The Poetics of Personification by James J. Paxson (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER after the introduction of the printing press into England. For that, as well as for an exceedingly skillful presentation ofa very controversial argument, we owe Ann Nichols a great debt of gratitude. GEORGE R. KEISER Kansas State University JAMES J. PAXSON. The Poetics ofPersonification. Literature, Culture, Theory Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii, 210. $49.95. This book is more ambitiously theorized than its title might initially sug­ gest. Writing explicitly in the tradition ofPaul de Man's Allegories ofRead­ ing, and making considerable use of the narratologies of Gerard Genette and Paul Ricoeur, Paxson applies poststructuralist hermeneutics and phe­ nomenology to the allegorical practices of canonical texts that (with the exception ofSpenser's Faerie Queene) have more usually attracted traditional literary historical approaches. His project takes as its special focus the mo­ ments when the discursive operations of personification within allegorical narrative serve less to "clarify meaning and reduce uncertainty than to complicate meanings and raise uncertainty" (p. 165). After a preliminary and wide-ranging survey of the history of personi­ fication theory from Cicero and Quintilian to the present day, Paxson pro­ ceeds to construct his own taxonomy of personification and its associated tropes. Examining in detail the question of what, in the various manifesta­ tions of personification, gets translated into whom, he is less interested in the deployment of "local rhetorical ornament" than in the specifically pro­ sopoetic transformations that "give face"-and, even more important, voice-to an abstraction or inanimate object, producing a figural character which may subsequently be projected into, or engender, an allegorical nar­ rative (pp. 39-42). Paxson's succeeding chapters offer sophisticated anal­ yses of Prudentius's Psychomachia, Chaucer's House of Fame and Parliament ofFowls, Piers Plowman, and The Faerie Queene. Laying particular emphasis on the relationship between the prosopoetic process and the narrative un­ folding ofallegory, he outlines the various ways in which figures ofpersoni­ fication may be understood as "textual encodings of phenomenal illusion" (p. 113). 266 REVIEWS Although his primary interest lies in the workings of personification in pre-seventeenth-century allegorical narratives, it is a twentieth-century model of allegory that determines Paxson's readings. His analyses are based on de Man's notion that literary texts tend to generate figurations of their own textuality-"allegories" of the self-referentiality of language that em­ phasize the limits of its ability to redescribe an external, material reality. He is consequently most interested in those textual moments when the narrative invention of a personification character puts into question the control of a work's internal narrative voice over the version of reality that the text strives to make present. Paxson's reading of the Psychomachia, for example, emphasizes Prudentius's disruption of his work's own internal decorum: having segregated his personifications from his representations of human figures, the author's unexpected introduction of the silent human figure of Job alongside the personified and voluble virtue of Patience re­ sults in his text's sly deconstruction of the "medieval ontology of created beings" (p. 81). Discussing Piers Plowman, Paxson suggests that the regular slippage of Will's narrative between different diegetic levels (as Will dreams and wakes, or dreams within his dreams) puts into question the transcendent significance of any of its personifications. This "self-undoing" tendency is reinforced by the way in which the poem draws attention to its own devices: the personification Anima, having told Will that it can also be called Mens or Memoria or Racio, becomes the signified for many other signifiers-as "personification personified," its appearance in the narrative offers a suggestively nominalist interrogation of the work's proliferating personifications (pp. 136-38). Paxson takes a look at other metanarratives of personification in his reading of The Faerie Queene, claiming that "the governing poetic code for Spenserian personification is the narrativization of the trope as it comes into or goes out of existence" (p. 139). For example, Spenser's narration of the disrobing of Duessa foregrounds the "making and unmaking of the personification figure's semiotic constitution" (p. 152); alternatively, in the beheading of Errour, the narration "undoes" what was "never 'factual' or material in...