Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions by Kathryn L. Lynch (review)

REVIEWS only point, that is, back to the solitary Hoccleve of the ‘‘Complaint,’’ whose authentic self is an uncertain category. At his best Knapp reads with a Derridean finesse, revealing just how strange and unsettling Hoccleve’s position is. Not all the writing is at that level: some is so sophisticated as to be unconvincing (Chapter 2), and occasionally wrinkles in the book’s thematic statements seem not to have been ironed out. The final sentence offers an example: we hear Hoccleve’s voice not as that of ‘‘personal alienation but as a voice shaped by a shared culture’’ (p. 186). The actual argument is that bureaucratic writing is the product of a shared culture that repeatedly produces personal alienation. In sum, this (beautifully produced) book advances one avenue of Hoccleve studies; it thickens the scholarly texture in laudable ways; it by no means exhausts present possibilities. James Simpson University of Cambridge Kathryn L. Lynch. Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions. Chaucer Studies, vol. 27. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. viii, 178. $75.00. In Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions, Kathryn Lynch proposes to take seriously the longstanding view that Chaucer is a philosophical poet, a view held during and immediately after Chaucer’s own lifetime by Deschamps , Hoccleve, and Usk among others, yet one which has never been adequately conceptualized in modern criticism. As Lynch’s title suggests, her focus is Chaucer’s dream visions; after an initial chapter that lays out her project, she proceeds chapter by chapter through the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Legend of Good Women, with a final chapter sketching possible extensions into Chaucer’s later poetry. Like most recent critics who have tried to develop the idea of a philosophical Chaucer beyond Christian moralizing and the citation of a few passages from Boethius, Lynch links Chaucer’s writings to technical debates in medieval logic, epistemology, and the theory of action. Her central claim is that Chaucer knew these technical debates and engaged them directly, without thereby becoming a dogmatic poet: that he was less interested in taking up a philosophical posi399 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:13 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tion than in the underlying philosophical problems that provoked the debates. I find Lynch’s focus on problems rather than positions to be utterly right, and some of the connections she draws to technical arguments are quite suggestive. But the book too frequently flattens out the philosophical issues it takes up, collapsing arguments and problems that are in fact distinct, and linking technical arguments to the poetry in hurried, unconvincing ways. I will concentrate on Lynch’s chapter on Parliament of Fowls; I think it is the book’s best, and taking time to lay out the issues it raises will clarify the book’s strengths and limitations better than would a chapter-by-chapter survey. Lynch begins her discussion of the Parliament by claiming that the erotic blockage it represents dramatizes a problem of the will rather than one of understanding. The formel eagle’s stasis and inability to choose a mate is not, Lynch argues, the sign of an intellectual failure; she knows everything she needs to know to make her choice. Chaucer instead uses her stasis, like that of the narrator earlier in the poem, to explore the difficulty of accounting for agents’ dispositions to act. Contrary to the Platonic argument in one standard reading of it, agents do not always pursue that which they know or believe to be good. On the other hand, part of the poem’s joke in having a bird be deaf to Nature’s call is that neither is there anything in nature—such as a naturally determined desire—that explains why agents act as they do. Lynch is right, I think, in arguing that Chaucer has a genuinely philosophical interest in the theory of action, that he understands what is at stake in both rationalistic and naturalistic attempts to explain action, and that the Parliament of Fowls investigates the appeal and the limitations of both forms of reductionism. But as she pursues her argument she gets that set of issues...