Chapter 13:

Summary

Pointing the Way: The focus with Chaucer is to show the importance of symbolism in writing and the focus on using weather for more than its real aspects.

Your Theme in a Word: Some of the lessons pulled from Chaucer by Clark:

• Time can be a cycle or a line.
• Human characters are revealed by their surface but also, later, what lies beneath.
• Individual stories can be embedded in a larger frame.
• Small stories and places can stand for bigger ones.
• Broad, deep themes can be often expressed in a short phrase or even a single word.

Weather as Character and Metaphor: Clark, whose dissertation is on Chaucer, explains three narrative patterns for the use of weather:

• Weather can be used in harmony with character.
• Writers can use existing climates to provide contrast with the narrative.
• Weather can be used thematically.

Writing Lessons

1. Most sentences you are going to write are going to be loose, or right-branching, with the subject and verb of the main clause occurring early on. But there are special opportunities to take readers on a journey of understanding, as Chaucer does in his first sentence. A periodic sentence-think of it as a destination sentence- allows you to build and build to a verb or main clause near the end, which can be used to surprise or reward the reader for following you on your journey.
2. Anytime you write a story or report, especially if you are stuck, try this strategy:think of what your work is about- what is is really about. Write down your theme. You can be as discursive as you want in a first draft, but as you proceed, exercise more discipline. Try writing your theme statement in five words or three or one. Chaucer might have written "rebirth". Dickens might have needed a few more.
3. When constructing a list, a catalog, or an inventory of revealing items, avoid the random. Look for an order:time , space , dimension, theme. In the beginnings of both The Canterbury Tales and Bleak House there is a logical order, a progression of elements that sets the thematic tone for an entire work.
4. Any long narrative will involve characters existing in a climate and moving through weather. In one sense it just pins down the effects of setting: the broiling sun of South Beach; the reliable rains of Seattle; the frigid grip of Ottawa in March. But the author has to make choices about which actions occur and in what kinds of weather. A certain random purposefulness may offer writers the most choices and create the most realistic effects.

Critique

Clark in this section offers a critique of formalist ideas. James Williams' article "Grammar and Writing" reinforces this rebuke of traditional writing practice, stating that direct instruction in grammar does not make better writers, but it is a more authentic engagement with grammar through reading that helps (125).