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

Abstract

Probably every medievalist harbours an ultimate ambition to represent the “medieval” in some way so appealing that the contemporary world as a whole will come to realize the full richness and importance of that great culture. Umberto Eco did just that, I believe, with his Name of the Rose, although the film version of the same work merely trivialized medieval culture in order to make it accessible to what its promoters no doubt hoped would be mass audiences; the sparkling intellectual world of the fourteenth-century Gugliemo da Baskerville became a caricature of our own age. In scholarship the poles between which we navigate are established on the one hand by historical analysis that discovers both the ways in which the Middle Ages as the originative period of our culture anticipates the intellectual and artistic preoccupations of the present and the ways in which contemporary concerns are wholly new, and on the other hand, by theoretical analysis that seeks to show how the art of the Middle Ages conforms to contemporary principles of literary analysis. The danger of the former approach is that it may harden into a formalism impermeable to the considerable insights of contemporary theory; the latter approach, however, risks putting all texts through the same sausage-grinder, so that Chaucer, for instance, comes out tasting quite like Kundera, Calvino, and Beckett. Robert M. Jordan’s latest book, Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader, is the most recent and one of the more substantial attempts at making Chaucer relevant to the modern audience, and, even if a bit too much mus­ tard disguises Chaucer’s distinct flavour here, Jordan’s study succeeds in opening up the corpus of Chaucer’s work to some valuable insights. Whereas in his earlier, very influential study, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation, Jordan has argued the aesthetics of “inorganic form” from historically con­ textualized materials of the Middle Ages and earlier, in this new work he relies much more heavily on modern and contemporary thinkers concerned with the theory of the relation between language and reality in order to de­ velop his thesis that Chaucer is fundamentally a “homo rhetoricus,” and not a “homo seriosus,” an opposition taken from Richard Lanham’s Motives of Eloquence (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976). Thus the insights of Todorov and Saussure here attempt to replace those of St. Augustine in illuminating the works of England’s greatest medieval poet. After a brief review of the influence of Le Cours de Linguistique Gen­ erate, Jordan goes on to discuss The House of Fame and each of Chaucer’s dream visions before concluding with two chapters on The Canterbury Tales. Armed with the terminology of Todorov, Gerard Genette (Narrative Dis­ course: An Essay in Method, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980), and others, Jordan Robert M. Jordan, C h a u c e r ’s P o e t i c s a n d th e M o d e r n R e a d e r (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 187. $29.95 (U.S.) cloth. 1 1 7 reads Chaucer as a proto-Postmodern, no longer the heir to Dante and Boethius, but now precursor to Barth and Nabokov, due to the predominant interest and use of rhetoric in his poetry. Alongside this insistent contempo­ raneity, however, is a peculiar tendency throughout the book to roll out the arsenal of modern theoretical weaponry against theories and their authors long since departed. Thus among Jordan’s chief targets are John Matthews Manly, who published over sixty years ago, and George Lyman Kittredge, active in a slightly mistier past, leading the reader to wonder whether the argument does not involve a certain tilting at windmills. Jordan’s discussion of the dream visions is certainly the strongest part of the book and the reading of The House of Fame is particularly suc­ cessful. Analyzing the poem as “a sequence of independent, self-defining structures, variously sized and shaped and more or less loosely linked to­ gether” (37), and analyzing the rhetorical method of the poem as consisting in free-floating blocks of writing, Jordan really helps the reader to come to terms with this attractive but...