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ABSTRACT
Inspired by Chaucer’s frame tale narrative, the recent volumes entitled Refugee Tales narrate the perilous journeys of modern-day displaced and stateless persons seeking asylum in the UK. This article examines the Refugee Tales’ goal to create a “spectacle of welcome” through the lens of the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor” and the related Levitical command that, “when a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong” (Leviticus 19:33–4). As a third-term in the sovereign formula of “friend/enemy,” the refugee threatens to uncouple power from the very criteria on which it depends: history, territory, bare life. And these concerns are arguably as important in the late-fourteenth century as in our own global political age. Does Chaucer think of the refugees he witnessed in his own life? Considering, then, the neighborly relations of literary texts — relations that are contiguous rather than genealogical — this article seeks Chaucer’s own refugee stories by delving into the narrative chasms of the Knight’s Tales’ absent narratives, the residue of Boccaccio’s Il Teseida, and the critically-contentious backstory to the Knight as storyteller.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Exemplaria’s editors and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Heather Blurton and Emily Houlik-Ritchey for their work assembling this special issue and for the opportunity to participate.
Notes
1. See “700 Capacity Migrant Centre Opening in Thebes,” Greek City Times, Mar 15, Citation2017. https://greekcitytimes.com/2017/03/15/700-capacity-migrant-centre-opening-in-thebes.
2. Citations of Chaucer’s works are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition (Citation1987).
3. Citations of Leviticus taken from the Holy Bible in the English Standard Version <esv.org>
4. See Schmitt (Citation2005), especially 5–15.
5. On the Reeve’s dialect, see Garbáty (Citation1973) and Horobin (Citation2002).
6. I discuss Wallace’s reading of the Cook’s Flemish in similar terms in Taylor (Citation2018).
7. The reference, here, is to Walter Benjamin’s Thesis XIV in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” For a discussion of Benjamin’s “Theses” in relation to Lacan’s Ethics, see Žižek (Citation1989), esp. pp. 136–49.
8. The first Refugee Walk, organized by Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group with help from Kent Refugee Help, moved from Dover to Crawley and through Canterbury over the course of nine days in June 2015. See: http://refugeetales.org/
9. The “Prologue” to Refugee Tales does not employ line-numbers, so I use corresponding page numbers.
10. Definitions of “tender” are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary online <www.oed.com>
11. Thanks to Jessica Rosenfeld for this helpful suggestion about the relationship between the verb “tender” and the evocation of debt that is evident in one’s encounter with the neighbor.
12. The Bail Observation Project, to which Herd alludes, continues to observe proceedings of asylum hearings and appeals, as well as issue reports. See: https://bailobs.org/; see, also, a recent study of asylum hearings in Gill, Rotter, Burridge, and Allsopp (Citation2017).
13. I use the term “absent narrative,” here, as explained by Elizabeth Scala in her book-length study: “an absent narrative … constitutes a more formative element, a ‘position’ in that mise en abyme from which the text ‘originates’ and where medieval texts engage with the problems of their own structural complexities” (Citation2002, 8–9).
14. All quotations of Boccaccio’s Teseida in translation are taken from Boccaccio (Citation1964).
15. See Clogan (Citation1992), esp. 173–4.
16. For readings that challenge Jones’ arguments, see, for example, Pratt (Citation1987) and Morgan (Citation2009). For contemporary responses to Jones’ book, see J. A. Burrow (Citation1980) and Maurice Keen (Citation1981).
17. See La Prise d’ Alixandre, for example, lines 652–8, in Guillaume de Machaut (Citation2002):
He had the whole city torched and burned.
There to be seen was many a silken cloth
Of pure gold that gleamed
As it burned, and many a beautiful woman,
Many a Saracen, many a young girl,
Many a Turk, and many a child too who perished
By fire or was cut down by the sword.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Joseph Taylor
Joseph Taylor, is associate professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is co-editor of The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain (Ohio State UP, 2016). He has published articles in Exemplaria, Chaucer Review, Modern Philology, and JEGP, among other venues.