Chaucer and the Subversion of Form ed. by Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld (review)

At least since E. Talbot Donaldson's "Chaucer the Pilgrim," the image of Chaucer most familiar to scholars has been that of a poet whose task is "to build" from "incongruous and inharmonious parts" an "inseparable whole which is infinitely greater than its parts" (Speaking of Chaucer, 11–12). This Chaucer is a master of speech-modes, literary character, and narrative emplotment, and he uses every one of his formal tricks to produce a series of convincing verbal portraits of medieval life as it was lived. This collection of essays revisits Donaldson's New Critical approach to Chaucer, but turns the approach on its head. Where Donaldson and his many followers saw formal unity in the poet's works—or at least, in the Chaucer they knew and loved best—the essays in Rosenfeld and Prendergast's collection focus instead, as their editors put it, "on the failures of form: the resistance to poetic terminology, to formal consolation, to formal interpretation, beauty, and even to literariness itself" (9). For these writers, Chaucer is a poet not of mastery, but of subversion—a poet who sees form as a "site of challenge" (3), as an opportunity to defy, rather than fulfill, the reader's expectations of unity, congruency, and order. With this orientation, Chaucer and the Subversion of Form joins Robert Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok's recent The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form in pushing back against the focus on congruent and harmonious forms in earlier New Formalist criticism. Five years ago, formally minded medievalists looked for the outlines of a well-wrought urn in the literature they studied. In these essays, when they read for form, they look for the ordered chaos of a Rauschenberg combine—for a combination, as Prendergast and Rosenfeld put it, of "formal ambitiousness and inchoateness" that "situate the work in its specific cultural context and yet allow it to reach beyond" (6).

The chapters in this volume are divided into three groups of three. The first group, "The Failures of Form," reads Chaucer's forms against the literary techniques and philosophical ideas that these forms suggest but do not endorse. Jenni Nuttall's fine essay "Many a Lay and Many a Thing" argues that the poet's invocations of technical terms for poetry—including "lenvoy," "songe," "dytee," "ryme," "cadence," "compleynt," "lay," and "ballade"—are metacritical sites where he "pose[s] questions to himself and his readers" (22) about the activity and intentions of his verse. Ultimately, Nuttall suggests that Chaucer uses these terms not to identify the forms his poetry employs, but to signal just how much his forms differ from, and even resist, the norms of the poetry of his time. In "Chaucer's Aesthetic Resources," Jennifer Jahner explores the role that literary form has in trying, and invariably failing, to bridge the gap between the forms of things an sich and the embodiment of these forms in the particulars that we perceive. Focusing on Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.III.21—which joins a Latin copy of Boethius's Consolation, the Boece, and "The Former Age" and "Fortune" together— Jahner argues that, in contrast to Boethius and, later, Kant, Chaucer does not believe that, by grasping form, we can apprehend universal things. Instead, like Adorno, Chaucer demonstrates that our attempts to grasp form are invariably conditioned by history, and so any attempt to perceive form will be imperfect and full of "longing and uncertainty" (53). In the last essay of this cluster, Eleanor Johnson also argues that Chaucer rejects the idea that poetry is a window onto things as they really are. Her chapter, "Against Order," argues that literature, both medieval and modern, "challenge[s] the idea that linear causality is a stable hermeneutic" (61); moreover, criticism that "fetishiz[es] causality" (62) actually occludes the complex relationship that exists between people and events in literature. Johnson tests this thesis against three texts...