Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Peter W. Travis Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale . Peter W. Travis. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. xi+443.

2013; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/670289

1545-6951

Norm Klassen,

Medieval Literature and History

Previous articleNext article FreePeter W. Travis Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Peter W. Travis. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. xi+443.Norm KlassenNorm KlassenSt Jerome’s University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA 443-page book on a 626-line poem about a rooster must be up to something, and one can tell pretty quickly that it must be something good, for Peter Travis writes with authority, ambition, generosity, and wit. He makes clear from the outset that the reach of his project extends well beyond the tale itself; he models a way of reading that applies to other Chaucerian texts as well and includes the recovery of significantly close reading, combined with a deconstructive approach. Such a fusion should not come as any surprise (except that it has never been so effectively applied to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale), for as Terry Eagleton recently reminded readers of poetry, the best theorists exemplify close reading and challenge others for not reading closely enough (How to Read a Poem [Oxford: Blackwell, 2007], 2).Travis is fully aware of the difficulty of prizing apart the “nominals” (25) of Chaucer, the Nun’s Priest, and the narrator, nicely complicating (in dialogue with A. C. Spearing, among others) easy distinctions between author and narrator. In attempting to revitalize the “rather tired gerund” (25) of rereading, citing a host of contemporary theorists in the process, the author restates one of the basic tenets of allegorical reading, with which his practice has much in common. He very rightly emphasizes Derridean dissemination as the “critique of the idea that any text, literary or otherwise, can be owned, controlled, limited, or appropriated in the name of some legitimate reading or authoritative source” (17). Anxiety over control is always suggestive of an idolatry against which Travis, like Derrida, consistently warns one off. His emphasis runs the risk, however, of returning deconstruction to the level of facile, romantic petulance, which Derrida strenuously opposed when he defended reconstructing a dominant reading as an indispensible moment. In a book of this seriousness and weight, it would also be helpful for its author to engage Louis Dupré’s claim that logocentric thinking only developed into rationalism when physis, or kosmos, or natura, at the end of the Middle Ages was no longer seen to combine a physical, anthropic, and divine component: “The real problem, then, as I see it, began not with the original linking of being and logos, but with the impoverished interpretation of logos as residing exclusively in the human subject and depriving all other being of its inherent meaning” (Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993], 24).Travis has his finger on the pulse of a number of current critical concerns. Beginning with an exploration of Harry Bailly’s reading of the priest’s manly body, he offers a none-too-convincing explanation of the absence of that body from the General Prologue but an intriguing exploration of classical and neoclassical anxiety over effeminate literary language (to which he might have added Spenser as an important reader of Chaucer). Travis then begins skillfully to guide the reader through Chaucer’s parodic method with relevant elements of the medieval grammar school curriculum. Having performatively displaced a meditation on beginnings and ending, once in medias res he makes them his focal point for close reading, followed by a long meditation on Chaucer’s exploration of the essence of poetry, “which, of course, is metaphor” (20). Like Nietzsche, who desires to preserve the sheer difference of a leaf, Travis offers many wonderful instances of sensuous particularity throughout: in his regard for flowers, animals, clocks, sounds, and of course words. His exploration of the Derridean preoccupation with violence takes the form of a creatively organized historicizing meditation on four instances of political explosion that show Chaucer’s intention of “paying homage to the dissonance of history and to the noise of political turmoil with an ‘inner ear’ that appears tobe radically different from the auditory practices of his peers” (204), including the “sonic masterpiece” (22) of the fox chase in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, all of which he relates to the 1381 uprising and to poetic strategies of resistance of comfortable interpretations of political realities. Travis also explores medieval ideas of time in a detailed and ambitious chapter, though one which I think would have benefited from his consideration of Charles Taylor on “gathered time” in A Secular Age (Boston: Belknap, 2007, esp. 54–59). The penultimate chapter on veridicality and its parody simply reminds the reader that the whole book resides comfortably, and problematically, within an epistemological construal; “Moralitas” predictably offers a concluding injunction to the reader to style her or his own life.Given the scope and reach of the project, Travis naturally interacts with theology. One must be grateful that he draws attention to the potential complexity of the relationship between the realms of nature and grace by taking on the topic of analogy. In two important places, however, the author’s engagement of theology lacks resonance. His meditation on beginnings and endings suffers from the failure to reckon properly with the classical Christian understanding of the ontological gap between God and the created universe. If patristic and medieval Christians, steeped in apophasis, betray “anxiety” (119) about beginnings and endings in narrative, it is perhaps, as Eagleton suggests, because of a desire to avoid the deception of a belief in self-origination (Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009], 16). Yet there can be no sense of including God in a causal chain; God is never a causal explanation in the mundane sense, for causality itself belongs to the created order. In Christian theology, the universe is entirely contingent on the God who created it out of need-free love. The undercutting of an exemplum as “the integration of carefully selected particulars inside a controlling sentential discourse, [and] the certainty embodied in the passage itself concerning the absolute rightness of this integration” (128) is thus always salutary. Travis brilliantly shows how Chaucer achieves this critique in the opening vignette of the tale. However, he sets up a straw man in appealing to “absolute rightness” as a Christian practice leaning toward the static. He fails to dwell in the paradoxicality of nature and grace, that transcendence is not a concept that can limit God, who transcends transcendence; for Christian theology, all conceptuality is answerable to the incarnation. It is worth quoting a theologian on where this leaves Christian understanding: “We return again to the theme of the oblique character of Christian knowledge of God, discerning God as hidden in what is not God.…We are drawn into a transformed life, speech and activity in which the inexhaustible resource of the God who draws us is gradually discovered” (Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge [London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990], 52). Travis also fails to convince the reader that he could imagine how Chaucer might anticipate atheism through the thoroughness of his commitment to such a relationship between nature and grace, Chaucer perhaps contributing to the paradox, recognized by numerous theologians, that atheism is a conversation within Christianity.This challenge reaches its apex in the idea of the analogia entis in the chapter following. Travis’s metaphysical argument is in the full light of day in the chapter on heliotropes and the poetics of metaphor. By at least engaging this important concept Travis exceeds many secularist endorsements of Chaucer’s putative naturalism. Hopefully readers will appreciate how he has enlarged the conversation by tackling Ricouer on this topic. However, there is no easy consensus on analogy, as the debate that flared up recently in the pages of Nova et vetera (especially vols. 5–6 [2007–8]) attests. While Travis deals adeptly with proportional analogy, he shows rather less interest in the complexities of what Gregory Rocca calls multivocal equivocity (Speaking the Incomprehensible God [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004], esp. 93–134). I very much appreciate Travis’s retrieval of Chaucer for careful philosophical engagement when he writes that Chaucer only seems “to be far removed from the arcana of all this metaphysics” (195). However, when he posits that “While philosophical treatises are intent on purging their ontological schemata of the taint of metaphoricity, Chaucer’s portrait, with the active assistance of his readers, is intent upon proving that metaphoricity is essential, and perhaps foundational, to all discourses” (195), he is reinscribing an Arnoldian opposition. Jacques Maritain certainly would not take this view. The Church Fathers were virtually all rhetoricians. Persistent anxieties about epistemology can only eventually meet the finding of oneself in a tradition, bearing witness, where coherence (of discourse, of metaphor as showing that things only make sense in terms of other things) can become a way of thinking about participatory being. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 1August 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/670289 Views: 377Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.