THE POETRY OF CHAUCER

The highly regarded novelist (Grendel; Jason and Medeia) is also a Middle English scholar of long standing; his biographical companion to the present volume will appear this spring. The Poetry of Chaucer, intended for a scholarly audience, attempts an ambitious and eclectic critical survey of the Chaucerian oeuvre. Like most recent interpreters, Gardner combines elements of the school which stresses Chaucer's subtle manipulation of his first-person narrators and the rival school which insists on the expressly doctrinal purposes of all medieval Christian art. In addition, Gardner convincingly argues that the 14th-century "nominalist" controversies underlie the structure of the Canterbury Tales and the House of Fame; tries to show the medieval psychology of the tripartite soul at work in character and motivation; reinterprets a great part of the Canterbury Tales in the light of contemporary anxiety over the limits of royal authority. Yet all of these excellent purposes are continually hampered by factual vagueness (as when Gardner suggests that the nominalist thinker Occam preceded Roger Bacon) and by a tendency to break down into a mass of unselective detail. For example, the attempt to link the three books of the House of Fame with the three branches of the trivium requires so many minor jugglings and qualifications that all sense of narrative proportion and continuity is lost. Unselective pun-huntings and Bible-ransackings abound, and one continually thinks of forests and trees. Does John in the Miller's Tale really have to be named after the author of the Apocalypse? Should the less polished part of the Canterbury Tales be redeemed as "intentionally bad art" or unappreciated masterpieces of irony? Quite possibly—but Gardner presents the case with very little sense of alternatives. He is a critic of important perceptions—"In his best works, Chaucer makes the play of artifice against natural voice not simply a poetic technique but a dialectic method, a means of perceiving." Yet his broader insights are dissipated when he attempts to apply them closely. For all his obvious love and learning, Gardner has failed to make his own words, as Chaucer made his, "cousin to the deed.