The Consolation of Narrative: Figural Selves from Augustine to Thomas More

Open Access
- Author:
- Schrock, Chad David
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 01, 2010
- Committee Members:
- Robert R Edwards, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Robert R Edwards, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Caroline Davis Eckhardt, Committee Member
Patrick G Cheney, Committee Member
Benjamin Thomas Hudson, Committee Member - Keywords:
- consolation
narrative
history of exegesis
Augustine
figural interpretation - Abstract:
- Augustine’s Confessiones and De Civitate Dei served medieval Christendom as canonical autobiography and historiography, respectively. Both works present variations upon a single narrative model derived from sacred history. First, events foreshadow a climactic revelation which, when it comes, provides a summary meaning to history. Then a posthistorical space follows, in which the implications of that climax are tentatively interpreted and performed. Thus the narrative ends in anticlimax or lack of closure, not the triumphalism of a Eusebian historiography or a saint’s life. If an end-stopped, triumphalist narrative generates fixed meaning, an Augustinian narrative produces consolation in the absence of meaning because authoritative sacred metanarrative predicts such absence. Following Augustine’s example, important medieval narrative structures of the self (Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and More’s Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation) use the anticlimactic structure of sacred history in order to provide consolation for their own lack of closure. This consolation arises from grounding the meaningless autonomies of their characters in inscrutable transcendence and from exploring a previous climactic moment through a provisional authorship. In short, this dissertation chronicles the role of the literary use of sacred history in the late classical and medieval construction of narratival selfhood and identity. This dissertation contributes primarily to three important discussions in medieval studies. First, it provides partial motivation for the frequent lack of resolution in medieval narrative form. By grounding itself in a posthistory governed by indiscernible divine form, medieval Augustinian narrative recontextualizes the formal problem of closure within religious culture. Second, it identifies a distinctively Augustinian narrative consolation that supplements Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, dominant in the medieval period. The linearity of Augustine’s sacred history up to conversion or incarnation provides an authoritative narrative absent from Boethius’s strictly philosophical resources. The authority of a climactic event enables Augustine’s return from that event into a posthistory where it can be re-performed. Third, its analysis of allusive narratives contributes to the history of medieval exegesis and hermeneutics. A figural telling of one’s own story, or the story of another person, is also a reading of individual and sacred history. The texts this project will examine are already provisional interpretive responses to the sacred narrative. However, they exemplify specifically literary interpretation, outside the usual functions of church hierarchy. As neither strictly sacred nor secular narratives because they interpret both sacred (biblical) and secular (individual) history, they offer unique opportunities to examine the competition and fusion of various interpretive techniques in the medieval period.