Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility ed. by James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility ed. by James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp Daniel Reeve James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp. Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. 264. $75.00. The authors of this intriguing book regard medieval romance as a "deeply philosophical" (3) kind of writing whose speculative force lies in its exploration of possible worlds and its resistance to conceptualization. In order to explain the continuing "immediacy" (ix) of romance for its readers today, the authors draw upon Kantian aesthetics, since, in such a system, aesthetic judgments are universal, not historically contingent (22–23). Accordingly, the book devotes much space to arguing that the texts it discusses are beautiful in the Kantian sense. This commitment to arguing for the transhistorical appeal of romance surfaces in several other aspects of the book's structure. The core readings of medieval romances are supplemented at various points with discussions of postmedieval analogues and adaptations. This practice is justified using a theory of bidirectional intertextuality derived from Leibniz's concept of apperception. Texts contain a multiplicity of [End Page 488] detail, and our knowledge of other texts determines which details are perceived as important; the simple presence of intertexts thus exerts a force on our interpretation (12–14). The sections in which later adaptations are discussed generally follow this gentle logic of juxtaposition, rather than insisting on rigid connections. The Leibnizian notion of "folded time" is another key component of the book's methodology. Time is not a "smooth historical progression" but contains "mysterious deep connections" along different axes (9). On the face of it, this would seem to be queer temporality stripped of any non-normative politics, and while the similarity with Carolyn Dinshaw's work is briefly noted (9), the absence of any detailed comparison of these two theoretical frameworks is regrettable. Each of the book's six chapters focuses on case studies that "have echoed across culture with particular vitality and which reflect internally on romance itself" (6). Chapter 1, on the Lais of Marie de France, takes an initial cue from the Prologue's famous metapoetic reflection on the interpretation of difficult texts: Marie's term surplus de sen is used to describe an excess "within the text itself, an excess of tiny detail always available to new perception" (31). In a reading of Eliduc alongside John Fowles's The Ebony Tower, the concept of possible worlds allows for a deft account of the consequences of changing the lai's name (as Marie's narrator suggests) from Eliduc to Guildeluëc and Guilliadun: "the tale suddenly becomes two tales … both told at the same time, through the same events … obscuring untroubled perception of either" (36). The reading of Lanval draws upon the Leibnizian idea of compossibility (the capacity of objects to exist together in a given world without logical contradiction) to show how the lai uses Lanval's love for a fairy from another world to express the irreconcilability of love and feudal obligation. The chapter's final reading, of Yonec, makes a distinction between two types of possible world, metaphysical and epistemic, in order to explore what might be at stake in the imaginative work of fiction for the construction of possible futures. Chapter 2, on Sir Orfeo, takes the Middle English poem as a point in the intertextual web of the Orpheus legend, between ancient and more recent versions: Virgil's Georgics, Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground beneath Her Feet. The poem's intertextual affiliations are taken as analogous to a narrative scheme in which "the past is not restored, but strangely folded into Orfeo's present" (54). The reading thus teases out the poem's awareness of its own legendary past [End Page 489] and narrative future, reflecting on the ways in which traveling through time and between worlds demarcates the essential and contingent aspects of personal identity. Chapter 3 discusses Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, arguing that the poem oscillates between a "realistic mode" and a "tendency towards allegory" (85). This refusal of either schematic allegory or simplistic realism allows Troilus and...