It's not that I'm an illiterate simpleton. It's just that I'd heard of the "Canterbury Tales", but I'd never really given them much thought, at all. I vaguely knew that they were held together in some book form, and that they were a collection of stories. Weirdly, I was reading the Sandman comic "World's End", which is likened to the "Canterbury Tales" themselves (This is because "World's End" is about a series of travelers telling their stories on the way to an inn) so I feel like I accidentally almost-kind-of prepared to read the "Canterbury Tales", a bit.
And my idea of Chaucer is (embarrassing as it is to admit) a naked Paul Bettany from the movie "A Knight's Tale". I think it's a great movie, even though the anachronisms can be used in a drinking game to see how fast one can get alcohol poisoning.
But Sandman! What's cool about "World's End" is that the entire volume is filled with literary and mythological allusions, very much like "The Canterbury Tales". The allusions and sly additions to the Sandman mythology broaden the stories told, to the point where stories begin to create their own stories--much like the "Canterbury Tales" from which the author borrowed the idea. Granted, this is all slightly confusing to a newcomer who has no idea what I'm really talking about--but trust me, man, it's cool. Especially because this volume can be read on its own, without prior knowledge of the other books in the series.
But Sandman! What's cool about "World's End" is that the entire volume is filled with literary and mythological allusions, very much like "The Canterbury Tales". The allusions and sly additions to the Sandman mythology broaden the stories told, to the point where stories begin to create their own stories--much like the "Canterbury Tales" from which the author borrowed the idea. Granted, this is all slightly confusing to a newcomer who has no idea what I'm really talking about--but trust me, man, it's cool. Especially because this volume can be read on its own, without prior knowledge of the other books in the series.
(World's End Inn)
It's interesting to contemplate the ways in which all of our reading is dependent on the reading that has gone before. For a writer like Chaucer, all those allusions certainly remind us of that. But all of us read "intertextually" - it's one of the reasons that it's important to tackle a survey chronologically, to see how a theme gets built and rebuilt on the same foundation across time.
ReplyDeleteBut of course it works in different ways, too, just as you point to here. Because you encountered Sandman first, it influenced your reading of the CT. And that in no way makes you an illiterate simpleton! ;-)