Modern Language Review

It is a pleasure to review a book so crisp and clear about its structure and stakes, a divisio at the beginning of every section, all the critical conversations it intends to join scrupulously tagged and chronicled. The stakes, then. First, the book argues from new interpretations of manuscript evidence that Fragments IV–V of the Canterbury Tales are a structural unit, and interprets them as a unified, composite assessment of the value of the literary enterprise vis-à-vis other occupations with which Chaucer personally identified. The sequence of Clerk–Merchant–Squire–Franklin and its metaliterary implications occurred to Chaucer after he had written the tales separately and assigned each its pilgrim; the links between the tales, then, are Chaucer’s final, definitive soldering of the sequence. Second, the book defines and applies a critical vocabulary to theorize and specify such value: axiology, axiological person, literary axiology, and axiological apologia. The book does not engage critical conversations about laureation or authorship (to which Robert J. Meyer-Lee has already contributed in this series), literature’s internal systems of self-assessment; instead, its Chaucer makes literature compete in a marketplace of social and generally materialistic axiologies (systems of value). What good does literature do; what use does it have; why would anyone write poetry instead of balancing customs accounts? Chaucer—that once clerkly former squire, son of a merchant, now socially positioned like a franklin—had surely made it his business to ask these questions.

The book stages an agon between alternating youthful idealist (Clerk, Squire) and mature materialist (Merchant, Franklin) axiologies. The Clerk nostalgically evokes Chaucer’s fledgling literary career, when Chaucer’s clerkish ‘non-instrumental intellectual labor’ (p. 73) of authorship resembled an accountantship in the closed literary system of The House of Fame, analogous to his day job as wool customs controller. The Merchant exposes ‘fiction’s instrumental essence’ (p. 77) as servant of desire. There is no closed literary system; January, May, and the Merchant all use fiction to get what they want in the real world. By describing unbelievable romance marvels, the Squire reasserts distinctly literary value as aristocratic social performance, but his simultaneous affirmation of unreal and real deconstructs. His literary mystification cannot hide ‘the instrumentality of all discourse and the actual ground of all value in individual desire’ (p. 169). The Franklin’s taletelling sees through magic and marvels and marriage vows as the Merchant would but leaves them intact anyway, understanding that ideals and linguistic conventions are fictions but that we need to pretend those fictions are real in order to use them, [End Page 111] fusing ‘sincerity and instrumentality’ (p. 221) to effect real social harmony and transform the real world.

The book is not subtitled ‘Chaucer’s Crisis in the Humanities’, but it could be, almost Meyer-Lee’s elegy for them. Its introductory paragraph ventriloquizes scepticism about the value of criticism on Chaucer; the last paragraph of its Introduction acknowledges that the book is probably only preaching to a choir. Its last paragraph confirms that Chaucer would probably agree with his Franklin’s assessment of and argument for ‘the value of secular literature in a fallen world’ (p. 235), but the last words of the book suggest that even that case, even for Chaucer, ‘was not to be strong enough’ (p. 235). It is hard to make the case for literature within a strictly pragmatic, materialist epistemology, an epistemology on which depend the concessions of concrete diction that irrupt even into Meyer-Lee’s prose: in colloquial translations of his own particularly knotty academic sentences (pp. 3, 32), in analogies to a parfait (pp. 10–12) and ‘chimps in suits’ (pp. 109–10). It is as if Chaucer already knew that his Tales would be fragments we would shore up against their ruin and our own.