Chaucers Poetics and the Modern Reader by Robert M. Jordan (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ROBERT M. JORDAN. Chaucer's Poetics and the Modern Reader. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1987. Pp. viii, 182. $25.00. In this succinct and provocative elaboration of positions first broached in Chaucer and the Shape of Creation (1967), Robert Jordan advises us to abandon literary interpretation in favor of structuralist poetics. Interpreta­ tion creates problems in reading Chaucer's poems, according toJordan, but structural (rhetorical, textual) analysis solves them-or dissolves them, by demonstrating that interpretative difficulties arise from the posing of inappropriate questionsbased on mistaken critical assumptions. The block composition, amplificatio, and linear architectonics associated with medi­ eval inorganic form inevitably frustrate the interpretative scrutiny appro­ priate to realist fiction.Jordan wants Chaucerians to resist their anachronis­ tic interpretative reflexes by adopting a critical program more suited to medieval texts-that is, structuralist poetics. Jordan's general method in Chaucer'sPoeticsand the Modern Readeris to catalogue the diverse 1:;enres, modes, and discursive forms of a particular Chaucerian text, to notice their incompatibility, and then to remark the failure of univocal interpretations to regulate such a gallimaufry of verbal figures and formal structures. Not only is there no unifying theme in Chaucer's poems, as interpretative critics have vainly supposed, but the Chaucerian narrator or speaker is little more than a compositional device linking incompatible rhetorical blocks. There is no thematic, dramatic, or psychological depth in Chaucer's works which would require interpreta­ tion, according toJordan. There is only linguistic surface. Discontinuities need not be made continuous, in the manner of univocal interpretation, since the purpose of Chaucer's poems is rhetorical display, not consistent characterization, central themes, or dramatic illusion. This bold thesis is supported by a brief historical justification. In the fourteenth century, just as in the twentieth, belief in a unified, commonly accepted reality shifted to interest in the language used to describe this purported reality. Such a change in the climate of opinion occurs when the underlying reality which supposedly anchors description becomes ques­ tionable. The effects of this shift of interest from "reality" to description, Jordan argues, can be found in the contingency, ambiguity, and in­ coherence of Chaucer's poetry. Only a nonrealist poetics that is disjunctive and inorganic can be adequate to the literature which follows such a radical cultural shift, and can avoid imposing inappropriate notions of character, meaning, and form. 250 REVIEWS Poetics is Jordan's antidote 'for the ennui many Chaucerians feel at encountering yet another interpretation of, say, Criseyde's character. Inter­ pretation bypasses literary specificity for "the other that is external to literature," in a vain attempt to capture referents (e.g., characters or themes), but poetics focuses on the "tangible, material nature oflanguage and its uncertain relation to truth." Saussure, the Russian Formalists, the Prague School, and most recently the French structuralists Genette and Todorov, according to Jordan, have rediscovered the medieval, inorganic view oflanguage. He gives particular emphasis to Genette's refinement of the Russian Formalistmodel, whichdividesthe text intostory (thesignified fictional world), narrative (the textual medium of signifiers), and narrating (the foregrounded, often self-conscious objectification of utterance itself). Chaucerian narrating is markedly self-reflexive-that is, the text-author relationship is objectified-and foregrounds an autonomous, contingent verbal surface of signifiers. Plumbing Chaucer's interpretative depths for signifieds is what analytic philosophers used .to call a category mistake, since the act of telling overshadows theme, just as in postmodern fiction by Nabokov, Borges, and Barth. Chaucerian poetics are "game," but have been misread as "ernest." Let me summarizeJordan's applications of poetics to specific Chaucerian texts. The House ofFame is disjunct and disparate, not continuous and integrated, and the consistency discovered by the various thematic ap­ proaches is spurious. Critics "should rein in their interpretive impulses," since the work is a mosaic of erudition and virtuosity, a sparkling, entertain­ ing surface without thematic depth. There is no thematic consistency to The Book ofthe Duchess, either, and the dreamer is primarily the agent of movement in a narrative devoted to joyful play with language. His com­ positionalfunction overrides his dramatic function, and most of the ques­ tions put to the text bycriticsareirrelevant. The ParliamentofPowis...