Literary Value and Social Identity in the "Canterbury Tales." by Robert J. Meyer-Lee (review)

Early in Literary Value and Social Identity in the "Canterbury Tales," Robert Meyer-Lee entertains the possibility that his readers will question not the models of literary value that Chaucer interrogates in the tales of the Clerk, Merchant, Squire, and Franklin—the central focus of the book—but rather the inherent value of Chaucer studies itself, as well as Meyer-Lee's own work within it. "Some may wonder what I have to contribute to the centuries-old project of Canterbury Tales criticism that does not merely retread much-worn tires," he writes. "More skeptical readers (if they get even this far) may question my assumption that the project of Chaucer criticism—by which I mean interpretation of Chaucer for its own sake—is itself still worthwhile, even if I do have something new to add to it" (1). While these lines may initially scan as a bit overly self-effacing from an important scholar with one well-received monograph and a series of influential articles already under his belt, the trepidation Meyer-Lee expresses hints at anxieties that many medievalists feel about the relevance of literary criticism in a world increasingly beset by acute political, social, and (as of this moment) epidemiological turmoil. Equally powerfully, it suggests more local anxieties about the relevance of Meyer-Lee's specific brand of criticism, which focuses resolutely on Chaucer's work in its own historical context, to a medieval studies increasingly and urgently engaged with contemporary concerns. Meyer-Lee's rigorous research, cogent argumentation, and nuanced consideration of the questions of axiology animated by Chaucer's work will make Literary Value and Social Identity in the "Canterbury Tales" an important and lasting touchstone for all scholars of Chaucer.

Opening with the important recognition that the pilgrims, or axiological persons (15), of Fragments IV and V "most overlap with those several identities that characterized [Chaucer's] own social existence" (3), Meyer-Lee argues that the four linked tales of these fragments articulate a cohesive dialectical arc along which Chaucer poses and evaluates a series of axiological apologias, each one offering a provisional justification for the time, effort, and capital required for the creation of imaginative literature. Such a project, as Meyer-Lee notes, would have seemed particularly salient for Chaucer himself, whose literary production always existed in some degree of competition with his varied "day jobs": courtier, esquire, controller of wool customs, clerk of the King's works, member of Parliament, forester. The Clerk of Oxford begins that project in earnest, a pilgrim trapped in the vaguely suspended adolescence often associated (fairly or unfairly) with university study. And indeed, it is the "imagined, idealized axiological environment of the university" (73) that Meyer-Lee sees as driving the Clerk's apologia, a meta-axiology inflected by the sophistical disputation of the university student, which does not entertain a singular conception of literary value but rather offers the "possibility of some number of multiple, conflicting conceptions" (55), none of which the Clerk unambiguously embraces. That position—shifting, idealizing, endlessly deferred and essentially multivalent—becomes for Chaucer the opening articulation of literary value within the four-pilgrim sequence.

Like some hard-bitten businessman alternately bemused and irritated by his son's fondness for philosophical insolubles, the Merchant emerges as the paternalistic counterpoint to the Clerk, demonstrating in his tale of January and May an axiology grounded solely in the instrumentalization of literature. Literary fiction has value, suggests the Merchant, only insofar as it is in some way fungible or translatable, only insofar as it leads to the fulfillment of desires outside itself. Such a position has been adumbrated by other critics attuned to the cynicism of the Merchant's vision; however, Meyer-Lee details with admirable clarity how the "jocular, biting, knowing irony" (99) of the fabliau, as well as the axiological person of the Merchant himself, transmutes the idealistic...