Chaucer’s Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse by Rosemarie P. McGerr (review)

REVIEWS ROSEMARIE P. McGERR. Chaucer's Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Pp. x, 210. $49.95. Few ofus these days are likely to quarrel with the proposition that Chau­ cer's poems offer challenges to interpretation rather than pat conclu­ sions. Rosemarie McGerr's contribution to reading Chaucer's openness is her steady insistence on placing the poems in dialogue with medieval (rather than modern or postmodern) discourses on the issue of closure. This strategy has the advantage of including many medieval voices, in­ teresting in themselves, in the discussion of Chaucer's poetics. There are, of course, many ways to evade closure and many kinds of closure to evade. The introductory chapter canvasses a good many of them and concludes that, although strong closure was always advised in the rhetorical treatises, medieval writers found various playful ways to keep their texts open. Although it is probably true that rhetorical theory places more stress on closure than poets deliver in practice, much of the quoted argument for closure could be interpreted as a broader call for self-consciousness about rhetorical or artistic effects. Once established as the rhetoricians' desideratum, "closure" in Chaucer's Open Books is used to suggest the assertion of unmodified truths, which is probably not the experienced sense ofthe endings ofmany, perhaps most, medieval texts. The blurred distinction between poetic closure for "greatest impact on the audience" (p. 24) and the closure of great human dilemmas (like God's view of human love) ends up claiming openness of one sort or another for most of the valued texts of the era. It would take a more detailed argument than that presented here, for example, to show that Roland is deliberately unclosed because it ends with Charlemagne's la­ ment when Gabriel commands his return to the battlefield. None the less, McGerr's discussions of so many evasions of closure in French and English texts nicely undermines a still-prevalent popular assumption that a formidable hegemony banished playfulness from medieval writing. In historicizing the issue of closure, McGerr places Book ofthe Duchess in the tradition ofthe dernande d'amour as well as that ofthe dream vision and Home ofFame in the circular structure of the rondeau. The two po­ ems exhibit different kinds and degrees of openness: for if the goal and conclusion of the Duchess is the "moment of recognition and sympathy" (p. 54) between the dreamer and the Black Knight, there is certainly a 371 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER stronger evocation of that in "hyt ys routhe," the ending of the hunt, and the waking from the dream than in the ellipses ending the House of Fame. Parliament ofFowles is discussed in terms of the sung ballades of Machaut, the effect of polyphony producing something like Bakhtin's effect of the dialogic, the inconclusive debate seen as a deliberate state­ ment about life and a deliberate refusal of parliamentary adjudication. If the particular insight offered by the Parliament is that "human beings live in a state of incompleteness," then the poem's inconclusive ending has in fact made that point quite nicely. As Sartre said, not deciding is itself a decision. In discussing Troilus and Criseyde, McGerr uses Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova to evoke the double vantage point from which the reader watches the unfolding narrative-that of Providence (since the end is known) and that of the lovers. Her lucid commentary on the passages in which the characters and narrator specify (or mystify) terms like mene, ende, and entencione demonstrates how insistently the poem has interro­ gated the meaning(s) of human love, and ultimately of meaning itself. The "piling on" of devices of closure cannot successfully "end" the poem by reframing its pagan setting in Christian theology. The Legend ofGood Women similarly encourages readers to interpret for themselves by prom­ ising closed and exemplary legends in the Prologue and then providing the variety ofdifferently situated stories the collection actually contains. McGerr sees the Retraction at the end of The Canterbury Tales as both alluding to and interrogating Augustine's Retractianes. This tactic his­ toricizes the controversy over the Retraction, illuminating its...