Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala (review)

Abstract

1?6ARTHURIANA Elizabeth scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, andLiterary Structure in Late Medieval Enghnd. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. xix, 284. isbn: 0-312-24043-0. «59-95Poststructuralist literary and cultural theory and their vocabularies appear more and more frequently in medieval studies. Elizabeth Scala's book on the 'absent narratives' in late Middle English texts is an attempt to bring these frameworks and reading strategies to medieval texts. Her approach is informed both by poststructuralist (especially psychoanalytic) literary theory and manuscript studies, a productive mixture; but in the final analysis the book is tilted towards the theoretical pole. Scala's starting point, developed convincingly in her Preface and Introduction, is the analogy she finds between the structure of late medieval literary texts as determined by the stories that they do not, cannot, or will not tell (the title's 'absent narratives'), and the culture of manuscript textuality that produced them (where manuscripts relyon exemplars and authority depends on previous texts, the Origins') (xvii). The three spaces where she locates her examinations are thus textual history, the history ofcritical/editorial reception, and the text itselfas a literary work ofart. She uses a basically psychoanalytic framework and vocabulary in the interpretations; gender, representation, and narratological considerations are also important foci. Treating the 'absent narratives' (untold stories which are nevertheless signalled as lacking) as 'repressed,' Scala's theoretical metaphor is that narratives are like subjects, in an explicitly Lacanian sense, whose unconscious operations affect their meaning (what they 'say') and their structure (what they 'do') (12). The discussion of this analogy leads into a series of case studies, interpretations of Chaucer's Book ofthe Duchess, 'Squire'sTale' and 'KnightsTale,' Sir Gawain andthe Green Knight, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Malory's Morte Darthur. Scala's interpretations are sensitive and fresh, integrating but also taking issue with a variety ofrecent theoretically minded approaches, such as Stephen Nichols's work about manuscript textuality and the 'manuscript matrix.' Her reading of Sir Gawain in terms of the discourse that substitutes the story acted for the (lacking) story told, the rational world for the uncontrollable, repressed and marginalized magical world figured by Morgan Ie Fay, stepping into the gap at the end, certainly throws new light on a number ofdetails. So is the approach to the 'Squire's Tale' as both figuring and sidestepping the telling of the incest story of Canacee, or the interpretation of the 'Knight's Tale' as romancing (and controlling) the Amazons and the feminine. But whenever Scala reaches more specific theoretical questions, so promisingly treated in the Introduction in the context ofmanuscript textuality, a specific 'medieval discourse,' and in terms of representation, the theoretically minded reader is frustrated. All we ever get at such points is that the text's concern is with the slippages and non-transparence of language, or with 'problems of representation'; a deeper analysis ofwhat exactly the texts tell us about this 'medieval discourse,' or how they redefine frameworks of representation is never given. Likewise, expectations as to the theorizing of manuscript textuality in detail as a place where such shifting signifying practices operate, and as to the particulars of REVIEWSIO7 these practices, are not fulfilled either. The theory of the absent narratives, as the repressed material ofthe textual unconscious that return and resignify in repetitions and substitutions, produces an application ofa set oftheoretical concerns to specific texts and their specific meanings in the case studies; it is not an all-embracing theory ofthe 'medieval discourse,' signification, and meaning production in general in late medieval England. But if poststructuralist thinking has taught us anything, it is that all-embracing theories are always suspect. One ofthe three spaces where the examination is situated, the manuscript context, is also somewhat less emphasized than one would expect from the Introduction. This is a book rather for the theorist and literary scholar than the codicologist. A wonderful exception is the chapter on Gower, where the manuscript's marginal Latin commentary (also its illustrations) is shown as an alternative discourse to the text: instead of limiting its meaning, this alternative discourse further elaborates it and contributes to the author/narrator figure's self-fictionalization. But the last...