Chaucer and Ovid by John M. Fyler (review)

REVIEWS JOHN M. FYLER, Chaucer and Ovid. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. Pp. x, 206. $14.50. John Fyler's intelligent and well-written study heralds, I believe, the onset ofa new aetas Ovidiana in Chaucer studies that will clarify Chaucer's idiosyncratic use of the poetic tradition available to him, as well as his particular debt and response to the poetry of Ovid. Chaucer and Ovid should also remind us that, helpful as joint projects to develop new Chaucerian research tools may be, the key to elucidating Chaucer re­ mains the rigorous exercise ofa single critical intelligence seeking a new understanding of the poet's texts and contexts. Fyler's book fills a notable gap. Although Chaucer's kinship with Ovid has been a commonplace since Dryden remarked it in the Preface to his Fables (1700), we have only begun to formulate the relationship in terms that go beyond Dryden's sometimes astute, sometimes mistaken generalizations. Essays on "Chaucer and the Classics," or for that matter "Ovid and His Medieval Influence," have not proven acceptable substi­ tutes for a thoughtful critical comparison ofthe two poets, because their scope has been too broad to allow for analysis in depth, and they have tended to substitute source-or allusion-hunting-for true critical in­ quiry. In fact, with a few exceptions such as E. K. Rand, the authors of such studies have not usually understood the poetic strategies of either Chaucer or Ovid. Now, however, we have begun to comprehend and appreciate both poets as chronic manipulators of poetic language and forms, and as self-conscious artists whose works abound with metaphoric and ironic models exemplifying the power and limits of art when faced with the complexities ofnature and society. This is the basis on which the current generation of scholar-critics can attempt meaningful comparisons of Chaucer and Ovid. Interestingly enough, Fyler has been anticipated by at least two American authors who are primarily neither Chaucer nor Ovid specialists, but rather Renaissance comparatists. Robert Durling, in The Figure of the Poet in the Renaissance Epic (1965), and Richard Lanham, in The Motives ofEloquence (1976), each include discussions of Ovid and Chaucer as prefatory to their tracing a theme through Renais­ sance texts. In each case the grounds for comparison are similar to those listed at the beginning of this paragraph, and though an extensive confrontation ofthe two poets is not relevant to the chosen task ofeither 159 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Durling or Lanham, the inference can easily be drawn from their chapters that Chaucer and Ovid are basically the same type of poet, and that the later poet's art was much influenced by that of the earlier. Fyler has clearly profited from studying Durling and Lanham, but his exclusive preoccupation with Chaucer and Ovid results in a study the structure, perspective, and depth of which are very much his own. Eschewing an encyclopedic consideration of Chaucer's Ovidianism, Fyler sets himself three tasks: ( 1) an opening chapter to expose his understanding of Ovid's genius and to isolate the facets of it that most appealed to Chaucer; ( 2) three chapters devoted to analyzing four Chau­ cerian dream visions, "to show how a broad Ovidian perspective serves to unify the meaning of Chaucer's earlier poetry, with its skeptical explora­ tion of the sources of human knowledge and the extent of man's limita­ tions" (p. 124); and (3) two final chapters, " ...to suggest, in a highly selective fashion, that an Ovidian perspective can also help us to under­ stand Chaucer's greatest works ...though the clear indebtedness of the dream visions is replaced by a more subtle Ovidian suffusion" (ibid.). Fyler's starting point is the adversary relationship between Ovid and Virgil-a relationship reproduced, mutatis mutandis, by that of Chaucer and Dante. Ovid attacks the "classical" viewpoint for which Virgil stands, which means that his poetry subverts both literary decorum and puritanical self-restraint.Where the Aeneid preaches-or at least hopes for-the triumph of personal and social order over the darker impulses that lead to furor and war, the Metamorphoses record the triumph of ceaseless change in life, to the...