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Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 36, 2014, pp. 335-338 (Review)
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DOI: 10.1353/sac.2014.0033
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sac/summary/v036/36.turner.html
Access provided by College of Charleston (12 Nov 2014 22:41 GMT)
REVIEWS
Myra Seaman, Eileen Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, eds. Dark
Chaucer: An Assortment. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Punctum Books, 2012.
Pp. vii, 203. $15.00.
This book is experimental, staging different ways of responding to
Chaucer. While some contributions are mini-versions of fairly traditional scholarly essays, others use rhyme, refrains, and word-association;
weave together different stories; or juxtapose Chaucerian texts with
modern pornography or with more canonical modern literature. Beginning with a ‘‘poetic preface’’ (by Gary J. Shipley) that describes each
essay in a short, poetic paragraph, Dark Chaucer is an idiosyncratic series
of meditations on moments or scenes in Chaucer that speak to the dark
side of life. They are ‘‘essays’’ in the sense of essaying something, trying
something out.
The assortment is connected by the theme of darkness. The book
aims to move away from comic, playful aspects of Chaucer and from the
idea of resolution in Chaucer’s work, and instead focuses on ‘‘small black
pearls’’ (Joy and Masciandaro), dark moments in Chaucer’s writings. A
theme that recurs over and over again is Chaucer’s interest in the liminal
space between life and death: reanimated corpses; bodies that won’t die
when they should; sleeping, dream-like, death-like states. Lisa Weston
focuses on zombies and The Prioress’s Tale; Masciandaro on Cecilia’s
three-day half-death in The Second Nun’s Tale; Ruth Evans and Myra
Seaman on The Book of the Duchess and its uncanny bodies. As one might
expect in a book about dark Chaucer, gender is also a recurrent theme,
as authors explore some of the most disturbing female figures, abused
women subjected to violence such as Constance, Virginia, Cecilia, and
Dorigen. Several essays circle around art and artifice. Elaine Treharne,
for instance, writes about the focus on artifice in The Physician’s Tale,
connecting this to what she terms Chaucer’s ‘‘hagioclasm,’’ arguing that
the tale challenges and breaks the genre of hagiography. Myra Seaman
interestingly compares The Book of the Duchess to Sir Orfeo, analyzing how
both texts interrogate the relationship between art and mortality.
The collection is dedicated to Lee Patterson, but the greatest influence on the essays as a whole is Aranye Fradenburg, whose work on
psychoanalysis and sacrifice permeates many of the essays. Indeed, the
fact that two such different critics both gravitate toward the darkness
in Chaucer in various ways indicates the potential within this theme.
Many of the essays are interested in psychoanalytical and specifically
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Lacanian and post-Freudian approaches, but the theoretical scope is
wide. One essay (by Thomas White) focuses on manuscript layout and
reading practices; another on the reception of Chaucer by AfricanAmerican poets at the turn of the twentieth century (Candace Barrington). Several essays engage with ecocriticism and animal theory, and
some of the most memorable insights in the collection come from these
perspectives: Travis Neel and Andrew Richmond discuss the crow as a
crow, rather than as a figure for the court poet; Brantley Bryant discusses the destruction of the grove in The Knight’s Tale and the horror of
the light itself as an example of ‘‘dark counter-thinking’’ (27); J. Allan
Mitchell sensitively explores the lithic imagery of The Franklin’s Tale.
Often-neglected texts are brought to the fore in this collection: Leigh
Harrison’s essay focuses on ‘‘The Former Age,’’ and fabliaux are sidelined in favor of the much less discussed tales such as The Second Nun’s
Tale, The Physician’s Tale, and The Tale of Sir Thopas.
The diversity of the essays makes the book an assortment in many
ways. While some essays are imbued with scholarship, others analyze
texts without showing knowledge of the critical field at all. Others do
not aim to be critical essays in this sense, but instead explore themes in
creative ways. Lisa Schamess’s essay begins with an associative prologue
inspired by Beckett; Hannah Priest takes us through different versions
of the Constance story and of connected stories, focusing on the theme
of retelling through cloth and tapestry, as woman and cloth are made
blank over and over again. The refrain-based structure of the piece itself
mirrors this theme of cycles and returns as it foregrounds questions
about control, storytelling, and recurrence. Bryant’s essay uses Saturn
and Theseus’s attitudes to life (in The Knight’s Tale) as a lens on the
current state of the academic profession and the value we place on a
certain kind of sociability, exploring the experience of depression
through the words of several anonymous academics who have suffered
from mental ill health.
