Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination by David Aers (review)

Reviews DAVID AERS, Chaucer.. Langland and the Creative Imagination. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Pp. xii, 236. $25.00. Although I admired David Aers' book for its scholarly breadth and marvelled sometimes at his ingenious arguments, as I read through it I found myself increasingly unsettled by the intrusion of the author's personal biases, by his unwillingness to countenance the common assumptions ofthe age ofLangland and Chaucer, and by his use of jargon and other ill-chosen expressions. In the first paragraph, Professor Aers promises to "show how due attention to the writers' contexts is necessary in the attempt to grasp the specific meaning and resonance of their poetry" (Preface, ix), but I have seldom found literary criticism which so consistently wrenches works out oftheir milieu and imposes on them the personal and societal tastes of the critic. Aers devotes the first three chapters to Piers Plowman, drawing to some extent on his previous book, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (London, 1975), but concentrating in these chapters on the way he sees Langland undermining his own seeming acceptance of orthodox church doctrine in poem by the force ofhis imaginative presentation ofrealistic characters and situations. As Aers puts it, "Langland's imaginative receptivity to conflicts and social movement pushes the total context beyond the perceptual bounds of his traditional model" (p. 15). Lang­ land may disapprove of rebellion, says Aers, but his portrayal of the oppression ofthe peasants and the economic inequities ofhis time shows that he sympathized with their discontent. Aers sees in the ending of Piers Plowman Langland's almost involuntary despair ofthe institutional church's being an instrument for realizing his ideals. Aers establishes in these chapters the principal method of the book: illustrating how Lang­ land and Chaucer paid lip-service to orthodoxy and established hierar­ chy, but at the same time showed the inadequacy ofthese institutional­ ized values almost in spite ofthemselves, by the power oftheir art. He is 121 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER only moderately successful in credibly applying this method to Piers Plowman (preoccupied as he is with what he judges to be the irredeemable corruption of medieval institutions), but he is even less successful in doing so in the chapters onChaucer. The latter half of the book is devoted to analyses of several ofChaucer's characters,notablyCriseyde, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and the Parson. He seesChaucer explaining the personalities of the first three primarily by reference to the interaction of social forces around them, rather than by emphasis on their personal responsibility for their actions. He is particularly at pains to demonstrateChaucer's presentation of these characters in such a way as to make us aware of how inescapably oppressed they are by the manipulative pressures of medieval social institutions. In explicating the characterizations ofCriseyde and the Wife of Bath, Aers waxes exceedingly indignant at the "male domination and egotistic predatoriness" by which he sees them being victimized and dehuman­ ized, and he asserts that this victimization constitutes the primary perspective from whichChaucer meant them to be viewed. Strangely enough, however, he holds the Parson, for whom he has great distaste, personally responsible for the severity (and even perverseness) of his sermon at the end of The Canterbury Tales. In fact, Aers seems to think thatChaucer's principal purpose in the Tales was to exonerate many of the rascals he portrayed by showing how they were formed by their society, while undermining the portraits of those whom he has tradition­ ally been thought to idealize (e.g., the Knight, the Clerk, and the Parson). Aers is convinced that so enlightened a man and so subtle an artist asChaucer could not really have tolerated the military exploits of the Knight (and of Theseus in his tale) nor the doctrinaire stances of the Clerk and the Parson. However, in so uncompromisingly rejecting the "elitism" of those in political and religious power referred to inChaucer's works, Aers seems to me to establish just as indefensible a kind of elitism by assuming the superiority of his modern moral sensitivity and his behavioristic convictions over the common ideologies and assumptions of the Middle Ages. The difficulties of Aers' approach are capsulated...