Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER highly informative. It will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in exploring the history of the social structures that both contain and support domestic violence. Elizabeth Robertson University of Colorado Elizabeth Scala. Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. xix, 284. $59.95. Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England announces three goals, any one of which would constitute a substantial scholarly accomplishment. First, the book claims it ‘‘dramatically revises the critical terrain by working out a properly structural account of medieval narrative’’ (p. xiv). Second, it promises to rethink ‘‘narrative structure as it relates to the manuscripts and manuscript culture’’ (p. xvii), and third, it intends to employ ‘‘the insights offered by psychoanalytic theory to read the structural relationships between medieval texts and their others, others that often include the long critical traditions written about the original texts’’ (p. 6). Structuralism, manuscript study, psychoanalysis: there are some good readings here and an occasional arresting insight, but this book does not achieve the synthesis it promises. Its ambitions are undercut less by their own grandness than by a more pedestrian problem: a lack of attention to previous scholarship. In relation to manuscript study, this problem mainly produces confusion . Elizabeth Scala includes a psychoanalytically driven account of the textual history of each of the major works she analyzes: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Squire’s and Knight’s Tales, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Malory’s Morte Darthur, and, in shorter introductory discussion, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. Although she cites the textual scholarship immediately relevant to each work, she makes no paleographical claims of her own; nor does she engage with any of the larger debates current in manuscript studies. As a result, it is unclear how or even whether these analyses contribute to such debates. In relation to theory, the problem is more severe. Scala practices a form of psychoanalytic critiPAGE 424 424 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:52 PS REVIEWS cism that is heavily dependent on deconstruction. This strand of psychoanalytic reading originated in Derrida’s ‘‘Freud and the Scene of Writing,’’ and enjoyed a brief but intense vogue in the 1980s, especially among acolytes of Paul de Man. Scala never acknowledges this fact; nor does she make any real effort to distinguish her approach from other, more recent trends in psychoanalytic theory. Slavoj Žižek is mentioned once, in a single footnote—an oversight the more glaring for his forceful disavowals of deconstruction. This truncated account of Scala’s own theory is matched by similarly truncated assumptions about the role of theory in Middle English studies. Scala tends to treat as a blanket resistance to theory what has in fact not been a resistance at all but a disinterest in a particular (and now dated) form of deconstruction. Nevertheless, I do not mean by this objection to imply that Scala’s analysis is without value. Noting the characteristic and ubiquitous reference in medieval narratives to other, absent narratives, she argues that absence constitutes medieval narrative’s most fundamental structuring principle. The point is an interesting one, and it enables Scala to produce some good readings, especially in the first half of the book. She reads Gawain and The Squire’s and Knight’s Tales as fables of repression, each text revealing its absences even as it represses them. Because the repression can never be complete, it must be compulsively repeated, thus driving the narrative forward. For instance, she presents The Knight’s Tale as the ‘‘primal scene’’ for the entire Canterbury collection. Its initial reference to Theseus’s conquest of the ‘‘regne of Femenye,’’ which it refuses to narrate, gives way to repeated scenes of ‘‘female domestication,’’ which, in turn, in their refusal to face fully the processes of transformation they assume, are driven by ‘‘submerged Oedipal intrications’’ and render all of the collection’s subsequent tales ‘‘troubled versions of and versions troubled by The Knight’s Tale’’ (p. 132). Scala takes pains to disavow any feminist coloration this reading might seem to have, chiding ‘‘feminist, Marxist, and generally revisionist...