The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature by Eric Jager

Abstract

REVIEWS organizational solutions when one's topic entails many hundreds of stories. Still, I think that The Fabliau in English will tend (in spite of its own awareness and arguments to the contrary) to reinforce a very traditional and limited view of its subject: first came the Old French fabliaux, then Dame Sirith, then Chaucer, and then some other not very important stuff. This book might have done more to challenge or at least qualify that view, particularly with respect to the influence of Chaucer's fabliaux in the fif­ teenth century. GLENDING OLSON Cleveland State University ERIC }AGER. The Tempter's Voice: Language and the Falt in Medieval Litera­ ture. Ithaca, N.Y, and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv, 332. $42.50. EricJager's topic is the cultural centrality ofthe Fall myth and what it has to say about language. He subscribes to Derrida's view, that "the sign is always a sign of the Fall," and produces a study of "how biblical commen­ tators, moralists and poets used the Fall to address practical and theoretical problems of language relating to literature, knowledge, power, society and eros" (p. 1). The project is welcome and entails a return by medievalists interested in poststructuralist theory to areas ofpatristic exegesis that were long the reserve of Robertsonians. Jager establishes the importance of his topic and does much to explore it. He writes succinctly and often lucidly. Yet his work is uneven and at times unsatisfactory in its handling of history. Jager's book divides into two halves. The first halfdeals with Augustine and patristic exegesis and the second with medieval vernacular texts (mainly English, from Anglo-Saxon to Chaucer, but with discussion of French and Italian texts as well). Both show a capacity to read texts closely, but I find in the first a surefootedness and subtlety that breaks down progressively in the second. In the first half Jager offers a careful and sustained reading of some patristic writing on the Fall. This is expounded in three chapters, "The School ofParadise," which presents the Fall as a paradigm for true and false teaching; "The Genesis ofHermeneutics," arguing that the Fall causes the 217 STIJDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER slippage and multiplication of signs that obscure the open book of divine Word with the figleaves, orfolia, of human language; and "The Garden of Eloquence," which presents the Fall as "the archetypal seduction through language." While Jager has useful things to say about Ambrose and the fifth-century bishop Avitus of Vienne, whose Poematum de spiritualis histo­ riae gestis becomes more relevant in the second half of Jager's book as a precursor of Genesis B, the focus is steadily on Augustine, and especially on the Confessions. Jager's reading is discriminating. He demonstrates that for Augustine signs antedate the Fall but change their function after it, so that textual interpretation becomes virtually synonymous with original sin, and the agricultural tropes used to describe reading and writing are close to being literal Qager is equally perceptive in his third chapter about the textile tropes used to describe rhetoric). His interest in gender leads to some good work on the masculine reader and the feminine text, and the text of The Song of Songs itself as "woman" (p. 87). The reading of Au­ gustine builds up to real excellence, as one in whose life "textual ambiva­ lence and feminine ambivalence mirror each other" (p. 88). To Jager's credit, the central difference between Augustinian and modem semiotics is emphasized: written text paradoxically allows Augustine to discover a self, not to decenter it. Nevertheless, the first part of the book has some worrying features. While it is impossible to overestimate the importance ofAugustine, he is not the whole story about patristic exegesis, still less about its transmission to the later Middle Ages; there is a major historical hiatus here. (An even more serious hiatus occurs in the book's misconceived epilogue, where Jager makes no real effort to trace the life of the Fall myth beyond the Middle Ages.) Moreover, an account focused on Augustinian semiotics and sensitive to modern criticism (Ricoeur, Derrida, Vance, Nichols, and, inev­ itably, Peter Brown) cannot afford to...