Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling by Leonard Michael Koff (review)

REVIEWS with one glaring exception. On page 98, four lines referring to fig. 9 have been so garbled that the author's interpretation of this interesting but obscure illustration is lost. Chaucerians may be disappointed by Kieckhefer's treatment of late­ medieval literature, which is brief. He does note that, unlike the Norse sagas, in which magic always involves the spoken or written word, the vernacular literatures of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries refer on the whole to magical objects and magicians. These things are not the objects or subjectsof the stories, however, but merely serve as a way to instigate action or move the plot along. Students of Chaucer should nevertheless gain a great deal from Kieckhefer's textured account of the study and practice of performative magic, astrology, magical medicine, alchemy, and necro­ mancy in and around medieval courtly society. They should also be chal­ lenged by his argument that the rise of a late-medieval clerical underworld of necromancers led many Christians, and most inquisitors, to see all forms of magic as demonic and thus helped prepare the way for the first wave of witch trials in the mid-fifteenth century. FREDERICK S. PAXTON Connecticut College LEONARD MICHAEL KOFF. Chaucer and the Art ofStorytelling. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. x, 298. $35.00. This study aims to define as fully as possible the performative aspect of Chaucerian narrative, "The sense in which Chaucer's stories are public," intended to "create companionship" among readers, each of whom will collaborate with the author in"guardianship over the integrity of the text he holds in his hands." Koff will have no truck with supposedly "deep" readings,"decodings" whose effect is to draw us away from the text under the pretense of taking us further into it, and he is skeptical of readings founded on Chaucer's supposed irony, or the "dramatic" discontinuity among the narratives of The Canterbury Tales. In place of"allegory," which tends always to replace the narrative story with a pattern of ideas which "means something" beyond what the story itself could deliver, or "sym­ bolism," which tends to read narratives in a nonlinear way as if they were 215 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER lyrics, Koff argues instead for what he calls "parabolic listening," which allows the literal level of a story to "control" its meaning, and so hears the story "for what it is" -not as a surface to be penetrated but as a natural disposition of detail and event, a mirror that renders human experience "shareable," and which we, as readers, invest with meaning in the light of our own experiential sense of natural justice. Harry Bailly and the other members of the pilgrim audience are present as indicators of how stories "awakensociability," andtheirpersonalresponses to what they hear provide models, often imperfect, for our own thoughtful participation in the storytelling occasion. Rejecting any such principle of organization as roadside drama, or a Muscatinian juxtaposition of contrasting styles, Koff stresses repeatedly that Chaucer's tales are to be received as a narrator's performance of a work in manuscript. The narrator is an imperfect dramatist, whose omnipre­ sence dominates any illusion his performance may create, and whose effect consists in making auditor or reader "see double," at once imagining the characters the narrator impersonates and relishing the skill of the interplay between the voices of these characters and his own. This interplay can of course be highly sophisticated: it encompasses the fascinating relationship of Chaucer as author and Chaucer as member of the pilgrim audience of his own authorialcreation,and it can engage such complexities as that of what Koffcalls "sexuality of performance," inviting us to reflect on the implica­ tions of, for example, a male narrator's impersonation of the Wife of Bath, who in turn impersonates a range of male antagonists. But we must never expect a total dramatic consistency. To seek a clear basis for discriminating among the different "voices" that operate in the opening portions of The Merchant's Tale is no more appropriate than to ask how the Eagle of The House ofFame obtained his considerable book learning. Our trust in the narrator...