Theory and the Premodern Text (review)

Paul Strohm's book exemplifies just what his title suggests, the and poised serenely between text and the manifold sense of theory he garners in these fascinating literary and historical analyses. As J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English at the University of Oxford, his explorations continue in the best traditions of medieval studies, into new literary directions, with an insistent sense of historicity, and by drawing on, and drawing the reader – if willing – into textual ramifications one might not have thought were there.

His starting-point is that the textual condition is 'more normally one of non-transparency, of inherent and obdurate recalcitrance …'. Why? 'The unperturbed text will, in respects made evident by contemporary theory, remain partially unanalysed … in possession of possibilities and experiences that it cannot or will not articulate.' Therefore, a necessary task of theory is 'to provoke a text into unpremeditated articulation, into the utterance of what it somehow contains or knows but neither intends nor is able to say' (pp. xii-xiii). Strohm positions this as engaged or practical theory, 'voluntarily "impure" … [and] uninsistent about its own status as a total explanatory system' (p. xi). Boldly, he says that 'theory is any standpoint from which we might challenge a text's self-understanding' (italics original) and that, 'Properly respected, the text itself becomes a center of resistance to inappropriate theory or to theory inappropriately applied.' He is 'most attracted to those theories which allow the impossibility of the text's exhaustion, the mystery or inexpressibility of its most private center' (pp. xiv-xv).

All this is from the barely six-page Introduction; thirteen complex case studies follow. The first section on 'Space, Symbolization, and Social Practice' takes up, firstly, London itineraries in Chaucer, Usk and Hoccleve and works with the 'presignifications' of medieval urban space. A reading of the first anti-Lollard burning of 1401 uses speech-act philosophy and the notion of illocutionary or performative utterance, still relevant for 'hate speech' today. In 'Coronation as Legible Practice', the social rituals and timing of aspects of the coronation of Richard II are analysed alongside the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu; Bourdieu's understanding of behaviour as regulated improvisation lies behind all these discussions.

Part II considers Chaucerian texts and textual moments. Perkyn in the Cook's Tale is not only a petty revelour but located within metanarrative associated with the Rising of 1381, 'with a heavy emphasis on closure' (p. 62). 'Fictions of Time and Origin' shows how narrative lapses into the nonsychronous temporalities of the General Prologue, both the 'slow time' of knight, parson and plowman (and later Troilus) and the 'fast time' of the friar amongst others (p 66-7). The lazars, with whom Friar Huberd has no aqueyntaunce, generate an unfixed time of myth in the story of mendicant origins (Franciscan, then Beguine) as Nietszche's 'utopian surplus' (pp. 77-9). 'Chaucer's Troilus as Temporal Archive' uses the idea of a textual unconscious, alongside interesting considerations of an 'Impressionist' Cézanne and a 'Renaissance' Chaucer.

In all of this Strohm argues for a conscious antidisciplinarity, because 'the processes of disciplinary analysis are likely to … leave a "remainder"… Antidisciplinarity enlists and deploys new procedures – or at any rate procedures introduced from outside a customary disciplinary range – in order to probe this remainder, to render visible aspects of a text or a situation that would otherwise remain unseen' (pp. 33-4). Moreover, to engage in provisional neglect of 'the literary' results in 'a more generous assignment of creativity across a larger range of written productions … always found to exist in intimate dialogue with the external/extratextual world' (p. xv).

Part III on 'Reading the Historical Text' considers a range of variant contemporary accounts around, firstly, the death of Richard II, then the murder of the Genoese merchant-cum-ambassador Janus Imperial in London in 1379 (a brilliant bit of sleuthing), and then 'Shakespeare's Oldcastle: Another Ill-Framed Knight.' In the way they generate 'rents...