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  • The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics
  • Thomas J. Farrell
Amanda Holton. The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. x, 168. £55; $99.95.

Amanda Holton does not intend to explore (as her title might suggest) where Chaucer got his ideas about what poetry is and what it might do; rather, she compares the employment of a substantial list of specific narratological, rhetorical, and poetic techniques in a selection of Chaucerian narratives and their source texts, asking whether Chaucer follows the poetic techniques of those sources or reformulates them according to his own predilections (1). Those narratives—several legends of good women, some tragedies from The Monk’s Tale, and the Tales of the Knight, Man of Law, Physician, and Manciple—are chosen because, being neither literal translations (like the Melibee) nor of mixed or uncertain derivation (The Franklin’s Tale), they give the clearest evidence about the direction of Chaucer’s changes.

Since analysis, not argument, structures Holton’s inquiries, striking conclusions mingle with more familiar ones, definitive tendencies with what might be random practice. Thus a complete summary is hardly possible, and her central findings may be appropriately presented in a list: [End Page 345]

  • • Chaucer consistently tells the same story as his source, varying from its plot only to exclude events deemed “inessential” (15–18) or to realign it chronologically (21–22).

  • • Descriptions of setting and character are kept or increased (27–28), and usually moved toward the beginning, regardless of their position in the source (25). This is further evidence of Chaucer’s interest in clarity.

  • • As he narrates, Chaucer frequently pauses to judge the action, generalize from it, and (especially) provide metafictional commentary (33). Such commentary frequently conflicts with plot details, creating narrative friction for the reader, as in The Physician’s Tale (38).

  • • Regardless of its deployment in the source, character speech occupies one-sixth to one-third of the Chaucerian narrative, which concentrates it in long speeches by major characters (49). In these passages, too, judgments are passed and narratological friction is generated, as in the “misplaced investment in a single god or power” (60) of Theseus’s “First Mover” speech.

  • • Chaucer, more than his sources, shapes character speech into complaint about fortune: Virgil and Ovid give Dido and Philomena passionate, angry words that react meaningfully to their plights, but Chaucer’s female characters more often bemoan (indeed perform) a lack of agency (50–52).

  • • Self-referential comments on narrative structure, quite pervasive, are ipso facto unlikely to be strategies for characterizing specific pilgrim-narrator characters (75–76).

    One important function of occultatio is to preserve (if only in a shortened form) the action narrated by respected sources like Ovid; other sources are cut silently (79–80).

  • • Chaucer uses the inexpressibility topos far more often in translating relatively uninteresting source texts—Holton cites Trevet—than highly articulate ones—Ovid. Insufficiency is located in the material Chaucer has to work with, not his own language (83–84).

  • • The predominant function of rhetorical figures is to generate emotion, especially “negative” emotions like reproach and distress (89).

  • • Chaucer uses metaphor and simile rather sparingly, in highly conventional forms (119). His similes are short and typically clustered in the text, making a single point in a variety of ways (123–30).

In her conclusion, Holton (appropriately abandoning the search for a single, consistent response) discusses seriatim Chaucer’s varied responses [End Page 346] to his source authors, tracing the different ways in which he finds each of them congenial (or not), and the different stimuli he is likely to follow (or not) in each (143–50).

My list highlights both strengths and weaknesses in Holton’s analysis. If her structuralism seems somewhat dated, it nevertheless generates information we are not likely to discover through any other form of inquiry: poststructuralist narratology ignores the questions she wants to ask, questions that arise out of the nature of medieval texts in which, however intertextual the milieu, some antecedent texts are inescapably more significant than others. The breadth of Holton’s analysis finesses the problems inherent in what Paul Strohm called “the straight-line transmission presumed by traditional source study” (SAC 17 [1995]: 26). She generates...

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