Chaucerian Ecopoetics: Deconstructing Anthropocentrism in the "Canterbury Tales" by Shawn Normandin (review)

Chaucer is often the subject of ecocritical analysis in articles, essays, and book chapters, but rarely are whole monographs devoted solely to ecoreadings of his works. Shawn Normandin's Chaucerian Ecopoetics is, then, a welcome new study affording sustained analyses of the Canterbury Tales over the course of six chapters, but doing so through the unexpected lens of deconstruction. Ecocriticism seeks to examine, in Glenn Love's words, the ways in which "the enveloping natural world is a part of the subject on the printed page before us," or at least how it "remains as a given, a part of the interpretive context." Green readings of medieval literature expose the anthropocentric focus of their objects of study and call into question simplified hierarchies of the living within an expanded, nonhuman frame of landscapes, flora, and fauna. Normandin takes seriously Jonathan Bate's argument that "ecocriticism should do more than provide ideology critiques" (18) and, like Bate, he turns to Paul de Man, who shows that language must mediate literary representations of nature and that this mediation perpetuates a gap between "the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural." The result of this approach is a series of vigorous and lively readings that unapologetically embrace Chaucer's anthropocentrism while, at the same time, illustrating the manner in which the poet's use of rhetoric and literary form "demystifies the vanity, paranoia, and bad faith attendant on the pretense that humans are ontologically superior to or radically different from other lifeforms" (6).

Chapter 1 introduces the book's methodology and quickly exchanges anthropocentrism for anthropotropism, a term typically used by theologians to describe narratives of God's turning to humanity. In their attacks on anthropocentrism, ecocritics unwittingly reaffirm humanity's singular ability to critique itself and to solve the very environmental crises for which it is responsible. An attention to anthropotropism, instead, befits Normandin's formalist approach, highlighting moments in the Canter-bury Tales when the narrative shifts focus from nonhuman to exclusively human interests—such as when, in The Pardoner's Tale, the three rioters stop seeking Death (plague) and redirect their animosity at one another. But this anthropotropic lens also illustrates how Chaucer's perceived anthropocentrism "undercuts [the human's] conceptual coherence and compromises its aesthetic appeal" (10). Normandin's reading stems, in part, from de Man's own ecopoetics, which foregrounds not the interdependence and entanglement of all life but, rather, an "apartness" from ourselves and other forms of life that every living thing shares in the world (20). Chaucer's ecopoetics within the Canterbury Tales, with its "vivid mimesis and linguistic intricacy," constitutes ripe ground for analyzing "literature's divergent capacities for connection and withdrawal" (24).

Chapter 2 foregrounds The Knight's Tale's literary language as a means for interaction and incongruence between nature and culture. The narrative's reconciliation of noble design and chaos never overcomes an implicit ecophobia evident in the extravagant destructions of the forest grove for Theseus's war-arena and Arcite's funeral pyre or, subtler, in the macabre imagery of Mars's temple. The Knight's Tale's ekphrasis of the murals within this temple, including the frightening darkness of the Thracian forest, works ironically to emphasize and expose the constructed nature of these images, that they are "peynted" (KnT, I.1975). Ekphrasis, further, confounds the narrative's thrust through its very form—a diachronic series of sentences constituting the description of a synchronic image. Time is out of joint in The Knight's Tale, a fact illuminated also by the Knight's oft-cited occupatio (Normandin, instead, prefers praeteritio) in which he catalogues fourteenth-century English species of trees (I.2919–24), which affords narrative dissonance within the ancient Greek setting. This dissonance abounds in the tale's conclusion, in Theseus's proclamation of the First Mover's (Jupiter's) dominance despite our having just read how Saturn—the very form of...