Cooking Your Goose: Chaucer's Food and the Realist Mode

This paper uses David Lodge's discussion of metonymy and metaphor - based on Roman Jakobson's theory - to explore Chaucer's treatment of food and drink in The Canterbury Tales. Lodge demonstrates that, while poetry is basically metaphoric in its mode of representation, the realist novel is in contrast fundamentally metonymic. An object described in a realist novel is usually metonymic in the sense that it represents, or is continuous with, objects physically present in the novelist's own material world. As opposed to the metonymic realist novel, Medieval and Renaissance texts normally use food and drink in allegorical or symbolic ways. Consumable items may represent sin, temptation, the Eucharist or the fulfilment of desire. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer often does use food metaphorically, but he also displays it in figures that are both metaphoric and metonymic to varying degrees; and, now and then, his representation of food is solely metonymic. In its trope analysis, this paper pays special attention to passages in which food or drink function metonymically, as things in a fictional material world. It demonstrates one of the ways in which The Canterbury Tales contributes to the general process that Mikhail Bakhtin calls 'novelization'.