The New Middle Ages academic imprint, the reader must confront the play of such undignified material in a dignified medium--the fun, in other words, gets serious. In "Playing Chaucer," Bryant modestly downplays any import of his efforts, writing, "As it is I am afraid the essay still sounds overserious for the topic at hand, and may prove the least fun part of book; please imagine me in a clown suit if necessary" (16). Intentional or not, this all reads as quintessentially Chaucerian--do we believe the author or not when he tells us that all of this, really, is just a joke, al for solas and nat sentence? [2]
It is the nature of New Media to converge and collapse older modes of aesthetic and intellectual expression within the new. Analogously, the rewriting of blog to book also converges traditional and emergent notions of how we choose to access the medieval past. Regardless of Bryant's actual position (whatever it may be), the printed remediation of his blog pokes and prods one of the more annoying ghosts in the academic machine: the spectre of the constantly shifting and erupting boundaries between what constitutes "medieval" (an authentic subject of study), and "medievalism" (a contemporary and inauthentic appropriation of the subject). Once historical distance is established, what once was authorized as a legitimate study of the medieval past inexorably drifts into an acknowledged presentism of ideological bias (e.g. Robertsonian exegetics, to cite a favored Chaucerian punching bag). Bryant's blog of Chaucer inverts this formula of historical drift, foregrounding the extreme subjectivity of its frivolity; the effectiveness of the joke, however confesses our belief that real bones still articulate inside the clown-suited effigy. A post-historical Chaucer such as this recalls Thomas Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg's charge that "medievalism has the capacity to function as a challenge to many of our most complex debates about historicism. While its subject matter often seems embarrassingly lightweight, the sheer range and variety of medievalism discloses a correspondingly wide range of responses to the past" [3]. LeVostreGC is not Geoffrey Chaucer, we know, but he is not exactly not-Chaucer, and we know that too. However hilarious and lightweight, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog nevertheless responds to and reformulates our historical Chaucer with the unexpected heft of contemporary resonance and popular accessibility. In Bryant's blog, LeVostreGC becomes another skin, another suit for the only Chaucer we can ever have, a transhistoricized Chaucer, rooted in the present moment of understanding, through which modern readers always filter and translate the medieval past. He is, as George Edmondson puts it, "that Chaucer [who] coincides not with the timely life he once led but with the untimely afterlife he continues to lead" [4].
So, Geoffrey Chaucer would enjoy this volume, I imagine, because Chaucer both wrote it, and was written by it. Here's to more such delightfully earnest and entertaining games.
----------------
Notes:
[1] Chris Jones, "From Heorot to Hollywood: Beowulf for the Third Millennium," in Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, eds. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 13-30, at p. 21.
[2] In real life Bryant is himself, it should be noted, a bit elvissh by his contenaunce.
[3] Thomas Pendegrast and Stephanie Trigg, "The Negative Erotics of Medievalism," in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, eds. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 117-38, at p. 118.
[4] George Edmondson, "Naked Chaucer," in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, op. cit., pp. 139-60, at p. 142.