Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II (review)

The first volume of Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, subtitled The First Five "Canterbury Tales," was published in 1984. Applying iconography to narrative in a novel way, it combined immense knowledge with sensitive close reading, using a methodology committed to the idea of a "mental image" central in a text. Directed by Kolve's good sense, his resistance to jargon, and his patient mode of explication working from particular detail toward profound observation, his method yielded eloquently compelling readings.

Chaucerians looked forward to a sequel and were treated to occasional installments, but the second volume has been a long time coming, and accordingly it is not without moments of personal valedictory nostalgia. Perhaps inevitably, it lacks the cohesive drive of its predecessor. In it, Kolve prints five essays separately published before: "From Cleopatra to Alceste" and "Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale and the Iconography of St. Cecilia" (both first published in 1981); "Man in the Middle" (on The Friar's Tale, 1990); "Rocky Shores and Pleasure Gardens" (on The Franklin's Tale, 1991); and "God-Denying Fools: Tristan, Troilus, and the Medieval Religion of Love" (1997). Alongside these are three brand-new studies: one on Troilus, and a double-header on The Merchant's Tale.

It is the work on "Calendars and Cuckoldry" in The Merchant's Tale that most demonstrates the continuing vitality of Kolve's method twenty-eight years on from the period of his first explorations. He scours the iconography of the months of January and May, and of May's zodiacal sign, Gemini. The immediate results are eye-catching: the month's Janus iconography seems to resonate in January's looking-back and looking-forward stances and in his gate-control; like the figure for the month, January also lazes and feasts, relishing his future wife as gourmet consumable. As for Chaucer's May, she and Damian embody the month's sheer celebration of lusty seasonal vigor, often visually located among trees. Kolve also finds Gemini's twinned and sometimes compulsively erotic naked "wrestlers" among (or even in) trees. Maybe the reader will query details of the accumulating interpretative edifice. Doesn't Chaucer's January look back on a lifetime rather than on a year? Can the reader's mind simultaneously reckon with the couple in the tale as "Gemini" figures and as occupants of a quasi-Jesse-tree? (Indeed, isn't the latter on its own a more convincing visual analogue for January's heir- and tree-obsessed imagination?) And should we be suspicious of an argument which invokes Gemini but locks Aquarius, the corresponding zodiacal sign for January, out of the discussion as irrelevant?

Kolve's extraordinary skill in enlarging the scope of inquiry takes us beguilingly beyond such pedantic objection. He leaves us pondering how the calendar allusion promotes realization of a cosmic order in The Merchant's Tale, whereby the unnaturalness of January's marriage is repudiated and seasonal succession is reaffirmed. It is the best case I have read for reading the tale as amorally "affirmative" (p. 166) rather than as being dyspeptically mired in moral darkness. Moreover, each chapter makes this kind of mind-stretching move. Kolve develops capacious readings of Troilus as a complex whole in the two essays which consider, respectively, the image of Troilus-as-eagle (in Criseyde's dream) and the iconography of folly which "denies God." Similarly he develops a whole nuanced statement of Chaucerian "poetics" from his meditation on garden, rocks, and the clerk-magician's production of illusions among books in The Franklin's Tale.

True, there are disadvantages in re-presenting with minimal alteration essays written far apart in the author's career. The Middle English Dictionary is properly cited for semantic evidence in the later essays: but OED evidence is quaintly left to fend for itself in the earliest (on Cleopatra's "pit," p. 270 n. 271). Then that 1981 discussion of pits seems to be forgotten by the...