The Failure of Invention : Chaucer's 'Squire's Tale'

Published: Robert R. Edwards. Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989), pp. 131-45.

Description: According to literary theorists, writers were able either to rework sources or more easily, to invent new matter. In the former method, the poet had to work the original idea anew, avoiding too close imitation, errors, and confusion. In SqT, the narrator dramatizes authorship: The Squire "Koude songes make and wel endite."; His tale is a "radical experiment that attempts--and fails--to synthesize narrative form and "materia remota." The only attempt in CT at a true chivalric romance, SqT looks back to Chretien's classic form of interlaced romance and conforms to Dante's "ambages" (a "roundabout way"), suggesting labyrinthine movement: multiple episodes, interlaced plots, deferral, and digression, to produce wonder.; Aspects of SqT are similar to "Sir Gawain." In contrast to the Knight, the Squire is unable to control his tale: the energy of the tale is "dissipated by the narrator's self-reflexive devices and oratorical gestures." The magic depends upon machines and physics, not the mysterious, "thaumaturgic power" emphasized in sources and the chivalric romance tradition. Chaucer was influenced by the emergence of experimental science.