Showing posts with label Geoffrey Chaucer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geoffrey Chaucer. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

My hero / Geoffrey Chaucer by Lavinia Greenlaw

 

Geoffrey Chaucer


My hero: Charles Geoffrey Chaucer by Lavinia Greenlaw

In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer takes risks, breaks laws, invents words and enters the dark


Friday 21 November 2014

Iwas introduced to Chaucer when I was too young to know that the questions of how to live and how to live with each other are ones we never stop exploring. I studied “The Franklin’s Tale” first, the story of a couple who try to live as equals. This now seems extraordinary for the 14th century, but all I remembered was some hokum about the “grisly rokkes blake” off the coast of Brittany that had to be magicked away to avoid a shipwreck.


Geoffrey Chaucer

The work that made me realise Chaucer was not all horses and castles was Troilus and Criseyde, the greatest account you will ever read of people arguing themselves and each other into and out of love. Chaucer stole the story, made up a source and invented a form. He showed that English, on which the paint was still wet, could be as elegant and evocative as Latin or French. He was open to influence, intellectually mobile and properly curious. He wrote a treatise on the astrolabe for his 10-year-old son.

A soldier and civil servant, he survived years of political turbulence, and was put in charge of everything from wool to forests to building works. The busier he was, the more he wrote. His poetry earned him the royal gift of a gallon of wine a day, which he eventually arranged to be converted into cash. He read widely and across languages, and his translations were praised in French even as England and France went to war. Chaucer was greatly influenced by Italian poetry, arriving in Florence when Dante was only 50 years dead, and Petrarch and Boccaccio (from whom he lifted Troilus and Criseyde) still living.

In Troilus and Criseyde, he activates courtly love and complicates his characters. He casts a searching light on Troilus and listens to Criseyde. He takes risks, breaks laws, invents words and enters the dark. While going to some lengths to point out that he’s not providing any answers, he intervenes from the start,Chaucer remindings us why such works are written and what we read them for.

THE GUARDIAN






2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
076 My hero / John Cooke by Geoffrey Robertson (24 April)

079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside

095 My hero / Les Murray by Daljit Nagra (2 september)
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan

100 My hero / Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson

102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

111 My hero / Arnold Lobell by Julia Donaldson (23 December)

2012 (PAGE 9)

115 My hero / Nadime Gordimer by Tessa Hadley (27 January)




2013




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194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman (13 September)

199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer (1 November)


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245 My hero / Geoffrey Chaucer by Lavinie Greenlan (21 November)

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre (22 January)
2016


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Monday, November 13, 2017

Best literary sex scenes / Writers' favourites

Photo by Francisco Javier Domínguez García


Best literary sex scenes: writers' favourites


In the wake of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, we asked authors to tell us who does sex best in fiction


Friday 6 July 2012 22.55 BST

Diana Athill

Alan Hollinghurst does sex rather well, but most of the writers who do it best don't "do" it at all, but simply allow it to happen in a way that can easily be supplied by any reader who happens to have done it.

John Banville

I find The Story of O deeply erotic precisely because the woman at the centre of it holds all the power, even though she seems the one most cruelly treated. Also the book is beautifully and tenderly written, in its odd way. Someone with a decent prose style should do a proper translation of it.


Mary Beard

It's got to be Alan Hollinghurst, for me. I vividly remember sitting in my 10-year-old daughter's cello lesson, with a rather fierce music teacher, reading The Folding Star ... she scratched the bow, and I went a bit pink. It was not so much at the sex itself, but at the sheer incongruity of the reading matter. And at the frisson that I might get found out.

Jilly Cooper

I like my erotic literature to be beautifully written as well as funny and can't do better than Chaucer. How about this from Troilus and Criseyde: "Her slender arms, her soft and supple back, / Her tapered sides – all fleshy smooth and white – / He stroked, and asked for favours at her neck, / Her snowish throat, her breasts so round and light; / Thus in this heaven he took his delight, / And smothered her with kisses upon kisses / Till gradually he came to learn where bliss is."


