The Art of the Gawain-Poet by W. A. Davenport

Abstract

REVIEWS Old French fabliaux, from essentially a generic point of view.One of the things we may learn from it is the difficulty of finding a single critical approach that will illuminate both a popular genre like the fabliaux and the transformations of that genre in the hands of a sophisticated artist. A few matters remain.Among the several misprints, the reading of "wel" for "wol" in a line from Chaucer on p.193 is especially unfor­ tunate, as is the misnumbered and marred passage from The Miller's Tale on p.180. There is a bibliography of works consulted and a thorough index.It is good to see footnotes rather than endnotes.Where passages of the French fabliaux are cited, Professor Cooke supplies appropriately idiomatic translations.He obviously enjoys the fabliaux and wants us to enjoy them, which is as it should be. GLENDING OLSON Cleveland State University W.A.DAVENPORT, The Art of the Gawain-Poet. London: The Athlone Press, 1978.Pp.xiii, 233.$18. It has become the custom of American scholarly reviewers to use their assignments as a means of composing their own articles, or of flailing their subject's work in order to establish their own reputations by demon­ strating keenness of vision ("Notable is the inexplicable misspelling of 'the' on p.26"), learned patronization ("What a pity the author did not see fit to include Prof.Hofstaur's 1904 article"), and mastery of the cheap shot ("Graduates of land-grant universities tend to think that ... "). Indeed the scholarly review has come to have a standard form: an open­ ing paragraph beginning "How wonderful that at last an examination of ...has been attempted"; a second paragraph beginning "What a pity then that ... "; an indeterminate number of paragraphs beginning with variants of "If that were not bad enough ... "; and a final paragraph beginning "It remains then.... " It is thus a pleasure to fly in the face of tradition in order to recom­ mend a volume of literary criticism with well-nigh whole-hearted en­ thusiasm, my only caveat being that the reader ignore the author's ill­ conceived critical method outlined in his introduction, militantly fol­ lowed through page 38 (halfway through the Pearl chapter), and then, 155 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER thank God, abandoned completely.For aside from this unfortunate be­ ginning, University of London Senior Lecturer W.A.Davenport's vol­ ume is the sanest, most perceptive, and best-written book-length study we have yet had on the Gawain-poet. The Introduction states that the author intends "to write about Pear l, Purity, Patience and Sir Gawain in terms of their effectiveness as poetry" and hence "to try to define the effects they have on the reader and the way the reader responds to them," a strategy which could possibly (given a certain type of reader) give high marks to "Casey at the Bat" and none at all to "Burnt Norton" (a forgiveable cheap shot).The first part of the Pearl chapter abounds in statements beginning "Only now does the poet encourage one to judge his words ...," "The reader responds to the sorrowful courage ...," "One's sense of unease, however...." and the like.Davenport is thus led into some notable confusions concerning the nature of late Middle-English literature, e. g. , "No medieval visionary wishing to communicate profound and rare religious experience would have chosen to be cryptic about it" and an apparent identification of debat and debate.This section also contains some really fearful analogies, e. g. , "the Dreamer is one in a long line from Odysseus to Henderson the Rain-King" and the statement that the Pearl child and her world "belong to the world of a romantic tale ..., the same world that contains the milk-white doe of Rylstone and the Woman in White. " But this is to pick minor flaws, gleaned from 38 pages out of 220, from a bad beginning to a fine book.After p.39 Davenport appears in his true colors; he is essentially a formalist, a New Critic who sees the poems as entities, and finally as a single entity, but a New Critic mercifully free from the jargon and posturing of the...