Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition (review)

This book urges that the persona be reenshrined in Chaucer studies: "Let us undertake to rescue Chaucer's persona from the ghetto, returning it to the center of critical discussion—where it belongs" (196). By "Chaucer's persona," Geoffrey Gust has in mind the persona presented in the Thopas-Melibee link, the subject of his final chapter, entitled "Claiming the 'Popet.' " It is argued that a sophisticated awareness of the usage of personae was current in the Middle Ages, but then was lost to view as later periods became obsessed with reading Chaucer's work and the "popet" as straight autobiography. The rediscovery of persona awareness permits a critical restoration, and the persona is for Gust a far more justifiable trope than the postmodern concern with "subject" or "voice," partly because it is authentically medieval, and because it means the same thing anyway only under a "variant terminology" (38). Unfortunately, this simple blurring of categories is characteristic of a study that, while frequently sophisticated in its mode of expression, betrays some conceptual naïveté.

It is never really made clear why the persona is such a vital entity, beyond the generalizing insistence that, if we take the "Chaucer" who appears in his works at face value, we will not be attuned to the complexity and "productive indeterminacy" of the Chaucer text (75). It would be difficult for any modern student of Chaucer to dissent from this, and indeed much of this book is a reception history of the unenlightened search for "Chaucer the Man" that characterized criticism from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries (with the honorable exception of Dryden). But Gust's desire to forge new directions in Chaucer criticism sits unconvincingly alongside the exposé of this tradition, which is hardly blocking the way any longer: the claim that "it is still broadly true that . . . some Chaucerians see in the narrator a kind of direct relationship with Chaucer the Man himself " (44) is not only vague but for support tellingly resorts via an endnote to an article published in 1974. Gust has in effect imperfectly welded two projects, one on the Chaucer tradition, and the other entering the field of contemporary critical debate; while the first is performed competently, the second suffers in the process.

This is partly because, the final chapter aside, Gust never develops his own persona-based readings. Time and again we are told of "possibilities" that deserve "more support and exploration, and might inspire much future research" (119), or of "issues that deserve further discussion [which] I have only been able to explore . . . in a limited fashion in this chapter" (135). Such issues include a nonautobiographical reading of "Lenvoy to Scogan" and the possibility of a "tongue-in-cheek quality" to Chaucer's Retraction (117). One might retort that one reason for these limitations is the amount of space the book dedicates to reception matters, to the exclusion of the detailed treatment that would justify a range of interpretations hardly begun. The curious tone of exhortation throughout—"critics would do well to explore further the fact that . . ." (106)—makes one ask why Gust has not done the exploring himself. Again, Chapter 1 indicates the Ph.D. origin of the whole in its dutiful survey of writing relating to the persona from classical times to Salman Rushdie, space that could have been used more productively in the passage from thesis into book. And in spite of the claim to consider both persona-history and persona-theory, the emphasis on the former is to the detriment of a theoretical underpinning that would bolster the contemporary critical intervention.

Where Gust does get down to some detailed critical work is in his final chapter. After sprinkling the term "queer" and passing references to queer theory around in earlier chapters as cognates for "productive indeterminacy"—" I would call [Sir Nicholas Harris] Nicolas's life-writing usefully 'queer' in its function" (of "undercut[ting] unequivocal, positivistic readings of complex...