Margaret Drabble

The most erotic book I ever read was an anonymous novel called L'Histoire d'O, which I think was by a woman called Pauline Réage. It was a sado-masochistic romp and I was given a copy in France in the 1960s when it was probably illegal in England. It surpassed Georgette Heyer, who seemed very exciting when I was at school. I was rather alarmed by how exciting it was and I remember giving my copy to an Arts Council officer somewhere in the north of England when I was on tour there; I didn't think it a good book to have around the house with small children. I also found DH Lawrence thrilling, in a healthier and more respectable kind of way. The Rainbow has some wonderfully powerful love scenes.

Geoff Dyer

My favourite scene is the seduction in dialogue in The Names by Don DeLillo – but then my favourite everything is in that book. Is the scene erotic? Yes, in a meta-sort of way, but mainly it's incredibly intoxicating. It begins with the narrator, James, and some friends at a club in Athens, watching a belly dancer named Janet Ruffing. After the performance she changes into a cardigan and comes to sit with the group. James proceeds to ease his way into her consciousness so that "a curious intimacy" is formed. After some polite exchanges he asks her to "say belly. I want to watch your lips." Then it's, "Say breasts. Say tongue." The conversation spirals on for pages, Janet insisting "I don't do this" while getting drawn deeper into the giddy linguistic spiral. "Say heat," says James. "Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered."


Howard Jacobson


Softcore porn is the literary equivalent of those feathery wimp-whips and talcum'd cufflinks you see in the windows of sex toy shops. If you're going to torture your lover, at least break the skin, I say. You would expect me, therefore, to chose the scene I find most erotic from the pages of De Sade or Bataille. But as far as writing goes, the best sex is the most implicit. So I nominate the scene in Persuasion in which Captain Wentworth wordlessly, and with none of their past grievous history resolved, assists a fatigued Anne Elliot into a carriage. There is no overt sexuality, no titillatory play with power and dependence - he helps her in and that's that. "Yes - he had done it. She was in the carriage and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it." Anne might tell herself that the kindness proceeds from what remains of "former sentiment", but Wentworth's hands have been on her body, and we never doubt that it's her body that receives the shock of the contact as much as her mind.

John Mullan

When it was published in 1968, John Updike's novel Couples was a succès de scandale because of its minutely attentive descriptions of sex. Much of this is adulterous sex, enjoyed by the pleasure-seeking 30 something couples of the New England town of Tarbox. Half a century later the descriptive precision is not shocking but absorbing. In the first of the novel's many adulterous couplings, Piet Hanema and Georgene Thorne make love on her sunporch. Updike typically gives us every beautifully rendered detail: the fall of morning light, the "musty cidery smell" of pine needles, the texture of the blanket they lie on. Updike makes you see everything his characters see. His novel is descriptively promiscuous: we move between different viewpoints, male and female, sharing their pleasures and perceptions. There is an extraordinary kind of tenderness in this physical detail that is an effect of style and patience. The tenderness heightens our appalled sense of how these people lie to each other and deceive themselves.

Edmund White

I think the sexiest passages are those about Luc in Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star. The 33-year-old Edward Manners leaves England for Belgium and a job as the tutor to the 17-year-old Luc. After mooning over the boy for months, astonishingly he falls into Edward's arms. As he sleeps after sex Edward studies his handsome face: "While he slept I kept watch over him - a smooth shoulder, the little pool of his clavicle, his neck, his extraordinary face, his hair muddled and pushed back." This is the romantic postlude. The sex act itself is much more strenuous: "I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddy doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty ... His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat but it was mine: the water poured off me like a boxer, my soaked hair fell forward and stung my eyes." This sex-writing is convincing because it mixes the sublime with the carnal, the grossly physical with the spiritual – and all of it experienced as a shock, the longed-for consummation that one can't believe is really happening.

THE GUARDIAN


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