The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will (review)

REVIEWS desire." The conclusion? "Chaucer is, pace Auerbach, more strictly the secular poet." No one would really argue with this conclusion, and certainly not Auerbach . But Taylor's real point is that Chaucer's characteristic ways of writing were developed specifically in reaction to Dante, that the Commedia is the crucial if unacknowledged subtext of Chaucer's greatest poem. Such an argument can of course only be as persuasive as the specific allusions, and unfortunately this reader must report himself to be almost entirely unpersuaded . There are really four problems here, I think. One is simply that the language and narrative structure of the Troilus are only rarely close enough to Dante to invite confident comparison. Consequently, Taylor relies on rather generalized thematic parallels. Hence, for instance, her crucial argument that the Paolo and Francesca episode is central to the eroticizing of the Chaucerian text must invoke a questionable Chaucerian "bookishness" as the agency ofanalogy to make up for the fact that Chaucer's characters do not fall in love over a book, and must further argue that they experience a Dantean "spontaneous combustion" of erotic possession although Chaucer stresses throughout their ruminative self-reflections and at times frank calculations of self-interest. A second problem is that Taylor's book is willing to think about the influence on Chaucer of only a single text, while other likely candidates clamor for attention. Third, Taylor's understanding of Dante is that developed in twentieth-century America by Singleton, Freccero, Hollander, Mazzotta , Barolini, et al. This is a compelling Dante, and Taylor presents him well, but is it Chaucer's? Are the questions Taylor sees at the center of Dante 's text likely to have been raised by a fourteenth-century reader? Also, and finally, Taylor never really explains what she means by authentication, nor, more importantly, what truth requirements a fourteenth-century reader would have applied to these texts. Literaltruth? Naturalistic representation? Spiritual benefit? Here also—as indeed throughout—Taylor's topic needs to be historicized. Taylor is a talented critic and powerful writer. One can hope for her next book that she will focus her shrewd attention on more of the contemporary evidence than she attends to here. Lee Patterson Duke University JOEL FINEMAN. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will. London and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. xix + 234 pp. Fineman's book takes us on a wild, Lacanian ride through the full range ofwestern philosophy and literature from Thucydides through Shakespeare to Derrida. Shakespeare is the fulcrum ofFineman's argument, however, not because of his canonical value, but because he created the slippery, rhetorical language needed to open and preserve space for the "subjectivity effect" in western literature. The circumstances of the book's production are poignant and pertinent to its synoptic contents. As Joel Fineman's last project—he 142 THE COMPARAHST died during its composition in 1989 at the age of 42—the book conveys both the drive to represent the presence of the subject in literature and its absence after death as a final will and testament. This collection of Fineman's articles and lectures is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the emergence of the subjectivity effect in literature from Chaucer to Beckett and the second, with "the release of Shakespeare 's Will" in his poetry and plays. Not surprisingly, Fineman begins his discussion with allegory, the master "trope" ofthe western literary—as opposed to oral—tradition where structure is guaranteed in both the articulation and interpretation of discourse. Allegory, privileged by New Criticism and Structuralism alike, "surfaces when something cannot be said . . . which is why allegory is always a hierarchicizing mode, indicative of timeless order, however subversively intended its contents might be" (8). Fineman notes, however, that allegory, from the Greek root meaning to "speak the other," inevitably implies the unsaid; it craves the trace ofprelinguistic awareness that is represented by the unconscious which exists perpetually, as Derrida remarked, avant la lettre. In subsequent essays Fineman identifies two kinds ofdiscourse, "autologicaL " in which words are about themselves, and "heterologicaL" where words are about something other than themselves. "Where literature depends upon the paradox...