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  • Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-Poet, and the Cloud-Author: Seeing from the Centre by Linda Tarte Holley
  • Eleanor Johnson
Linda Tarte Holley. Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-Poet, and the Cloud-Author: Seeing from the Centre. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Pp 184. $80.00.

This book undertakes the difficult task of using cutting-edge contemporary theory—about hermeneutics, subjective versus objective knowledge, positionality, and spatialization—to show that medieval English literary works are invested not only in teaching their readers what they are meant to see and understand by reading, but also how they are meant to see and understand. This is not to say that Linda Tarte Holley ignores medieval theories on hermeneutics, space, objectivity, or positionality—to the contrary, she addresses theories on these matters in Aristotle, Augustine, Duns Scotus, John of Salisbury, and Bradwardine and shows how their theories inform select writings of Chaucer, the Pearl-poet, and the Cloud-author. The vast and interconnected network of ancient, medieval, and contemporary works and theories allows Holley to argue for the importance in medieval literature of establishing “procedures for knowing” (xiv) for an audience, procedures that hinge upon the establishment (or, in some cases, the conspicuous eradication) of a place to stand—a perspectival center—for the work.

This insistence on the importance of stasis, of standing in a fixed position, as an interpretive construct has the potential to be very useful for scholars. Critical approaches usually privilege dynamism and flux as the necessary ingredients of any act of interpretation: (new) formalism, new historicism, psychoanalytic theory, genre theory, and narratology all quietly rely on literature’s capacity to shift suddenly beneath a reader’s feet. Holley’s critical practice and the literary quarry it addresses instead emphasize the importance of stepping—even if only briefly—beyond the chaotic realms of history, place, and change and into the much quieter realm of space.

Holley deploys two interpretive axes to pursue this project. The first [End Page 407] separates reason from imagination, and the second separates analogy (the rational) from metaphor (the imaginary). The precise contours of these two overlapping axes are articulated slightly less clearly than they could be, particularly in relation to the larger issues of place, space, and time that animate the book. But, in essence, Holley suggests that medieval authors’ rejections or at least problematizings of “place” concomitantly critique the possibility of knowing something purely by reason, analogy, or measure and validate the metaphorical imagination as a means of making ideas knowable to a reader.

The first three chapters address Chaucer’s poetry and depict him as recurrently interested in thinking through, sometimes reaffirming, and sometimes disassembling the relationship between reason and imagination in the pursuit of positional knowledge. In Chapter 1, Holley argues that place (measure and mappability) productively dovetails with space (imagination and metaphor) in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: “[w]ith the simple device of metaphor—using the gauge of the upstart fox to measure the political space of Jack Straw’s contingent—Chaucer’s narrative draws us into a cultural space of the moment by claiming the book itself as a plaza, the common public ground where everyday possibilities are foregrounded” (47). The second chapter goes further in its treatment of place, measure, and knowability by offering what Holley calls “a view from nowhere” (57), which is the realm of dream-space and dream-time, as rendered in The House of Fame. The third chapter suggests that The Book of the Duchess “demonstrates Chaucer’s reservations about allegory as a way of knowing” (71). It does so in two steps: first the poem suggests that the job of the dream-poet is not to help readers understand the internal affective states of an other by analogy. Second, with the inadequacy of analogy established, the poem suggests that dream-poetry, at its best, should create a feeling of presence with that other’s sorrow.

The fourth chapter turns away from Chaucer to examine Pearl, a poem obsessively concerned with emplacement and with what happens when a person no longer has a place on which to stand and from which to gain perspective. Ultimately, the poem...

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