Penguins on Parade: Early Fiction in England!
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Some Penguin Classics need to work harder than others to define their terms. Take, for example, the nifty recent volume edited by Laura Ashe, Early Fiction in England from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer – even the title of the book might prompt a quizzical expression from the average 
reader, who might just naturally associate “early fiction in England” with Richardson and Fielding, hundreds of years later than Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chaucer. The so-called renaissance of the 12th century is all well and good, but can a volume titled Early Fiction in England actually manage to find any fiction?
Professor Ashe seems well aware of the tangle of ideas here preceding the emergence of a revitalized European literature in the 12th century, and she notices the shortage of one key element:
The earliest English writers had access to all the learning of the known world; churchmen travelled freely from north Africa and the Middle East to the monasteries of Yorkshire and Kent, bringing books and knowledge with them. English writers translated scripture, philosophy and theology; they wrote practical handbooks of medicine, astrology, weather prediction and recipes; they composed language and grammar guides for those learning to read and translate; they wrote saints’ lives and vivid accounts of the deaths of martyrs; they produced the unique vernacular poetry about loss, and love, and despair; they composed epic narratives of heroic warriors and their monstrous enemies. But despite all this, they did not write fiction.
After reading such a summary, the natural response might be to say those early English writers – and readers – weren’t actually doing without fiction but rather creating and enjoying it in forms somewhat different from the forms writers and readers use today. Surely the stories of Scripture, the elaborate teleologies of philosophy and theology, and most especially the entirely spurious wonders (physical and psychological) of all those saints’ lives were doing the work of Smollett, Burney, et al and just not getting the credit?
But again, we come back to defining our terms, and Professor Ashe has a veritable web of a definition for fiction – one that seems tailor-constructed specifically to disqualify every last scrap of martyrology:
‘Fiction’ is not a synonym for ‘literature’, as it is often used today. It is a label used to imply a contract between author and reader, a contract whose terms are known without being explicitly stated. The terms are these: that both author and reader know, and are aware that the other knows (and knows that they know), that this narrative is not an account of events which can be known to have happened.
This seems a bit dodgy to me, just a trifle too convenient. I know it’s customary nowadays to set no upper limit on the credulity of pre-Enlightenment common folk, but nobody in AD 986, reading all those juicy stories about executed martyrs walking around carrying their severed heads in the crooks of their elbows, or stories about fish in the river singing the praises of the local slain bishop, or sacred children causing flowers to grow in winter … nobody reading those stories ever looked up and said, “Honey, this story reminds me of that time last week when I heard that trout talking about Bishop Athanasius.” I look at Professor Ashe’s distinctions – that fiction is a story I know is made up, and you know it’s made up, and you know I know it’s made up – and I wonder how many smart, educated people more or less just like herself she’s consigning to the
turnip truck in order to widen the ambit of a Penguin anthology.
But the anthology itself, regardless, is superb! In between the thick garlic-bread loaves of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of King Arthur and Chaucer’s account of embattled Troy, we get a wide range of delights: Wace’s Brut is here, and Sir Orfeo, and Marie de France, and the great, now-forgotten Walter Map. Professor Ashe herself provides a translation of Amis e Amilun that’s one of the highlights of the whole book. And as with so many Penguin anthologies, so too with this one: it’s a delight to think of all the college and high school students out there who’ll be encountering all these great old writers in such a fresh and energetic presentation. And the fact that the good professor’s fancy-dancing about what fiction is and is not can only spark debates is just a much-appreciated bonus.
