Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales by Carl Lindahl (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER authorial voice and a reflector figure, thus giving rise to a multiplicity of narrative perspectives. Lawton then proceeds logically to extend his reading ofChaucer's fiction­ alization ofhis sources to The Canterbury Tales. Admitting the presence of a narratorial persona in The General Prologue, he defines the process of fictionalization as follows: "...the narrator as poet presents his transcrip­ tion of the pilgrim's pretended experience as an act of translation (730-6)" (p.102).The process used by Chaucer, therefore, is no different from that in the Troilus. Chaucer's aim, though, is not to concentrate the recipient's attention "on the narratorialpersona but to disperse it into a scattering of fiction," which Lawton appropriately terms a "narratorial diaspora" (p. 100). One is inclined to follow Lawton's carefully presented argument, which proceeds by presenting three possible objections touching on voice, frame, and tone and by then refuting them (pp.96-103). This general survey of narratorial "voice" in The Canterbury Tales is followed by a chapter on The Squire's Tale and an afterword sketching a historical account of narratorial persona and voice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In spite of the objections made here, Lawton's book is a worthwhile enterprise. Although one hesitates to followall ofthe leads he gives to their ultimate conclusion, his presentation of the complexity of Chaucerian narrationalpersonas and voices is thought-provoking and stimulating.His conclusions, arrived at by a careful and perceptive close reading of Chau­ cer's works, challenge the reader to reassess his own assumptions about Chaucerian narrators and may perhaps cause him to dismiss long-cherised but simplistic concepts ofpsychologically consistent narratorial personas. JOERG O. FICHTE University of Tubingen CARL LINDAHL.Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.Pp. ix, 197.$25.00. Folklore and literature are closely related humanistic disciplines: both frequently intersect, and the aims of their practitioners are often similar. Literary historians as well as folklorists study the aesthetic artifact as a 168 REVIEWS product of tradition and the individual talent. Both kinds of scholars seek tounderstand thecomposition and the artistic effect of theirrespective arts. Of course, they do not study that tradition with the same principles or focus, and they differ in their appreciation of differing arts they study: schooled and elitist, and folkloric and "spontaneous." Yet the seminal structuralist study, which has heavily influenced more than a decade of literary criticism, was Propp's analysis of the folktale. Oral formulaic analy­ ses of texts, which have spawned more than a thousand articles, mono­ graphs, and books on the alleged "orality" of works now known to us only in manuscript, was theresult of the research of Milman Parry and AlbertLord, work which was largely folkloric in conception, research strategies, and formulation. When literary narratologists seek today for "minimum nar­ ratives," they (usually improperly) cite the folktale. The study of folklore had for nearly a century been the province of professors of literature: Child, Kittredge, Whiting, Taylor, Utley. Even Stith Thompson, the "father of American folklore," laced his works with examples from world literature. Then about three decades ago a number of talented folklorists, trained mainly by anthropologists, made a declaration of independence for the American Folklore Society. It was no longer to be a satellite of the Modern Language Society. With seeming ease and effortlessness theymoved the study ofAmericanfolkloreaway from its text­ centered focus in the direction of anthropology. The text, the product, faded as the folkloric process, the folkloric and communicative event, assumed the spotlight. Folklorists were not much interested in text liter­ ature; with no Kittredge and no Utley to guide them (or was it to goad them?), literary historians lost nearly all interest in the folk, those un­ washed individuals whose productions were never good enough to appear in text under illustrious names. That is where we are now. Thompson and Taylor were advocates of the historical-geographic method of analysis, no longer seriously considered even by folklorists in America. One hardly sees essays on oral-formulaic analysis anymore, even in the pages of Oral Tradition. And Utley's preoc­ cupation with tale types, so heavily...