Earnest Exuberance in Chaucer’s Poetics: Textual Games in the Canterbury Tales by Wolfgang E. H. Rudat (review)

REVIEWS WOLFGANG E. H. RUDAT. Earnest Exuberance in Chaucer's Poetics: Textual Games in the Canterbury Tales. Lewiston, N.Y.; Queenston, Ontario; and Lampeter, Dyfed, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. Pp. viii, 340. $79.95. The reader of Wolfgang E. H. Rudat's new book on The Canterbury Tales should proceed forewarned: Rudat's critical "earnest" so fully unbalances Chaucer's "game" that what accrues is an entirely unfunny vision of the poet's art. According to Rudat, we are to see that Chaucer habitually im­ beds the gems of his "sentence" in the dung of obsessively scatological, sexual, and irreverent allusion. Rudat's method for uncovering buried meaning is to tease out the minute, physical, and secret "facts"--especially the dark and dirty compulsions--supposedly hidden in the highly private lives of Chaucer's pilgrims. Not content to stop there, Rudat is eager also to tell us the intimate foibles of even the pilgrims' own created characters. Hardly does a Chaucerian creature exist, it seems, without a secret "priv­ etee" to be exposed and critically plundered. The tales and inner lives that Rudat dissects at most length are those of (or those created by) the Miller, the Prioress, the Pardoner, the Clerk, and the Merchant. That Chaucer has a propensity for shocking us and for flirting with taboos is, ofcourse, a reasonable starting premise, well enough documented in The Miller's Tale if nowhere else. One must nevertheless wonder at the sheer brashness and perverse inventiveness of Rudat's interpretations. When Rudat boasts frequently that his new readings will ultimately prove "definitive" (e.g., pp. 3, 100), he is challenging the critical community to assess them rigorously. Some of the observations in this book could poten­ tially lead to intriguing lines of development. For example, Rudat sees in the opening lines of Th/t:ieneral Prologue an overt figure of "cosmic-union," which he claims Chaucer derived from Virgil and then used allusively in several tales: it is pathetically revised in the bedroom scene between Janu­ ary and May and further perverted in the idea of a Second Flood that threatens John and Alison. The latter allusion leads one, according to Rudat, to imagine that the deluge will consist ofGod's divine ejaculate, an idea that brings God's retributive justice (and "privetee") into the Tale in a rather strange way. Such potentially interesting readings are, unfortunately, mixed indis­ criminately with many others that are extremely far-fetched, and, with next to no commonsensical gauge of which ideas are plausibly grounded and which wildly speculative, Rudat often loses his reader's forbearance. 251 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER We are, for example, treated to a detailed account of the Prioress's sexual fantasies and "actual" sexual history: despite her vocation, the woman does not believe at all in chastity; she is instead "a sex-starved victim of the economic power ofthe Church" (p. 143). Angry at her father for putting her in a convent, she is, moreover, a rampant castrater of men; her Tale succeeds in castrating not only the boyish gem ofchastity (its main victim) but also her father and Father. To Rudat there appears little doubt that The Prioress's Tale-which he reads as her "confession" (p. 104}--tells us that she is not virginal (in fact and by nature) and that, as an enforced bride of Christ, she is woefully deprived ofsexual pleasure. So she is angry at Christ, too, because He is a neglectful husband in the physical sense (p. 91). Ironic readings abound in Rudat's book, so that Chaucer himself can be com­ pletely divorced from the Prioress's sexual delusions and guilt (and her anti-Semitism), and so that a symbol apparently as straightforward as the "gemme of chastite, this emeraude" (line 609) can be turned completely inside out in meaning: ...the Prioress [as adulteress} may be subject to a barrage of stones.... [P}erhaps the Prioress is throwing a stone at herself... in the form of the "emeraude" which she creates in her story because she didn't have such a pre­ cious stone on hand when she needed it. [Pp. 98-99} Finally, Rudat tells us that "Chaucer...