The One and the Many in The Canterbury Tales by Traugott Lawler (review)

REVIEWS could be more mistaken. Chaucer's poetry evokes the human reality of war, brilliantly fusing officially sanctioned, 'legitimate' violence with individualistic acts of 'illicit' barbarism and plunder, decisively unveil­ ing the repulsive defences and glorification of war which still plague our culture-we deform other humans in our language and imagination before we slaughter them. Anyone wanting a sensitive literary and ethical commentary on Chaucer's writing here and at the death of Arcite, with discussion of its relation to the source, should turn to the commen­ tary written nearly twenty years ago by that outstanding medievalist whose tragically early death all who have tried to learn from her and her work now mourn, Elizabeth Salter, Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and The Clerk's Tale (London: Arnold, 1962). In discussing Theseus' abuse of Boethius and his 'tyranny' Jones rightly uses both her work and R. Neuse's shrewd essay ("The Knight: The First Mover in Chaucer's Human Comedy," UTQ, 31 [1962], 299-315). But, again, even with these guides, his interpretive framework inevitably transforms Chaucer's profound critique into one directed at "military despotism in northern Italy" reflected in the allegedly incompetent, uneducated, and murder­ ous narrator-a sad reduction and displacement of the imaginative and intellectual power of the poem. DAVID AERS University of East Anglia TRAUGOIT LAWLER, The One and the Many in the Canterbury Tales. Ham­ den, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980. Pp. 209. $17.50. In ordinary English the phrase 'the one and the many' suggests strictly philosophical usage, especially the problem discussed by Plato in the Sophist (244B-245E), in a particularly difficult passage, if I remember my old undergraduate days aright. Boethius deals with an aspect of the problem of wholeness, unity, and parts in the De Consolatione (III, prose 10), and here Chaucer would have come upon a simpler application in Philosophia'sdemonstration that 'perfect goodness and perfect unity' are identical, together with the identity of God and "blisfulnesse," as Chaucer translates: " . . . alle thise thinges ben al o thyng." 175 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The literary critic who lifts this phraseology from its philosophical context does so at his own peril, whether it be the simple application of Boethius or the more complicated problem posed by Plato's discussion of Parmenides' "one being." Professor Lawler states in his 'Introduction': The subject of this book is the subject which these brief passages illus­ trate: the complementary relationship in the Canterbury Tales between unity and diversity, oneness and multiplicity-between the one and the many. I shall argue that this relationship is the most pervasive issue in the poem, and its major unifying force (p. 15). Now, there is something troubling in this assertion. Either it is self­ evidently true, if the work of art achieves the perfection of form we associate with a skillfully constructed complex narrative, or it is 'true' but almost certainly destructive of the form and meaning of the work of art if a "relationship" ('the one and the many') is an "issue" in the poem, "the most pervasive issue." "Unifying force" is the result of successful formal construction, not the object of its being created. 'Unity' is abstractable from a complex narrative by the act of literary analysis; it should not be either the specific subject matter of formal creation or partake of the 'meaning' or the 'argument' of the work. An aesthetic tautologycannot be a poem, or at least I am not aware ofhaving ever read one. The "all pervasive issue" becomes an "issue" in The Canterbury Tales because the author of this study has seen fit to put it there. "I have tried to provide an organizing rubric for certain related phenomena in the Canterbury Tales, not a key to Chaucer's mind" (p. 15). Exactly. As "an organizing rubric," a peg, for Professor Lawler to hang his various interpretations of some tales upon, 'the one and the many' admirably serves its purpose. Sometimes the original philosophical phrase seems capable of trivialization. For example, on p. 48 we are told: "Another one-and-many aspect of the professional tales is the issue of privacy­ ('pryvetee')--versus exposure." The author has lost me here. I...