Theory and the Premodern Text by Paul Strohm (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Paul Strohm. Theory and the Premodern Text. Medieval Cultures, vol. 26. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 269. $46.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. Paul Strohm declares less interest in theory per se than in theory’s application to objects of study. He dislikes the lopsidedness of analysis that silences its pretended object by preferring to batten upon a contemplation of its own processes; the theory that gazes at its navel or, to visit a different bodily site, that vanishes up its own nostrils, is not for him. Especially awful are theories so determined to make the text they ostensibly study in their own image that one text comes out looking pretty much like another. No, for Strohm, theory is best when practical and applied, when it respects, not hijacks, what it studies. In fact, I think Strohm’s practice in this collection of essays is itself theorizable, although I do not particularly want to dwell on that: what he has essentially done is to pursue a theory argued in action, one less formulated in the abstract than evolved in practice, and what emerges is, in the main, quite exciting. Strohm’s introduction offers five rules of thumb that guide his preferred form of textual engagement: the text must be central; ‘‘literary’’ considerations (in the old belle-lettristic sense) will be avoided; attention must be paid to the way the text dialogues with its wider environment, and this includes the material world; the text, since it is partially constituted by silences and repressions, may be said to have a ‘‘textual unconscious’’ that in principle might be made available for inspection; and finally, the text’s meaning is communal property and exists somewhere in the range between broad tradition and unique articulation. Following this manifesto, the book is organized into four parts, three essays per part except in Part III, where we are treated to four. Part I, ‘‘Space, Symbolization, and Social Practice,’’ begins with an essay examining three medieval London itineraries (by Chaucer, Usk, and Hoccleve ), and illustrating the sorts of self-representation available to individuals within the symbolic spaces that the medieval city mapped and that were differently charged according to the locale in question. (Here, I missed a map of medieval London, which would have conveniently configured the three locales under discussion.) Strohm thinks it a peculiarity of medieval space that it was so densely symbolically organized by the meaning-making activities of the many generations crossing it; the loosened symbolic structure of the postmodern city, PAGE 430 430 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:54 PS REVIEWS conversely, seems to him to impinge less vigorously on walkers through it. The more I pondered this distinction, however, the more permeable as a boundary between the pre- and the postmodern it seemed. Nevertheless , the essay has a wonderful sense of streets as theaters of ideology, variously inflected according to the traditional function and associations of the particular street (something that recent studies of civic pageantry have also been acutely aware of, although these seem not to enter Strohm’s radar). The second essay, much in debt to the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle, considers the divide between verbal aggression and the thing itself, narrowing their distance and reflecting on the action incipient in symbolic speech and the symbolization incipient in action . The case under review is that of William Sawtre, the first person to be burned under the terms of De heretico comburendo in 1401. The third essay extols the practice theory developed by Bourdieu, using his theory to consider three different moments of coronation (of Richard II, Henry IV, and Joanne of Navarre), regarding each as a legible cultural practice, and flags practice theory’s value for identifying and appreciating the importance of what is aberrant in these coronation narratives. The three essays gathered in Part II are on the general topic of time and narrative. The first considers the career of Perkyn revelour in The Cook’s Tale as not an allegory of the 1381 Rising, or even necessarily as a reference to that time, but as contoured along a narrative curve similar to that of...