Chaucer the Heretic

Chaucer the Heretic Alan J. Fletcher University College, Dublin Dead authors refuse to lie quietly in their graves. They keep returning to haunt us, and perhaps this is as it should be. Tall among these literary revenants lately summoned into critical consciousness walks the ghost of Geoffrey Chaucer, for in the last thirty years or so, the writing of scholarly assessments of Chaucer the man and of the nature of his relation to his contingent history has, if anything, accelerated, acquiring defiant momentum in the face of the theory that would insist that he ought not matter.1 Even when mindful of the skepticism of the theorists, commentators on Chaucer have finally shown themselves undeterred by it, and continue to harbor a conviction that something solid ought still to be salvageable even after theory has done its problematizing worst. Doubtless, the stiffening of their resolve results in part for highly problematical reasons, from Chaucer’s ability to sustain so convincing an illusion of an empirically available authorial presence that some readers, even as technically they confess the illusion, have been emboldened to parry the objections of theoretically driven skepticism with increasingly sophisticated attempts at determining whether the illusion anywhere accesses reality. They have tried to winnow authorial fact from fiction, finding things to say about the historical Chaucer that might be thought to sediment out from the artifice of his various selfrepresentations , and from the slippery rhetoric of his writing in general, things whose palpability can be defended against many theoretically invigorated forms of objection.2 Arguably, even that very slipperiness 1 See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–48. The decentered author is also familiar from the 1969 essay by Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is an Author?’’ (ed. and trans. in Josué Harari, Textual Strategies : Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 141–60). 2 Though not, of course, of all forms; the insistence of some theorists (Louis Althusser, for example) upon the unanalyzability of historical totalities is liable to undermine the medievalist’s usual endeavour. The present essay, similarly threatened by such insistence , attempts the compromise of the petit récit (see note 6 below). 53 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER might be susceptible to an historicized understanding and an explanation in terms of historically real considerations and of demonstrable discourses within whose terms Chaucer lived, moved, and had his being.3 Of course, traditionally recognized sites exist for transacting the business of recuperating dead authors, the most obvious being the literary biography, a site tenanted most recently in Chaucer’s case by Derek Pearsall. In writing a literary biography, he accordingly consorts with the values of an old and resiliently self-perpetuating biographical genre predicated on equally old and often, unreconstructed notions about why the author as subject should matter. Pearsall’s Life, notwithstanding its nod at theory’s skepticism, might thus represent a turning back of the clock in more senses than one.4 Yet as I began by saying, the return of the dead author is perhaps as it should be, for it will probably happen, even if by a back door, in any historicist enterprise; historicisms will ensure that the author as subject continues to matter, though not for some of the reasons after which literary biography still hankers. The big-picture dash and seductively broad brushstrokes of Pearsall’s Life can beguile readers into forgetting its astute preliminary disclaimer that what it compasses is a form of scholarly impressionism.5 In this essay, I will be more interested in a matter of pointillist detail because, if impressionism is what we are inevitably going to be put to even as we try to 3 There are several excellent recent examples of this, but to take two with which I will later engage: David Aers, in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 444, reflects on Chaucer’s apparent relative aloofness from the rebellion of 1381 thus: ‘‘what seems absent may, in its very absence, be a present force in shaping a work . . . even the most dazzling complexities may be...