Chaucer Reads "The Divine Comedy" (review)

THE COMPARATIST Other chapters, on "RomanticPoetryandthe Institutionalizing ofValue," and on "Evaluation as Justification and Performance: The Leech Gatherer as Testing Ground," in the "Value in History" section; on "Theories of Romanticism : From a Theory of Genre to the Genre of Theory," on "The History in Opera: La clemenza di Tito, Khovanshchina, Moses andAwn," and on "The Literature in History: Danton's Death in the Texts of Revolutions," in the "Genre in History" section; and on the new historicism, in the "Institutions" section, are equally rich in historical insights and information. The book ends with an epilogue in the form of an interview, where Lindenberger ironizes to himself, expressing his views, for example, on the new historicism as both a valuable corrective to earlier trends, and "the only viable career move the past ten years," demonstrating that "canon change is as normal in criticism as in literature." Finally, he predicts that the issue for the 1990's will be style, but "style in a much broader sense, the styles ofparticular cultures, of the institutions that frame and regulate the culture, ... a stylistics that reeks of history as we've come to view history over the past ten years." Sounds good. I hope he is right. Wendy B. Faris The University of Texas at Arlington KARLA TAYLOR. Chaucer Reads The Divine Comedy.'' Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989. 289 pp. One of the current growth industries in comparative literary studies is Chaucer's relation to Dante, the past decade having seen the appearance of two books and several dozen shorter studies. Karla Taylor's intelligent and well-written book, a revision of her 1983 dissertation, is a worthy addition to this corpus. That the final effect makes one wonder if the enterprise as currently defined is perhaps misconceived can hardly be attributed to her energetic advocacy. Despite its global title, Taylor's study deals onlywith the House ofFame (chapter one), and Troilus and Criseyde (the remaining four). In both cases she focuses primarily on "authentication." The House ofFame is read, somewhat predictably, as "a broad questioning of the authenticity of any human version of the world of history," and specifically of the Commedia, which by contrast "carries traditional truth-claims to a unique extreme." The reading of the Troilus is more original, arguing that throughout the poem Chaucer "uses the Commedia against itself." The argument runs roughly as follows: while Dante insists that his writing protects itself against erotic misuse, Chaucer acknowledges that poetry may well be a galeotto; while Dante issues austere judgments, Chaucer's narrative "precludes both transcendence and damnation"; while Dante invests great effort in establishing both the credibility of his narrator and the legitimacy of his theological allegory, the Chaucerian narrator is misled by desire and deploys a radically unstable proverbial style; and finally, while the Commedia concludes in the inexpressibility of paradisal vision, the Troilus "shows the ideal of transcendent experience reported in language to be attainable only inauthentically—that is, as a figment ofreified 141 REVIEWS desire." The conclusion? "Chaucer is, pace Auerbach, more strictly the secular poet." No one would really argue with this conclusion, and certainly not Auerbach . But Taylor's real point is that Chaucer's characteristic ways of writing were developed specifically in reaction to Dante, that the Commedia is the crucial if unacknowledged subtext of Chaucer's greatest poem. Such an argument can of course only be as persuasive as the specific allusions, and unfortunately this reader must report himself to be almost entirely unpersuaded . There are really four problems here, I think. One is simply that the language and narrative structure of the Troilus are only rarely close enough to Dante to invite confident comparison. Consequently, Taylor relies on rather generalized thematic parallels. Hence, for instance, her crucial argument that the Paolo and Francesca episode is central to the eroticizing of the Chaucerian text must invoke a questionable Chaucerian "bookishness" as the agency ofanalogy to make up for the fact that Chaucer's characters do not fall in love over a book, and must further argue that they experience a Dantean "spontaneous combustion" of erotic possession although Chaucer stresses throughout their ruminative self-reflections and at times frank calculations of self-interest...