The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales by H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. (review)

REVIEWS the "optimist" readers who believe that Langland was announcing the coming of a better world, she is unlikely to convert the Langland pessimists who think that the author of Piers could hardly have been an optimist since there is no clearly optimistic statement about the future at poem's end. Be that as it may, this study is so thoughtful, original, and well informed that every open-minded student of Piers Plowman is bound to profit from it. ROBERT E. LERNER Northwestern University H. MARSHALL LEICESTER, JR. The Disenchanted Self Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1990. Pp.xii, 451. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. On the one hand, we have in Marshall Leicester a critic so congenially in the groove of traditional, not to say old-fashioned, Chaucer studies that he can say as he begins his peroration, "What seem to me to be the two best treatments of the General Prologue, E. Talbot Donaldson's 'Chaucer the Pilgrim,' and Jill Mann's Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, between them outline the general structure of Chaucerian practice in the Canter­ bury Tales, the telling of tales as the interaction between a subject and an institution" (p. 383). On the other hand, the chapter that he begins that way, "Conclusion: The Disenchanted Self," is headed by three epigraphs. One is a well-known couplet from The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue, "'I am nat wont in no mirour to prie / But swynke soore and lerne multiplie' " (lines 668-69), but the other two, which bracket the Chaucerian lines at the top of the page, are fromJacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and from Roland Barthes's The Pleasure ofthe Text. And by the time the readers reach this point, more than nine­ tenths of the way through this dense and intricate study, nothing would surprise them less than this matter-of-fact juxtaposition. Leicester's book, like the contributions of Donaldson, Mann, Hoffman, Muscatine, and all the other giants in the history of Chaucerian scholarship and commentary, sits even now at a crucial point in the path of further explorationsof the meaningand significance of the Chaucer canon: there is no way past them but through them. That is, such works, Leicester's 167 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER included, will need to be cited not to show respect for one's predecessors, or evento show the proper scholarly diligence in cultivating one's Sitzfleisch in the carrels, but simply because each of them contributes tothe understand­ ing of our subject in such a way that to ignore them is to be, well, ignorant. Well, what, then, is Leicester doing? He is trying to understand how the various narrating voices of The Canterbury Tales do their job and what job it is they end up doing. To this end he concentrates on only a few of the many narrators involved, but on the ones for whom his sharply observed distinc­ tions make the greatest difference, which turns out to mean, in the main, the most interesting ones: the narrator of The General Prologue, the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner. Along the way many other narrators and tales come into play-almost all of them, in fact-but The DisenchantedSeifis not areading of The Canterbury Tales as a whole. It is a form of analytical play, and this play is directed toward the intertwinings, the intricacies, and the puzzles that attend the shadowy alternations of narrational presence and absence. Like all other modern theorists from Saussure forward, Leicester is fond of distinctions-between "self" and "subject," between "masculine" and "feminine" forms of disenchantment-fond of establishing categories and terms, especially those that can be delivered to us already compromised by the self-effacement of ironic figuration-"Leicester's razor," for example, which is the name he bestows on his Latin maxim, "Narratores non sunt multiplicandi sine absolute necessitate," and fond of every kind of verbal play that is strong enough to bear the title of wit, whether it originates in Lacan-/e Nom-du-Pere, le Non-du-Pere...