Chaucer and the Subject of History by Lee Patterson (review)

REVIEWS Tales circulation. In an anthology devoted to the love of God (and includ­ ing a form of confession, fols. 24v-29v, 31), I cannot imagine any other appropriate Canterbury tales, but I can imagine a production team that knew Chaucer's whole collection simply ignoring most of it in favor of a brief yet precise and comprehensive sacramental tract that they tailored to fit the manuscript. In the analysis of these and other copies Owen fre­ quently raises telling and provocative points. But, as in various other instances, scholars of greater codicological acumen will need to test these points thoroughly. They will then bring Owen's useful first assay at a full transmission history toward completion. RALPH HANNA III University of California, Riverside LEE PATIERS0N. Chaucer and the Subject ofHistory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Pp. xiv, 489. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper. Chaucer andthe Subject ofHistory has been much anticipated as a major contribution to the "historicizing" reinterpretation of Chaucer's poetry. In fact, this impressive, ambitious study manifests resistance as well as ad­ herence to the New Historicism. In his editorial introduction to Literary Practice and Social Change in England, 1380-1530 (1990), Patterson subscribes wholeheartedly to Fred­ ricJameson's motto "Always historicize!" (p. 1). By contrast, the afterword to the present work offers a more nuanced credo: "Think socially" is one of the mottos that has been in my mind as I tried to understand the shape of Chaucer's career and the claims of his writing.... In this book I have tried to think socially about Chaucer.In terms ofscholarly practice, this has meant locating each ofhis texts in relation to a discourse-a specific set oftexts and practices-that can make explicit the social meaning of his poetry.... None­ theless this program has been tempered, at times even countered, by a different concern.For surely it is a mistake to think that the only meaning worth explicating is social meaning.... However much they may have served to mystify the concrete relations of social power, neither liberalism nor individualism can be simply ban­ ished into the outer darkness of the politically incorrect. [Pp.423-24) Hence Patterson renounces "absolutizing, totalizing schemes" in favor of "the specific, the particular, the local, and the contingent," because it is 251 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER "here that the relationship between the individual and the social, in all its irreducible complexity, becomes visible.It is finally this relationship, as it is worked out in both Chaucer's poetic career and in his writing, that I have tried to understand" (p.425; author's italics ). In the introduction to Chaucer and the Subject ofHistory, Patterson defines this relationship in terms of two impulses battling for primacy in Chaucer's poetry.One is a "modernist" impulse to deny historical process a role in the construction of subjectivity. (Patterson relates this impulse to Chaucer's socially "anomalous situation....Not bourgeois, not noble, not clerical, he nonetheless participates in all these communities. Surely this sense ofmarginality...is related to the sense ofsubjectivity, the sense ofa selfhood that stands apart from all community" [p. 39; author's italics].) The other is a vivid perception of history as inescapable, language as inherently equivocal, and character as contingent, changeable, and thus subject to temporality. Hence "the Chaucerian imagination is at once caught within the middling world of history and haunted by the dream of origins" (p.20), and as a result the poetry "everywhere records the attrac­ tion of modernity but is finally unwilling to annul its own historicity" (p.2 1).In short, Chaucer's famous, almost universally applauded fascina­ tion with "character" functions "as one term in an oppositional dialectic constituted on the other side by history, ...the persistent presence of the past and the pressure of social realities" (p. 11). Chaucerandthe Subject a/History traces this dialectic through two main phases in Chaucer's poetry, each occupying four of the book's eight chap­ ters.In the first phase, under the influence ofcourt culture, Chaucer avoids contemporary history by "staging the problematic of historical action in terms of antiquity" (p.25), in Anelida andArcite, Trot/us and Criseyde, The Knight...