Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” and the Critics by Alice R. Kaminsky (review)

REVIEWS students and scholars will find this an excellent, stimulating, and reward­ ing book I have no doubt. PIERO BOITANI University ofPerugia ALICER. KAMINSKY, Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" and the Critics. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980.Pp.xiv, 245.$15.0 0. In his Prologue to the Confessio Amantis, Gower writes, "Bot it is seid and evere schal, / Between two stoles lyth the fal."Just so it may be said again about Alice R. Kaminsky's Chaucer's "Trot/us and Criseyde" and the Critics. Kaminsky avers that she has "read exhaustively in the areas of Chaucer scholarship and criticism" and that she presents the "most relevant and most representative [instances] of certain crucial positions" (p. xiii). Moreover, her study "attempts to identify and assess the methodology employed by critics" so that the volume "should have paradigmatic value that extends beyond the field of medieval literature" (p. xiii). The dust jacket labels the book an "essay in metacriticism," though Kaminsky never herselfapplies this term to her work.She does indeed discuss the work of Hirsch, Hartman, Frye, and others in her introduction, but she indicates that in this book "the most crucial issue [is], 'What is Truth in Criticism?' " (p. 4). In the quest for Truth, she seems to endorse an analogy with scientific inquiry, and she finally declares that "I will attempt to determine the extent to which the hypotheses of each critical approach yield plausi­ ble, or correct, or objective interpretations" (p.12).Throughout the book she judges criticism according to what has been "proved" or on whether its method is "objective, verifiable" (p. 38) or whether an approach can "supply us with a 'correct' or 'objective'...interpretation" (p. 71). The peculiar demands ofsuch an inquiry ensure that the book falls between two stools, into a critical or scholarly vacuum. Kaminsky divides the criticism that she has read into historical, philo­ sophical, formalist, and psychological approaches. Each section is satu­ rated with the terms not of criticism but of philosophy. Critics are overruled or dismissed on grounds of "exclusive disjunction" (p. 9), 173 SWDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER "genetic fallacy" (p. 17), "a very obvious petitio principti" (p. 24), "priv­ ileged hypothesis" (p. 37), ''post hoc reasoning" (p. 60), "a model tautol­ ogy" (p. 83), and so on. Even characters can be refuted: "Troilus is guilty of the either-or fallacy" (p. 62). Such logic chopping does not identify the best insights or the most useful commentaries on the poem. Judgments of this sort require more general criteria and common sense, and Kaminsky oftenoverlooksthese in herdiscriminations. For example, in her discussion of historical criticism she gives more attention to the work ofJohn Gardner, Edward Wagenknecht, and George Williams than to D. W. Robertson, though in grouping them together she seems to consider all equally valuable (or flawed). Likewise, in the philosophical section she names B. L. Jefferson "the foremost exponent of this view" (p. 43). She takes time to consider seriously, or refute, critics such as Cummings, Dodd, Denomy, and Slaughter, while she neglects or passes quickly over the writings of Bloomfield, Howard, Muscatine (whose French Tradition is not men­ tioned under formalistic criticism), and Spearing, omitting entirely the latter's short book of 1977. Her refutation of critics' positions and argu­ ments appears at times to reflect a mismanagement of what the critics themselves have to say, as in her report of Bloomfield and Donaldson on the narrator of the Trot/us. Partly as a result of her concern with logical consistency, Kaminsky almost always prefers explications and arguments that deal with a single passage or point to systematic readings, historical expositions, or overviews. Book-length studies (including those by McAlpine and Rowe) consequently receive short shrift, apparently because they admit exceptions or are tied to matter outside the poem; in the same way the most influential critics are slighted because of their reliance on cultural background and complex argument. Although at some points one feels uncertain whether Kaminsky is offering an interpretation of a critic or her own opinion, she does several times state her own views. She claims, for example, that Chaucer did not produce an "original poem": "I believe that Troilus is...