Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments of the Canterbury Tales by Jerome Mandel

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ciaos it in part addresses; to the medievalists reading this review, I highly recommend the volume as both stimulating and accessible. KATHLEEN AsHLEY University of Southern Maine JEROME MANDEL. Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments ofthe Canter­ bury Tales. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992. Pp. 257. $39.50. Ever since Chaucer died and left behind him not The Canterbury Tales but "a mass of papers in which the tales he had written formed a series of fragments," as Derek Pearsall puts it in his recent biography (The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992}, p. 233), scholars and critics have tried to discover the poet's intentions about the eventual plan of the collection. Most of these claims are either uncontroversially general or implausibly specific; the currently prevailing approach seems to be rather more commonsensical and pragmatic than speculative, as exem­ plified by Derek Pearsall's eminently helpful account in his The Canterbury Tales (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985). He comes down very firmly on the side of those who find in the individual tales the real achievement of the collection and who refuse to join in the "game offree association," which he dismisses as "the activity not ofthe critically alert mind striving to partici­ pate with Chaucer in his imaginative engagement with his matter, but of the mind idling among its reminiscences ofthe Tales" (p. 50). This may be a somewhat extreme position, and it will certainly not stop readers from discovering for themselves all kinds of links and parallels between various Tales, but it is more trustworthy than more or less inspired guesses about Chaucer's hidden intentions. Jerome Mandel's book must be read in this context, but it is different from most previous hypothetical structures because he makes the much more modest and plausible claim that it is the fragments, not the Tales as a whole, that are unified, i.e., made "coherent in terms of structure, theme, and characters" by Chaucer (p. 17). This is argued with a wealth of detail, persuasive eloquence, and infectious enthusiasm. One virtue of Mandel's book seems to me that one need not necessarily be convinced by evety single observation or perhaps even by his general thesis to find his argu224 REVIEWS ment stimulating and useful. For one thing, it is very reader-friendly: there is ample and fair documentation, dissenting critics are treated without any righteous superiority, and objections are openmindedly admitted. In this spirit scholarly controversy genuinely enriches our understanding of the text, independent of our consent. Each chapter ofMandel's book is devoted to one fragment, and each tries to show that the stories Chaucer chose to link have more in common with each other than they have with any other part of The Canterbury Tales. Starting with minor and sometimes marginal but often striking details, Mandel proceeds to discuss the areas in which he finds the most demon­ strable links: structure, theme, and character. Thus The Clerk's Tale and The Merchant's Tale are linked by their common structure (council, marriage agreement, test, restoration) in a number of surprisingly similar details. More doubtful is perhaps the claim that the themes treated in both tales are significantly related to each other to the exclusion ofothers, and it takes some goodwill in the reader to agree with Mandel that January and Walter "are more like each other than they are like any other characters in the Canterbury Tales" (p. 41). Still, he has a way of holding our attention until we see at least the reasonableness of his point, especially since he is careful to dissociate himselffrom more extreme claims. There are many debatable observations, such as the belief that "Chaucer deliberately set Griselda and May into the same fragment to unify it because they complement each other" (p. 45); it is surprising how many correspondences, parallels and contrasts you can find if you look long and hard enough at Chaucer's words. This may also be the impression ofreaders when they come to chapter 2, where the performances of the Pardoner and the Physician, including the performers themselves, are presented as "unlike the sequence of events in any...