Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales (review)

In the aftermath of the 1960s student uprisings, when critical theorists of various allegiances were fast becoming the dominant faction in departments of English, the study of medieval literature seemed less disposed to radical revision. Though a number of leading medievalists such as Charles Muscatine (1972: esp. 1–35) acknowledged the challenges set by the younger generation, they did so as sympathizers rather than agents of change. Lee Patterson is among the first scholars to have taken the bastion from the inside by insisting not only on the relevance of critical theory to the Middle Ages but also on the relevance of the Middle Ages to critical theory. For if the modern was early on defined as the negation, transcendence, or even loss of the medieval, then postmodern accounts of modernity cannot afford to neglect the medieval Other when scrutinizing the modern Self; the boundary between the two, argues Patterson, is less clear-cut than we are accustomed to believe (1990).¹

All the same, Patterson is as much a critic of critical theory as he is an adherent. The pièce de résistance of his new collection of essays on Chaucer, and perhaps the most interesting piece to non-specialists, is a veritable crusade against the use of Freud and Lacan in studies of medieval literature (chapter 4). Drawing on a formidable array of sources and running up 167 footnotes, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch” accuses psychoanalysis of being a circular, unsubstantiated, and outdated hermeneutics that “gives an impression of immense explanatory power while concealing empirical emptiness” (75). According to Patterson, “Lacanianism’s popularity” among critical theorists “derives not from its truth value, which remains not just undemonstrated but indemonstrable, but because it fits with other modes of ‘anti-humanist’ — indeed irrationalist — thought that are taken to be progressive and even liberatory” (78). The second part of his critique tackles psychoanalytically inspired readings of the Pardoner’s Tale and offers an alternative to the inevitable “Freudian move” that “invoke[s] the Oedip[us]” complex and the “Lacanian/Derridean move” that “invoke[s] the absence of the signified” (92). His alternative promises to be attuned both to the historical and textual specificity of Chaucer’s work and to the human concerns it raises.

Patterson advertises his reinterpretation of the Pardoner’s Tale as a “palinode” meant to expose the “allure” of psychoanalysis, to which he himself once “succumbed” (79) in studies like Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991). To the best of my knowledge, since “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch” was first read at a symposium, to be published five years later in the July 2001 issue of Speculum, no medievalist has followed suit by recanting his or her psychoanalytic affiliations; nor has there been any serious attempt to refute Patterson’s claims. Instead, this scholar has been charged with the usual combination of nostalgia and naive positivism, a charge he anticipates in “Chaucer’s Pardoner” (71–72) and dismisses again in the introduction to Temporal Circumstances (16–18).

There is, however, another objection to Patterson’s critique that he does not adequately face: its lack of novelty. As Cynthia Marshall, quoting Žižek, has pointed out, “[d]eclaring psychoanalysis ‘finally dead and buried’ is ‘one of the seasonal rituals of our intellectual life’”; and “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch” is simply the “latest salvo of this battle” (2002: 1207). To answer why Patterson has not succeeded in reforming Medieval Studies, one has to ask why he employed psychoanalysis in the first place when the arguments he was to mount against it had long been available. His answer, that we “start our intellectual lives under the spell” as “psychological individuals . . . shaped by the structures of thought and feeling that derive directly from the work of Freud and his disciples” (2006: 68), both expects the reader to break the “spell” and excuses himself for having done so tardily. One suspects that Patterson had a stake in choosing psychoanalysis despite its lack of...