Proverbs and the Wisdom of Literature: The Proverbs of Alfred and Chaucer's Tale of Melibee

Textual Practice, Volume 24, Issue 3, pages 407 - 434.

By Christopher Cannon

 In an essay in which he explored the nature of the proverb, Kenneth Burke wondered why it would not be possible to 'extend such analysis … to encompass the whole field of literature'. For Burke, the possibility for such extension stemmed from a similarity in 'strategy', and the proposition that even 'the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art' shares the proverb's capacity to intervene in 'situations'. This comparison seems, at first, to rest on a fairly conventional definition of the proverb as ethical 'equipment' (a kind of pragmatic tool 'for living'), but, as Burke's analysis unfolds, it slowly absorbs to the proverb much of the affect that we usually associate with literature (by 'naming … a situation', Burke says, the proverb acts as a kind of 'medicine', helping us to 'adopt an attitude' towards it). For Derrida, who sees an equally strong analogy between what he calls the 'aphorism' and literature, the comparison presses in the opposite direction. As he describes the resemblance between Romeo and Juliet and a series of disconnected and repeatedly cited sentences, as the well-known and highly valued play is in his eyes 'aphoristic' insofar as it is also endlessly repeated and thus shorn of its originary circumstances, literature seems to have absorbed many of the qualities we usually attribute to the aphorism. In this account, a work is literature not only because of certain inherent qualities but because it has 'already happened, in essence before it happens' - because the very esteem that makes us class it as 'literature' also ensures that we will repeatedly perform (or read) it. In this definition of the 'literary', in other words, whatever it is about the work that makes us value it in the first place is not dimmed by familiarity but, rather, 'survive[s] thanks to it'.

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