Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal by Jameson S. Workman (review)

In this wide-ranging and sophisticated book, Jameson S. Workman places Chaucer’s poetry within a long tradition of poetic and philosophical discourse that, he argues, offers new insight into the ways in which we can read much of the Canterbury Tales. Drawing on several literary and intellectual traditions—including medieval epistemology and philosophy, metapoetics, classical mythology, and Neoplatonic aesthetics— Workman seeks to cast a revisionist light on the Canterbury Tales, by seeking alternatives to historicist approaches to Chaucer. Writing from a standpoint that apparently draws little distinction among standardized historical periods, Workman discusses Chaucer by situating his most famous work within broader philosophical and mythological currents, bringing together classical, medieval, and contemporary sources in unique, if potentially controversial, ways. Though unconventional, this methodology—which posits a kernel of self-sameness to poetry, one that defies change over time—raises compelling questions about the ways that we read poetic works from vast historical removes, a problem familiar to scholars of the Canterbury Tales and to medievalists more generally.

Workman focuses especially on the issue of language, or rather, on the mythological Fall of language, and its consequences for the comprehension of poetic texts written during the Middle Ages. To that end, Workman gravitates toward the poetic portions of the Canterbury Tales, and in particular toward tales that directly engage issues of language and communication before and after the biblical Fall. The book contains four chapters, which collectively dwell on the place of poetry within philosophical discussions of language, art, and history.

The first chapter, “Poetry’s Old War,” invites speculation as to the functions of poetry across time. In a discussion of historicism and its limitations, Workman emphasizes that “every mode of reading brings us a new Chaucer” (8) and advocates for a mode of literary criticism that takes into account poetry’s mission to overcome language itself and to transform itself into a semiotic theory of knowledge. The Homeric myth of Tithonus’s transformation into a cicada organizes the chapter’s consideration of this poetic ambition, one that tellingly transitions to a reflection on failure, both poetic and divine. Here and elsewhere, Workman strives to develop a post-noetic understanding of poetry (noetics being a branch of metaphysical philosophy engaged in a study of mind and intellect), one that seems to minimize categorization and definition. In pursuing this aim, Workman relies on certain assumptions that not all readers might share, particularly the supposed existence of a true, certain, and consistent “mission” for poetry that transcends time and cultural setting. Notwithstanding objections to this premise, this imaginative chapter—which draws compelling connections between classical mythological figures and the practice of poetry—makes a fine introduction to the book as a whole.

The second chapter turns its attention to The Miller’s Tale, treating it as a rich, complex study in poetic failure. Examining how the poetic balance encapsulated in the figure of the old man Tithonus is inherited by the Christian tradition, Workman argues that The Miller’s Tale approaches the myth of the Flood in a way that allows readers to discern “the philosophical cracks in the makeup of Chaucer’s poems and small fissures where ideas seep through” (43). Of particular note are Workman’s engagements with the work of the French dramatist and essayist Antonin Artaud, whose controversial, prophetic ideas on metaphysics and creation significantly inform Workman’s hypotheses about why The Miller’s Tale is built around the idea of the Flood at all. In an analysis that is part mythographic and part epistemological, Workman emphasizes how Chaucer’s characters (or, as he calls them, “interlocutors”) navigate myth and symbol in their interactions with one another. Ultimately, Workman’s reading of these plot dynamics invites readers to consider the possibility that The Miller’s Tale was built to fail, and perhaps even built to symbolize failure.

Chapter 3, “The Runaway Gods of the Manciple’s Tale,” explores the mythological drive behind this poem’s characterization...