Literal Opposition: Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster

Author/Editor
Epstein, Robert

Title
Literal Opposition: Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster

Published
Epstein, Robert. "Literal Opposition: Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002), pp. 16-33.

Review
"We should be as studious to historicize deconstruction as we are to deconstruct history,” Epstein writes in the conclusion to this essay (30), in which he describes how the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century construction of Lancastrian identity does not conform to postmodern expectation of “an idealized and ahistorical unity” (18). The Lancastrian texts that he examines “evince a unique consciousness of the underlying nature of language” (18) and in them, “identity is represented as relational rather than absolute” (30), being constructed of oppositions and represented “on the typographic level in ways that link the relational nature of identity to the relational nature of language and of all signification” (ibid.). Epstein uses Gower’s revision of the dedication of CA, in which Gower “explicitly pitted Henry against his cousin Richard,” to illustrate how “the idea of Lancaster . . . originates in opposition” (19). (Such an opposition is more visible, of course, in Macaulay’s edition, in which the two passages are juxtaposed, than it would have been in any medieval copy.) He also examines the passage in TC 458-73 in which Gower sets Richard’s abuses against Henry’ virtues, referring to each only by his initial, “R.” and “H.,” a feature that is effaced in Stockton’s translation. Epstein demonstrates that the lines in question scan only if the letters represent long monosyllables and that they therefore cannot be replaced by the kings’ full names. “The text,” he points out, “moves towards an originary opposition of signs, arriving ultimately at the level of writing” (22), an effect that is complemented by the punning in line 461, “[H.] Quem deus extollit, et ab R. sua prospera tollit”: “the difference between divine favor and damnation is reduced to an arbitrary linguistic coincidence. . . . So, some fifteen years after originally opposing Henry to Richard in the 'Confessio,' Gower is still defining Lancaster through opposition rather than essential unity. Indeed the opposition has become only more central, emphatic, even elemental. It has been filed down to the irreducible basis of opposition in symbolic writing: alphabetical characters” (23). An opposition that is typical, one might add, of the self-conscious verbality of Gower’s Latin throughout VC. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 22.1.]

Date
2002

Gower Subjects
Cronica Tripertita
Confessio Amantis