Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the Canterbury Tales by R. Allen Shoaf (review)

REVIEWS as for example the seven citations over four pages (70–73) of the Wife’s funny but insignificant aside concerning friars and limitors lurking about the countryside. Added to this, an excessive amount of unnecessary use of Middle English words in quotation marks, a tendency to use back-to-back quotation marks and parentheses, and a generous sprinkling of virgules in poetic quotations within the text results in pages that sometimes resemble OED entries. Lois Bragg Gallaudet University R. Allen Shoaf. Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the Canterbury Tales. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Pp. xvi, 162. $55.00. R. Allen Shoaf’s new book takes the body in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as its subject and circulation as its governing metaphor, exploring circulation from a variety of perspectives, including somatic and social circulation and most importantly the circulation of ideas embodied in and represented by language, which is presented as both communication and communicable: ‘‘Infection,’’ he says in the introduction to the book, ‘‘the consequence of contagion, itself the result of circulation, threatens the human body. And the most infectious agent there is . . . is language itself’’ (2). Shoaf postulates the inherent, existential isolation of individual bodies, a condition that necessitates efforts of communication and at the same time generates fears about communication as a potential source of infection, pathogenesis, and degeneration (7). Throughout this book Shoaf proclaims his interest in bodies, and indeed considers the physical bodies Chaucer creates for his characters— the Prioress’s body and its relationship to food, the Nun’s Priest’s body and its protean, substantial relationship to the power conferred by language skillfully marshaled are but two examples—but his real focus is that circulation of language that reception theory and semiotic theory seek to explain: the often labyrinthine and highly individual patterns of response that signs and groups of signs evoke. Over the course of the book Shoaf investigates, queries, and performs the circulation, contagion , and anxiety that is its topic, reading Chaucer’s words broadly and 429 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:26 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER imaginatively against the context of his own reading and literary experience . In their promotional materials the publishers have included Julian Wasserman’s opinion that the book ‘‘breaks new critical ground’’ as Shoaf ‘‘casts his reading of Chaucer somewhat in the tradition of Wordsworth ’s Prelude.’’ While it is doubtful that this book constitutes the education of either a poet or a critic, it does foreground the crucial role of the reader in responding to a literature designed to foreclose simple, unidimensional interpretations. Shoaf develops his twofold argument through five closely argued, dense chapters that defy summary. The opening chapter, ‘‘The Care of the Self,’’ devoted to Fragments VII and II of the Tales, examines a series of selves, linking the physical body and its prepossessing qualities to the effectiveness of tale-telling: ‘‘Only after the Priest has told his delightful tale . . . does Harry, perceiving the substance in it and in him, recognize the body of the Priest—the substance is between them’’ (18). The second chapter, ‘‘The Pestilence of the Sentence,’’ reads Fragment VI, the tales of the Physician and the Pardoner, as tales that ‘‘repeat in a different and darker perspective the same binarism or duality of the . . . Monk’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale’’ (47). The third chapter, ‘‘EtymAlchemy ,’’ discusses the secrets, transformations, and vital flow of language and life at work in Fragments VIII and III. The fourth chapter, ‘‘Magic versus Rhetoric,’’ explores language’s seemingly magical ability to transform and transmute by exploring the rhetorical magic of metonymy in Fragments V and I. The final chapter ‘‘Grant Translateur,’’ dealing with Fragments IX, X, and IV, suggests that the ‘‘psychology of someone who defends against the anxiety of circulation with metonymy and reduction [i.e. Chaucer] is also the psychology of a translator: not an originator, the translator creates fragmentarily out of the archive of others’ originals that, like the story of Tereus, threaten to ‘infect’ and ‘envenom’ him unless he inoculates himself with his own versions of them’’ (102). Throughout these explorations Shoaf interweaves a variety of...