Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception by Sarah Stanbury (review)

REVIEWS know their Chaucer, for example, only through a modern printed edition will have a very restricted view of their author: what texts were available, how he used them, what his methods ofcomposition were, and what he was trying to achieve. Although Chaucer is hardly mentioned in this volume, the methodology and approach as well as the questions asked by its authors can be applied to Chaucer and his work. All students of Middle English literature would profit from a careful reading of this book. N. F. BLAKE University of Sheffield SARAH STANBURY. Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Descnption and the Act of Perception. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl­ vania Press, 1992. Pp. x, 155. $22.95. This is a useful and frequently compelling book, as much an exploration of method as a study of the Cotton Nero poems. As the title suggests, Stanbury focuses on the act ofperception in Pearl, Patience, Purity, and Sir Gawain andthe Green Knight; specifically, she studies the four poems' use of"focalization," the design ofa descriptive passage both to illuminate the object being described and to represent dramatically the character, per­ spective, and situation ofthe viewer. Stanbury introduces the concept in a brief introduction that draws chiefly on Mieke Bal's Narratology (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1985) and on Alain Renoir's essays on descrip­ tion in Sir Gawain andthe Green Knight. She then introduces the concept of the focalized scene with two examples from Pearl, the garden and the Heavenly City, showing that in each scene point ofview and description are subtly interdependent. She then turns to detailed examinations ofthe four poems ofmanuscript Cotton Nero A.x. These discussions seek to "explore the construction ofdescriptive detail through ocular reception, the acts of vision that record and structure accounts of what is seen" (p. 6). Holding to this very specific program proves to be a rather tall order. While the four chapters on the poems deal with perception and interpreta­ tion and with real and figurative acts of seeing, they do not each treat focalization in the strict terms that Stanbury sets out in the introduction. The truest applications of the method are to be found in the chapters on Patience and Purity, while the Pearl and Gawain discussions take "the 279 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER construction ofdescriptive detail" in subtly different directions. This is but an observation, not a criticism: Stanbury's liberal approach to her focus permits her a mature and flexible response to the four Cotton Nero poems, allowing her to introduce useful perspectives from philosophy and ico­ nology without forcing her texts into frameworks that are less illuminating. The four chapters dealing with the individual poems are unfailingly provocative, serving especially well as a corrective to intellectualizingstud­ ies that tend to treat these works as treatises and not poems. The best chapter in my judgment is "Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside," one of the most acute and perceptive treatments of the poem that I have encountered. Focusing on the ship, the whale's belly, and the woodbine as enclosures that define Jonah's perspective as distinct from those of out­ siders, Stanbury gets to the heart of Patience's challenge to embrace the perceptualliberation ofspiritual insight. The analysis ofthese enclosures as separating or defining the viatorJonah is original and powerful: Stanbury permits us to see them as crucial venues for Jonah's and the reader's liminality. The chapter ends with the cogent observation that the tech­ niques ofdescription in Patience do not always comfortably fit their homiletic frame, for the poem's most successful and memorable story is not how to be patient but how difficult it is to attend to God in his apparent absence. [P. 92] A conclusion such as this captures Patience as a work ofart whose poet uses techniques without being driven by them. The chapter on Purity, "Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness to History" is nearly asgood as the Patience chapter. Seeing correctly thatPurity is in large measure a poem aboutsigns and their interpretation, Stanbury sets out and develops a comprehensive sense of the poem's method: By establishing a link between the reader and the spectator in the text...