Some of these contributions, then, are not the kind of essays that one
usually—or ever—reads in collections about Chaucer; they are very
much written in the spirit of Punctum Books’ mission statement (http://
punctumbooks.com/about/): ‘‘neo-traditional and non-conventional
scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms.’’
Punctum aims to be a refuge for ‘‘the imp-orphans of your thought and
pen’’—to encourage creative engagement with the humanities in the
broadest sense.
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REVIEWS
In other ways too, Dark Chaucer is an unusual book. It was first imagined by the editors in April 2011 and it was published in 2012. It is
currently available free online on the Punctum Books website. Most of
us are used to working within a publishing system in which, sometimes,
we wait many months for readers’ reports, copy-edits, and proofs, and,
once the process has finally worked its way through many years, our
books are priced at a level that makes them unaffordable for almost
anyone except libraries. Punctum offers a challenge to this standard
publishing model, just as it also offers an alternative to the kind of
work we might do with, for instance, Chaucer. That isn’t to say that all
publishing needs to go down this route. Most scholarly work needs time
to bed down and to be worked through; many essays and books are not
ready for publication so soon after their conception. And, at a time when
many of us are thinking about open-access papers and journals, there is
much to be said for books costing money.
Open access sounds like a bastion of intellectual freedom and
knowledge-sharing, something that only an old-school elitist could possibly be against, but that is not necessarily the case. In the UK, the
recent, government-supported Finch Report suggested moving the costs
of publishing articles from publisher or consumer to published (i.e.
author), with the implication that only those articles that a university
department decides to fund will get published. This is a serious threat
to academic freedom. It would work against the basic principle that
work should be published based on merit, not based on where a
researcher works or on the stage of his or her career. Issues about open
access for edited collections or monographs have not yet been foregrounded, but these are issues with which we will all have to grapple.
Of course, impoverished students and independent scholars should have
access to knowledge through well-funded libraries and library subscriptions; our books should be cheaper, and the onus is on presses to find
ways to do that. But, I don’t want them all to be free. Books are the
products of many kinds of labor, and we should value that.
This is not a critique of Punctum Books, an innovative, blue-skies
concept that is enriching and diversifying the world of book production.
Rather, what I want to emphasize is that open access is problematic as
a more general aim. Punctum should make older publishers think about
how they can work on getting books out faster and more affordably.
But text-workers—editors, copy-editors, typesetters, peer-reviewers—
are worthy of their hire, even if their labor is not as physically grueling
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as it was for Hoccleve or Usk. Making a book is still a collaborative
process, and we need all of these different kinds of text-workers if we
want to be able to read actual books. It would be nice if government
funding or infinite philanthropy could make books available to all, free
at the point of use, but since that isn’t happening, I think readers and
libraries—rather than authors or their patrons—should pay for the production of books. Open access is a crucial and complicated issue: we
need to ensure fair access for the institutionally less privileged, as both
readers and as authors, and we also need to support our colleagues in
the publishing industry if we want the book as material object to continue to be part of our scholarly landscape.
Marion Turner
Jesus College, Oxford
A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The ‘‘I’’ of the Text. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. viii, 347. $32.00
paper.
In this book, A. C. Spearing revisits the central claims made in his Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and
Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The guiding conviction
there and in Medieval Autographies is that modern critics of Middle
English literature misrepresent the works that they attempt to explicate
when they apply the same set of interpretative categories to their texts
as those that were developed for the analysis of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century novels and poems. In particular, Spearing asserts,
unlike the dramatic monologues of Kazuo Ishiguro and Robert Browning, the ‘‘I’’ of a Middle English poem ‘‘may refer to a fictional individual . . . whose consciousness the writing purports to represent’’ but ‘‘it
does not necessarily do so’’ and ‘‘rarely does so in any clear-cut or systematic way’’ (13, emphasis in original). Closely bound up with this
argument is a rejection of the assumption, which Spearing finds commonplace, that a medieval author’s purpose ‘‘would be to produce a text
coherent in perspective and ideology,’’ and that ‘‘he or she could normally be expected to be perfectly in control of the text in fulfillment of
this aim’’ (3). Although ‘‘discovering planned intricacies of structure
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