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A modern take on the Canterbury Tales
Posted by Dr. Margaret Zeegers on 2009/12/12
I have only TWO weeks to go before I leave the United States, and I have to say that it has been a marvelous experience. One trip that I took was a road trip to North Carolina, to Charlotte. Driving through some of the most spectacular country I have seen, especially through the Shenandoah Valley, a number of sites just stuck in my mind. To top this off, I just happened to be in a diner where a Southern writer, Sharyn McCrumb, popped in for something to eat just before she gave her author’s talk that night, where I was also scheduled to be in the audience. That was the first coincidence. The second was that she was talking about her book, ‘St Dale’ set in the very country that we had just been driving through. The third was that a friend bought me a copy of that book, signed by the author. The fourth is that this book is based on Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’, and on my last trip to England I made a point of retracing the pilgrimage myself as part of my research for something that I was working on for publication (watch this space…my book is coming out soon).
Now, this book of McCrumb’s is based on the most fascinating proposition that modern pilgrims will undertake such things on the basis of modern saints, the celebrities that for some reason add meaning to their lives. Why, she asks, do some people beatify, if not sanctify, some celebrities and not others? Why Elvis Presley and not John Lennon, for example? Why Princess Diana? Pilgrims on the St Dale trek have elevated a Nascar driver, Dale Earnhardt, killed in a Nascar race, to the pantheon of their own modern saints, without any benefit of clergy to make such a decision for them, in much the same way, she argues, as ordinary people did with Thomas a’Beckett so many hundreds of years ago.
It is a fascinating concept, and I read the book intrigued by it. I had never even heard of Nascar racing before I went to Charlotte, and I really don’t know much more about it since I read the book, but I’d be interested to know if other folk have read it, and what they think of it. I still can’t cope with the idea of celebrities or the public devotion to them Perhaps it's an American thing? Would like to know what you think.
Now, this book of McCrumb’s is based on the most fascinating proposition that modern pilgrims will undertake such things on the basis of modern saints, the celebrities that for some reason add meaning to their lives. Why, she asks, do some people beatify, if not sanctify, some celebrities and not others? Why Elvis Presley and not John Lennon, for example? Why Princess Diana? Pilgrims on the St Dale trek have elevated a Nascar driver, Dale Earnhardt, killed in a Nascar race, to the pantheon of their own modern saints, without any benefit of clergy to make such a decision for them, in much the same way, she argues, as ordinary people did with Thomas a’Beckett so many hundreds of years ago.
It is a fascinating concept, and I read the book intrigued by it. I had never even heard of Nascar racing before I went to Charlotte, and I really don’t know much more about it since I read the book, but I’d be interested to know if other folk have read it, and what they think of it. I still can’t cope with the idea of celebrities or the public devotion to them Perhaps it's an American thing? Would like to know what you think.
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While in the United States, folk have ccde been most generous in responding to my requests for recommended reading in American literature. I have been reading some terrific books, especially Faulkner, whom I had not encountered before, and some more generalist books as well. One that somebody has loaned me is ‘Adventures of a Verbivore’, by Richard Lederer (1994 Pocket Books, New York), an American linguist who is apparently quite well known here. Something that I encountered regarding lipograms in this book might interest folk. Lipograms are passages that deliberately omit one or more letters of the alphabet. Here is what he has to say: ‘The most extensive lipogram in English is the 1939 novel ‘Gadsby’ by Ernest Vincent Wright, which contains fifty thousand words—and bicsi training not a single letter ‘e’. In lipogram service, however, no writer in English has ever equaled [sic] the achievement of the Spanish writer Carlos Ibañez, who in each of his twenty-eight novels banished a single and different letter of the Spanish alphabet’
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