Chaucer’s Frame Tales: The Physical and the Metaphysical ed. by Joerg O. Fichte (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER nist, treating first the narrative and then the author. She redeems older psychoanalytic criticism and subtly interrogates the sympathies of a male author apparently sympathetic to women. Marie de France's "Le Fresne," conventionally cited as an analogue of the Griselda, undergoes a struc­ turalist analysis by Michelle Freeman, who claims that "Marie has sub­ stituted a lineage born of sisterhood for the more familiar patriarchy" (p. 261). The editors' introduction sets the essays that follow into the larger context ofwomen's studies. They have produced a volume that will stimu­ late further work in women's studies. CHARLOTTE C. MORSE V irginia Commonwealth University JOERG 0. FICHTE, ed. Chaucer's Frame Tales: The Physical and the Meta­ physical. Tubinger Beitrage zur Anglistik, vol. 9. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag; Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987. Pp. 154. ;£25.00, OM 46, $34.50. This is amiscellanyofsixessays originallydelivered as lectures by the editor and five invited speakers in a course on The Canterbury Tales at the University of Tubingen in summer term, 1985. All are in English. Not much credit should be given for accuracy to the volume's title or subtitle: "frame tales" permits inclusion ofan essay on The LegendofGood Women with others on The Canterbury Tales, and the central opposition of the subtitle is addressed in but few of the pieces, and there just incidentally. And, while Fichte's claim (in the preface) of "a remarkable unanimity of interests" among the papers will seem overstated, there are interesting convergences. The first two essays deal with the nature of the poet's comic impulse. In "The Origins of Comicality in Chaucer," Willi Erzgraber finds common ground with Derek Pearsall's "Versions ofComedy in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales" by viewing the comic in anthropological perspective-as a narrative mode that devalidates cultural norms. Erzgraber poses a theory of Karl­ heinz Stierle, that "the object of comicality is anything that threatens a culture as a system," then tests it against a range of poems in which characters show either a reversion to animalism or the tendency to abso218 REVIEWS lutize culture itself in a way that forgets nature. Thus both the raw and the too fully cooked, as it were, are comic; they "threaten" culture by their incongruence. The concept is provocative, but its heuristic value for works like TrozJus or The Wife ofBath's Prologue proves unconvincing, in part because "culture" is not define univocally: the more "cultural systems" seen to be in evidence in Chaucer's poems, the less explanatory power to the theory. For his part, Derek Pearsall cites Bakhtin on the antiauthoritarian quality of medieval laughter, which served to deflate inhibitions that protected values imposed by the official "class culture." The principle helps explain but cannot finally exhaust the meaning of Chaucer's comic tales, which, Pearsall maintains, are autonomous "narrative games" having little relation to real life. They do not reflect a Bakhtinian celebration of life through a "universal subversion of established values," nor are they simply satirical, in the classical sense of comedy as a social and moral corrective. They are amoral and asocial, showing no values other than "survival and satisfaction ofappetite." Even the Summoner'sand Friar's Tales, here detached from the four fabliaux involving sexual relations, emerge in Pearsall's elegant and seasoned analysis not as satire but as storial things unto themselves, as much pure fantasies of greed and lust as romances are of nobility and honor. Fichte's own contribution to the volume, "Chaucer's Shipman's Tale Within the Context of the French Fabliaux Tradition," rejects the familiar assertion that the tale is Chaucer's most typical of the genre. To obtain an objectively verifiable (and less impressionistic) model of the fabliau, he surveys Montaiglon and Raynaud's RecuezJgeneral and compiles a "register of genre markers" by reserving for analysis only the sixty-oddtales explicitly styledfabliaux in the texts . These features fall into fourcategories: commu­ nicative situation, province of meaning, authorial intent, and audience reception. It is in the second grouping (meaning-including such aspects of narrative as plot, character, setting, and point of view), where The Shipman's Tale departs most widely from fabliau...