The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (review)

The word “neighbor” comes with a trail of sweetness. Neighbor bespeaks cordiality and proximity. My neighbor’s house is the one I can see from my window. “Neighbor” carries obligation. My neighbor is she or he to whom I am bound by the mere fact of neighboring. It has nostalgic baggage. If you’re from the old neighborhood, I will find myself tied to you for reasons of family and shared history. But there are dark sides to neighboring. If good fences make good neighbors, their moderating work also bespeaks the fractiousness of neighbor relations. Love thy neighbor as thyself, a Levitican injunction foundational to Judeo-Christian ethics, is scripted as law to organize community in the face of the hostility endemic to neighbor relations. It is this set of crossovers between fraught impulses of identification and misrecognition, love and violence, that has made the neighbor a rich topic for psychoanalytic theories of identity. The neighbor, according to Freud, is the Nebenmensch, the “next man” whose otherness and likeness provoke both identification and aggression. In his writings as well as in writings of Slavoj Žižek, Kenneth Reinhard, and Jacques Lacan, the psychodynamics of neighbor relations are foundational to the emergence of identity and selfhood as well as to political and social ethics.

The psychodynamics of neighboring, heretofore little studied in relation to medieval writings, also drive textual relationships among Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Henryson in their rewritings of the Troilus story, according to George Edmondson in The Neighboring Text. In retelling the story of Troilus, all three writers take up questions of identity and mirroring that are played out among characters within the narrative and that underwrite the uses of the Troy legend as a political fable in pre-modern Europe, with the neighborhood comprising Europe between Florence, London, and Scotland. The Troilus story, that is, is a neighborly text on multiple levels: as a story about a community under siege; as a story about homosocial relationships and the polarizations of courtly love; as a story, exchanged among writers with different political and devotional aims, about community formation itself. Most provocatively, the idea of the neighbor provides Edmondson with a vehicle for rethinking lineal models of medieval literary history. That neighborly relations were more important for the Middle Ages than kinship or genealogy has been productively argued by David Wallace, Paul Strohm, and Aranye Fradenburg, among others. Edmondson breaks important new ground by extending those principles to writers and readers of medieval texts. Lineal genealogies of literary transmission are associated with a concept of nation that does not really apply to premodern Europe, Edmondson argues. Association, guild, fraternity, family: rules for engagement that underwrite premodern social and political communities can apply as well to literary transmission.

The readings of Henryson, Boccaccio, and Chaucer offered here, buttressed throughout by readings of Lacan, Žižek, and Reinhard, are exceptionally rich and fine. If they make a single argument, it is that the neighbor relationships articulated in one text (a neighboring text) get a second play in their narrative reprisals—that Henryson responds to Chaucer and that Chaucer responds to Boccaccio as literary neighbors and also as creators of narratives about neighboring—and of the neighbor’s life or death. Following a lucid introduction outlining the central concerns of the book—the idea of the neighbor in psychoanalytic theory, the meaning of Troy in London’s political and civic imaginary, and the book’s key psychoanalytic concepts (Nebenmensch, jouissance, the Thing, the space between two deaths)—the study opens with a reading of Henryson’s Scottish response to Chaucer’s London Troilus. The Testament, Edmondson argues, is organized and contoured by English/Scottish neighbor relations, dramatized through the fates of its characters as well as through Henryson’s invocations of Chaucer and of Scottish geography. By reanimating Troilus and denying him a real and symbolic death, by inflicting leprosy on Cresseid, and by presenting Chaucer as a neighbor rather than a literary father, hence denying the community...