Review Jacques Marc Pacific Coast Ship China. Royal BC Museum Corporation, Victoria, BC, Canada, 2009. Photographs, bibliography, index. 192 pages. $$75.00 cloth.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition John M. Ganim Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition. By Geoffrey W. Gust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. xiv + 286. $95. The argument of this book is that we have given up on the notion of the literary persona just at the moment when we need it the most in Chaucer studies. Most of us think of the persona as an artifact of modernist and humanist criticism, masking but speaking as if for the real authorial subject. Gust, in contrast, seeks to “queer” the persona, and in fact argues that the concept of the persona is already “queer,” destabilizing the possibility of a centered, essential identity. The persona, he argues, has been ignored or underemployed as a clarifying concept in criticism from the fifteenth through the twenty-first century, and long stretches of the book take up this progress, or lack of it, concerning a series of critical conundrums in Chaucer scholarship: the pilgrim narrator, the biography of the poet, Chaucer’s direct voice in the short poems and the Retraction, the pairing of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, and the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of Melibee ostensibly told by the “popet” figure who seems to be Chaucer himself. This is a book that begins with its weakest chapter and gets somewhat stronger as it proceeds. Gust argues that “the crux for virtually any understanding of Chaucer’s poetry is to be located in his self-conscious use and manipulation of diverse narrative personae” (p. 2). Chaucer’s paradoxical combination of confidence and humility results in the difficulty readers have had achieving consensus about the meaning of Chaucer’s works. While study of the persona has fallen out of fashion in the twenty-first century, he notes, it had a considerable theoretical justification in the Middle Ages. Gust’s first chapter, “Persona and Personalities: Medieval Lineage, Modern Legacy,” sets the agenda for the rest of the book, attempting to analyze the history of Chaucer’s reception with a critical intervention into contemporary discourse. As with those following chapters, however, one has the uneasy feeling that the author is attempting to reopen questions that have been more or less [End Page 134] answered. By seeking to negotiate between an older humanist concept of the persona, which implied a centered subject deploying many voices, and a postmodern conception of a subject which is always already performed, Gust ends up with an argument that is compromised by his own nomenclature. Trying to accommodate both a long view of literary history, in which all that is new has been preshadowed, and an engagement with current theory sometimes results in a parody of recent approaches as “old wine in new bottles” (p. 37), a metaphor that by its very mustiness undoes his efforts. This entire first chapter seems out-of-place in a series such as Palgrave’s The New Middle Ages, more resembling the volumes published by Peter Lang. In his effort to clear a space in a well-worn field, he points out the shortcomings of major scholars, holds up contemporary theory and literary tradition against each other, and methodically seeks to resurrect an overlooked key to all understanding. The result is that the first chapter feels more like a labored dissertation paper presented for defense. This is all the more disappointing since Gust is the author of a refreshing article in Chaucer Review on Donaldson and the persona, but something seems to have rendered that directness impossible in an extended argument. Fortunately, the next two chapters somewhat redeem this opening chapter. Chapter 2, “Getting a Life: Biographical Constructions of Chaucer the Man,” critiques the monumental and idolatrous traditions of Chaucerian biography, which disregard documentary evidence, or the lack of it, in an effort to portray a Chaucer compatible with the ideals of various periods. For Gust, with its skeptical minimalism, Derek Pearsall’s biography is one of the few that holds water. While most of us would agree that for scholarly purposes, Pearsall’s biography is excellent, there is something to be said for the quasi-imaginative constructions of Donald R. Howard...