Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution by Thomas L. Reed, Jr. (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Here her argument that "imagery has not actually developed in the course ofthe poem but has only been reused in subtly shifting ways to make the same points" (p. 134) is most persuasive. Chapter 4, "Creating the Text: Ambivalence, Holy Play, and Salvation," addresses the poet's use oflanguage-particularly the pun. In keeping with the spirit ofMary Clemente Davlin's study ofthe pun, Raabe notes that "Langland uses wordplay as a means ofsalvation, but his method is not to purge ambivalence but to multiply it, not to eschew paradox but to embraceit in the faith thatalonebrings redemption" (p. 148). She should, however, draw a greater distinction between thelanguage ofthe poem in its attempt to arrive at Truth and the perception oflinguistic corruption in the world. There is indeed an anxiety about the misuses of words that no concept ofwordplay can override. More intriguing in this chapter is her discussion ofmisreading, especially "overskipping" and "glosing" (p. 158). She notes "they cannot destroy truth" (p. 159), but they certainly can thwart access to it. Raabe's work on Piers Plowman appears at a time when scholarship on the poem is seeing an increasing presence ofpoststructural and historicist readings. Any study ofthe poem has assumptions behind it, and Raabe's work is no exception. Her book would profit from a more detailed descrip­ tion ofmethodology. Raabe provides several new insights into the poem that must be balanced with historical readings. DANIEL F. PIGG University of Tennessee at Martin THOMAS L. REED, JR. Middle English Debate Poetry andthe Aesthetics of Irresolution. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Pp. xiii, 461. $43.00. ThomasReed's book tears another large hole in the bynow tattered fabricof a homogeneous Augustinian Middle Ages. He sets out to demonstrate, initially through debate poems, later througha wide genericarrayofworks, that irresolution is a major principle ofmedieval English poetic composi­ tion. Debate poems "often seem less interested in settling on a winner than in the apprehension or appreciation. .. ofthe differences that give rise to the debate," just as disputations in the Schools often focused on the quality 200 REVIEWS of the arguments rather than on the final conclusion. Such poems are concerned more with "the sensed complexity of experience" than with the simplicity of authoritative generalization; they are recreational, Bakhti­ nian, or, as Reed sums them up, Dionysian, in contrast to Apollonian models of official dogma, instruction, and closed endings. He sets out the polarity between unresolved and resolved debate poems in a thirty-one­ item list of contrasting pairs-temporal versus eternal, mimetic versus allegorical, paradoxical versus axiomatic, and so on. As Reed argues it, works from the Carolingian Conftictus veris et Hiemis down through Lydgate's Horse, Goose, and Sheep are designed to show up the common failure "to realize that blacks and whites are most often reductive misperceptions of shades of gray"-a failure persistentlyrepeated by modern scholars. Such a position has been recurrently argued for The Owl and the Nightingale, often for The Parliament ofPawls, but as if they were exceptional; in the context of the multitude of other debates that Reed describes, they emerge as being at the center rather than the periph­ ery of the tradition. His conclusions have further implications for works such as The Canterbury Tales that contain something like debates. He has interesting thoughts to offer on The Parson's Tale and The Retractions, Sir Thopas and Melibee, and The Monk's Tale and The Nun's Priest's Tale: the last of these in particular he sees as showing the superiority of the "generic hybrid" in conveying the complexity of human experience. Such an ap­ proach suggests more that might be said about the whole work as a multivoiced debate. He concludes the book by casting his net still more widely, to gather works that contain no formal element of disputation, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras's aubade "Gaita ben," and, in the last few sentences, any other works the reader may wish to add, into his catch of writings shaped to avoid authoritative conclusions or simplifying moral endings. In one of the most interesting sections of...