Fragments: Past and Present in Chaucer and Gower (review)

In Fragments: Past and Present in Chaucer and Gower, Malte Urban identifies a three-part subject: Chaucer's and Gower's "uses of the past within their texts, their different conceptualisations of history and its use-value for the present, and the ways in which we can read these from the vantage point of our (post)modern present" (p. 12). He examines Chaucer's Hous of Fame, Parlement of Foules, Troilus and Criseyde, and the tales of "Melibee" and the Physician; and Gower's Visio in some detail and select passages throughout the Vox Clamantis, the Troy-related material in the Confessio Amantis, Book VII generally, and the "Tale of Virginia" in particular. This is a lot of ground to cover in under 250 pages, and requires selectivity, a clear plan, and the discipline to maintain focus. Urban goes on to assert as his purpose showing "the different ways in which Chaucer and Gower filter and refract key themes of Richard [II]'s reign" (p. 30). Not surprisingly, his method is comparative, and (refreshingly) non-"historicist," at least not in the sense recently promulgated by Paul Strohm. Rather, Urban's foremost concern is to identify Gower's theory of history, and Chaucer's, relying on a broad range of thinkers to do so, including St. Augustine, Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard (and Julian Barnes!), as well as heavily (but never slavishly) on Strohm and Lee Patterson.

Again—a list of intellectual progenitors both lengthy and weighty, another turn of focus, apparently, a short space farther on: Urban's study is a mixture of undigested dissertation and ambitious self-assertion—and yet he pulls it off. Not, to be sure, always as smoothly as one might wish (he seldom employs a short word when a suitable polysyllabic can be found), but nonetheless the result is more cohesive and clear than one might have guessed, and more often persuasive than provocative—especially the seventh chapter, "Tales of Virginia," which Urban calls "a case study for their appropriating of the past within the Ricardian present" (p. 222). Here he is at his most successful in clarifying the distinction he draws between Chaucer and Gower when, he argues, they ask "how old and authoritative texts can be put to use within the temporal confines of the present" (p. 174). "Chaucer is . . . constantly bringing the writings of the past . . . forward into his present," Urban claims (p. 223), employing, in contrast to Gower, a "discursive ambiguity [that] is at the very core of [his] poetics and politics" (p. 224). Gower seems to Urban stylistically and philosophically more straightforward, in particular when he approaches political history: "despite the fragmentation and division ripe in his own time, Gower is at pains to formulate clear and unambiguous statements in his poetry . . . he acknowledges the cultural division and fragmented knowledge while still attempting to interpret the past within the present in ways that are coherent within specific moments albeit not within his historical present as a whole" (pp. 223-24).

What is freshest and most intriguing about Fragments: Past and Present is how Urban's nascent portrait of Gower suggestively recalls Eliot's "Wasteland" ("these fragments I have shored against my ruins") and the failing civilization both poets, centuries apart, seem to fear and strike against. Chaucer, as Urban presents him, comes through as relatively unthreatened because his sensibility is fluid, less morally moored. While this distinction is definitive for Urban, nonetheless he argues that, in the end, both Chaucer and Gower have made their mark on who we are: "our (post)modern culture depends on a fragmentation, flattening and reconstruction of the past that echoes or is prefigured in Chaucer's and Gower's poetry" (p. 224). Mutatis mutandis, one must say in agreement—a position Eliot would defend as well.