Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader by Robert M. Jordan

Abstract

R E V IE W S Robert M. Jordan, Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). viii, 182. $25.00 (u.s.) If Chaucer had written an account of his literary procedure, something along the lines of James’s “The Art of Fiction,” what might it have been like? In an attempt to answer that question, Jordan bases his account of his subject on an analysis, as opposed to an interpretation, of Chaucer’s text. Not surprisingly, given his procedure, he reveals a rhetorical Chaucer, a self-conscious practi­ tioner of the arts of language, whose virtuosity is inseparable from his profound and resonant doubt about the ability of his all-too-subtle medium to express truth. Jordan contrasts Chaucer’s style to the realism of Dickens and James, who artfully conceal their art to insinuate a seamless continuity between the text and a world beyond it; while Chaucer’s art, in calling attention to itself, pro­ claims a gratuitousness inseparable from its freedom. As in his earlier book, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Inorganic Structure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), Jordan em­ phasizes the differences between the organic form sought by romantic and postromantic critics, notably the New Critics, and the “quantitative,” aggre­ gate quality of Chaucer’s text. The latter is less like a natural form than like a veil or garment. Such a garment may moreover consist of a multiplicity of parts, each of which in turn may be adorned with a multiplicity of ornaments. Jordan proposes that Saussurean linguistics, the literary theory based on it, and postmodern metafiction have enabled contemporary readers to under­ stand and appreciate Chaucer’s nominalist skepticism, his consequent rhetori­ cal practices, and the reflexivity of his text. Four of Jordan’s six chapters describe the dream visions — the House of Fame, the Book of the Duchess, the Parlement of Foules, and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women — which resist and frustrate realist critics in their collages of subjects, styles, genres, and points of view. Meaning, Jordan insists, inheres in the intricate, E nglish Studies in C anada, xiv, 4, December 1988 dense, and varied surface of Chaucer’s acentric text, not in some extratextual unity buried beneath that surface or hovering transcendentally above it. Jordan looks at Chaucer’s career, like his poems, paratactically and synchro­ nously rather than as an organic development that progresses through and from its early outgrown stages to culminate in maturity. Thus he sees the dream visions as continuous in important ways with the Canterbury Tales. The poet who emerges from this study is the author of neither fictional narrative nor drama. Jordan’s analyses of the General Prologue, the Pardoner’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and the Manciple’s Tale, like his analyses of the dream visions, demonstrate the extent to which stories and storytelling are threaded among other kinds of discourse, whose delimitations of narrative direct atten­ tion to the arbitrary and created quality of the text. As for drama, Jordan suggests, fascinatingly and convincingly, that the voices of the Canterbury pilgrims, rather than being differentiated in ways that contribute to a sense of the characters’ individuality, are remarkably similar to one another and to the presentational voices in the dream visions and the General Prologue. All share a tendency to digress; to juxtapose varying subjects, attitudes, and styles; and to launch into lists that can extend towards the encyclopedic. Jordan demonstrates, for example, similarities in style between the exempla in the Pardoner’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale; similarities between the shifts in both tales from the narrative style of the exemplum to the oratorical sonority that follows it; and, finally, similarities between the oratorical voices in both tales. The book closes with consideration of three successive endings: the Man­ ciple’s Tale, the final fiction; the Parson’s Tale, which concludes the Canter­ bury Tales; and the Retraction, with which Chaucer ends his career. Jordan reads the Manciple’s Tale as an example of the Chaucerian attributes he has described elsewhere. It is a text that draws attention to itself rather than...