Chaucer's Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse (review)

300 Short Notices Pierre Bayle, Aphra Behn and seventeenth-century Massachusetts and reveals a wide variety of paths to toleration, growing from either end of the spectrum between religious scepticism and dogmatism. This work should generate further individual studies on toleration themes and stimulate wider discussion about the myths and stereotypes that have tended to conceal the richness and complexity of this major theme in Western history. John Tonkin School ofHumanities The University of Western Australia McGerr, Rosemarie P., Chaucer's Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1998; board; pp. x, 210; R.R.P. US$49.95. This is a stimulating study of Chaucer's major fiction that seeks to demonstrate that Chaucer, like other medieval writers, is much more 'resistant to closure' than has generally been suspected. Rosemarie McGerr begins by looking at concepts of openness, distinguishing that which inheres in language as a system of signs from the more radical 'falsification of expectations' found especially in postmodernist fiction. Traditionally, medieval texts have been described as closed, in part, she suggests, because of an inadequate understanding of medieval poetics. McGerr provides substantial evidence that theoretical treatments of literary closure in the Middle Ages involve a m u c h more complex understanding of the nature of resolution than might have been assumed; she also provides abundant evidence that the practice of medieval authors involved significant playing with, and even subversion of, closural techniques. The bulk of the book deals with Chaucerian fiction, discussing, chapter by chapter, all his narrative poems with the exception of Anelida and Arcite. As will be apparent, McGerr's basic thesis is that Chaucer, in all his work—whether conventionally 'finished' or not—exploits a variety of conventional closing techniques not just to complicate the resolution of his poem, but somehow to cast doubt on the possibility of resolution. 301 The material in these chapters is always lively and engaging, and refreshingly free of the clotted prose of so m a n y theorists. A n d m u c h of i t is persuasive, too. Inevitably, of course, some points of disagreement emerge. I think there needs to be a fuller discussion of the distinction to be drawn between openness and incompletion. McGerr is aware of the difficulties created by the fact that half of Chaucer's narratives are apparently unfinished. Her argument leads her to conclude that they should be treated as examples of open form, but I would have liked to see that argument include some analysis of what the manuscripts suggest about textual completion and textual stability. Similarly, w e need to maintain a distinction between artistic imperfection and resistance to closure. Aquinas suggests that artist create beauty through imitation of the perfect creation; Dante has Aquinas modify this by acknowledging that such imitation is necessarily imperfect. But there is no evidence to support McGerr's reading (on p. 15) that this indicates an understanding of incompletion that operates as deliberate resistance to formal completion. Finally, as an aside, it is rather curious to find the concept of authorial intention—so severely debunked when it was invoked to justify a single interpretation—being rehabilitated to prove multiplicity of meaning. The rehabilitation is Eco's rather than McGerr's, and she is aware of the irony, but seems happy to accept the possibility of invoking authorial intention. In sum, Chaucer's Open Books presents a persuasive argument that Chaucer regularly forestalls any easy conclusion in his narrative p o e m s — regularly enough, indeed, for it to be an intentional feature of his art. Tha much, of course, is hardly new, but McGerr's location of this within a consideration of concepts and techniques of closure does focus attention on the deliberate subjectivity of Chaucer's fiction. In addition to inviting some reconsideration of Chaucer's work, McGerr's thesis inevitably invites a similar consideration of Chaucer's contemporaries. Peter Whiteford Department of English Language and Literature Victoria University of Wellington ...