Beyond Canterbury: Chaucer, Humanism, and Literature by Raymond P. Tripp, Jr. (review)

REVIEWS universe on both the frame-tale level and within the tales themselves, narrated in the third person. The interplay between the two narrative levels becomes his dialectical critique of the courtly ideal. In The Canter­ bury Tales he has "thematicized" and "problematized" this conceptual universe (p. 256). The author does not put these terms in quotes. Schaefer concludes her discussion of The Canterbury Tales by applying an unexceptionable reading of the artistic ambivalence of The Knight's Tale to her main thesis. A good example of the level of abstraction at which she can operate is found on pp. 362-63. There Peter Elbow's 1972 Chaucer Review article is quoted: "The contrast between the knight and his squire is like that between Theseus and the two young cousins." But Schaefer wants this comparison to read differently: the Knight is to be compared to Palamon and Arcite, and the Squire to Theseus. Why? "For the Knight and Palamon and Arcite, war and love are depicted as senseless self-service, while the Squire and Theseus are two variants on the same theme." This is simply not true for the Knight in the General Prologue, and it misses completely the likeness in tone between Theseus and the Knight as narrator. Similarly, in the preceding chapter she underplays the sense of forward development and enlargement in Troilus, preferring instead to emphasize Adrienne Lockhart's notion of semantic degeneration, since it better fits her thesis about the insufficiency of the courtly·universe. The text of the book, in photo-offset typescript, is relatively free of errors. Two typos, both in English, occur on pp. 318n and 392; in the table of contents, under section I.3.2, "Ausbildung" should read "Abschliessung"; p. 306, the "3. Prosa des III. Buchs" (of Boethius) should read "6. Prosa"; on pp. 321 and 393, change the incorrect paging of Roy Pearcy's 1973 Chaucer Review article on the Franklin to "33-59." HOWELL CHICKERING Amherst College RAYMOND P. TRIPP, JR. Beyond Canterbury: Chaucer, Humanism, and Literature. Church Stretton, Shropshire: Onny Press, Ltd., 1977. Pp. 239. $7. That this book is "not a regular academic study of Chaucer and poetry," as its author warns, becomes apparent when one calculates that 211 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER two-thirds of it does not discuss any of Chaucer's verses, while the part that does, deals only with The Book ofthe Duchess and The Knight's Tale. It must be as our author approvingly quotes Thoreau: "If you are ac­ quainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications." The principle depends upon a position, one that is outside, or above, or beyond: meta-critical. Within, we are but illustrations of a late and rather debased phase in the history of consciousness, and most of us are Humanists. Except for Tripp. He stands by himself, proposing, he says, "Some Really New Views on Chaucer." He will not tell us how he has been delivered from Humanism, when the rest of us have not, but here is his book if we wish to dissociate ourselves from "personality" and "attain a new literalness." By stepping outside (extra-Humanism), we can attain certainty of description, rather than "asymptotic approximations." The book is written for non-Humanists, whoever and wherever they are, but Tripp imagines "a curious humanist looking over my shoulder" (p. 2). Humanism "may be described as an emotionally inflated, man­ centered, phenomenally oriented relativism" (p. 60). The term is closer to Heidegger's critique of Western thought than, say, to Petrarch, Erasmus, or Colet, but from as remote a perspective as Tripp attains, they-and we-swim in the same current of increasing self­ consciousness and aestheticism. Tripp's book is divided into six sections and an Epilogue, called chapters, with many separately titled sub-sections; each paragraph is numbered. The allusion to rational philosophy rather than impressionis­ tic criticism is deliberate: the meta-humanist must not compete with, or depend upon, "literature," for "its function . . . is not to extend literature by means of the mirror-image admiration called criticism, but rather to terminate literary history." The "termination" comes from the transcending intelligence, which "will...