Addiction Literature's Past and Present.
- Author/Editor
- Ronan, Mark.
- Title
- Addiction Literature's Past and Present.
- Published
- Ronan, Mark. Addiction Literature's Past and Present. Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
- Review
- Ronan's book is remarkable in several ways, not least because it begins by explaining his interest in "addiction literature" as having grown from his own decade-long experience as a drug addict, now recovered. Following a substantial introduction, "Premodern Addiction and Addiction," the book has six chapters: 2, "Modern Addiction Discourse," 3, "Modern Addiction Literature," 4, "Premodern Discursive and Didactic Texts," 5, "Addicted to Love in Premodern Literature," 6, "Anthropomorphised Beasts and Bestial Men." In chapter 4 (133-84), Ronan traces the idea of addiction as considered by Plato, Aristotle, Prudentius, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas. In chapter 5 (185-244)--following an unexpected opening referencing Robert Palmer, the Chambers Brothers, and Smokey Robinson--he takes up love (quoting Jacalyn Duffin) as "burning desire, lust, and rest-of-your-life, self-obliterating adoration" (186), the kind of love, in other words, found in Ovid's "Remedia Amoris" (Ronan compares Ovid's advice to "modern addiction recovery discourses" [191]), Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (a "diseased" Troilus presents "the common narrative traits of modern Addiction Literature: initial hubris, a progressive and chronic loss of agency, ignored negatives, and the need for intervention" [195]), and Gower's Confessio Amantis," where "the frame narrative . . . represents one of the most significant, sustained and wide-ranging examples of Middle English poetic engagements with the issues of impaired personal behavioural agency" (210). Ronan thus pays particular attention to the frame, something that he asserts "Macauly" [sic, throughout] got wrong (215-17), because it is in the frame that readers encounter Amans, whose "addiction to love" justifies the process of the poem. Ronan concurs with C. S. Lewis that the CA "tells the story of the death of love" (215) and this for Ronan amounts to a glad--if complicated--ending, since "love" in Amans' terms amounts to addiction, its death in Ronan's parlance recovery and "renovation" (217). Yet what Amans relinquishes at the poem's conclusion is only a kind of love, not love itself, which has many positive aspects: love of family, of community, of God. Thus, "love in the 'Confessio' is never depicted in a wholly negative light, but it is depicted as possessing a capacity for being misused. The behaviour of Amans is not in need of intervention and correction because he is a lover, but because he loves futilely and out of measure of reason" (221). For Ronan, recovery narrative unlocks the secret of the CA's structure, which seen from this viewpoint, he asserts, is fully coherent. Even the many tales told by Genius, some of them seemingly conflicting, fit, because Genius recognizes the need to be "slyh / To hem which hath the need on honed" (8.2064-65), that is, to distract while the cure settles in. (In this Genius channels Ovid's advice in the "Remedia" [236-40]). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2024
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis