Some theories appeal to us because of their cleverness and what they reveal about the intellectual facility of the theorizer. Others stimulate an "Of course!" reflex, a recognition that something has been revealed to us about the text. Michaela Grudin's book falls very much into the latter category. Indeed, she consciously diminishes her own role as interpreter in order to foreground Chaucer's role as both author and cultural commentator. "It follows," she writes, "that a cultural self-consciousness as subtle as Chaucer's should be presented insofar as possible in the author's own words, rather than be intruded upon by the contemporary jargon of awareness" (26). To some readers, such an avowed intention may bear the marks of theoretical naivete. More likely, however, is that Grudin is a product of her work environment -- small liberal arts college -- in which understandable and even useful explanations of literary texts are in demand. Whatever the reason, Grudin has written a highly readable and communicative book, which works very well as an analysis of Chaucer.
She argues that orality is linked to social order in Chaucer's writing in an important fashion. "If human voices are so various as we hear them in the Parliament of Fowls and The Canterbury Tales, how can talk promote social order?" she asks. "What, indeed, constitutes a cultural discourse? What is the place of the poet's own discourse within the human community? Why, finally, is it so important to Chaucer to bring speche to our attention?" (2). She reflects upon fourteenth-century attitudes toward speech, citing Boccaccio's reflections in De casibus that the study of speech is a means of 'reading' others, a means of understanding human nature and society. Similarly, she sees the study of speech, for Chaucer, as a way of delineating character, of drawing attention to the gulf between rhetorical skills and public understanding, and of uncovering the discontinuity of words and deeds. The portraits of the General Prologue, Grudin suggests, return repeatedly to the issue of the integrity of speech and action.
While this is interesting material, it is not a departure from previous readings of Chaucer and, indeed, somewhat self-evident in most readings of the General Prologue. Grudin's more unusual -- and ultimately satisfying -- arguments stem out of her belief that "for Chaucer, discourse does not attain its full meaning until it becomes dialogue -- until an audience enters the equation" (19). She argues that Chaucer's work suggests that no single frame, except a dialogic one, can hope to be either inclusive or objective. In a period when discourse tended to be more prescriptive than descriptive, Chaucer's work explored the ways in which speech refused to be prescribed and contained. This refusal, Grudin adds, relates directly to the arbitrary and severe restrictions that were being put upon the spoken word in the latter fourteenth century. Chaucer's artistic exploration of the possibilities of dialogue, therefore, can also be read as a strategic resistance to the political climate.
Grudin is quick to add the disclaimer that Chaucer's sense of the dialogic nature of discourse predates the period in which the English were experiencing an intensified suppression of free speech -- it is a recurrent interest throughout his poetic career.
"Taken together, phenomena such as Chaucer's treatment of discourse as a transaction (usually open) between listener and speaker, his concern with the lines of co-dependence and reciprocity that build up between listener and speaker, his captivation with miscommunication and the multiple perspectives of a narrator, his discontent with conventional structural closure, his acute interest in the literary artist's audience and, of course, his frequent return to frame narration and the evidence of the Canterbury Tales itself, all point to a more than usual fascination with speech as a social and political phenomenon." (25)
Of course.
The bulk of the book is analysis of the works of Chaucer and the extent to which they correspond to a dialogic model, not only in the speech of characters within the work, but incorporating the idea of a participatory audience to the work. She addresses the works in chronological order. In the earliest work she deals with, The Book of the Duchess, she already finds the fascination with interactive speech that she will trace in his later writing. She suggests that the poem's transactions are a means of joining together its episodes and illustrating the fundamental reciprocity of discourse. Such reciprocity demands that the speaker have not only a talent for speech, but also for listening. The implication of the need for reciprocity is that discourse is an open process that precipitates and generates initiative, controversy and revision. "There is a sense at every juncture of Chaucer's poem that in discourse the role of the listener is as significant as the role of the speaker, and by extension, the reader as significant as the fable read, the interpreter as significant as the dream interpreted" (33). Similar assessments are made of House of Fame and Parliament of Fowls. Indeed, in the third dream vision she notes that the desire to assert authority and to make a definitive statement is itself a part of the forces of disorder which speech unleashes.
Troilus and Criseyde fits her model equally well. She finds Troilus' discourse largely one-dimensional and defined by the forms of courtly love. Finally, she argues, the character is paralyzed by his own forms. In contrast, the various forms of speech of Pandarus, Criseyde and Diomede are multi-layered, responsive to changing contexts and pragmatic. Lovemaking or seduction, like language, involves the readiness of two, speaker and listener. This is particularly evident in the passage between Pandarus and Criseyde. The ending of the poem, Grudin adds, seems to be Chaucer showing us that speech can show us numerous and sometimes conflicting realities. Although we may look for closure, the poem gives us, instead, a different, more difficult alternative, a part of the "newly discovered potentiality of speech" (83).
This theme of the potentialities of speech is continued in Grudin's discussion of the Canterbury Tales. In these tales, she sees Chaucer's propensity for the dialogic as not only a dramatic matter, but also an ethical and political one.
"[D]ialogic almost always confronts authority, exposing alternative discourse to critical contradiction. The dialogic structure reveals culture as an interplay of multiple authorities, some agreeing and some disagreeing, some operating from the top down and some from the bottom up; authoritative discourse belongs to any speaker who speaks within the embrace of authority, whether that authority be political, erotic, social, or religious." (84)
Accordingly, in the initial exchange of tales between the Knight and the Miller, the Knight thinks he has closed his tale, but for the Miller, this is not the case, for he cannot accept the Knight's discourse without accepting its values. In the competitive world of the Miller's Tale, speech is retribution and a fart as effective as words. In turn, the Reeve's Tale suggests conflict with the intellectual aspect of discourse more than its political aspect. In the Reeve's Tale, the miller "satirizes an art in which space itself is confected of nothing but discourse" (89).
Grudin analyses The Clerk's Tale as representing an all- encompassing philosophical and social order, presided over by an absolute ruler. Ultimately, she extends her analysis to The Wife of Bath's Tale, The Squire's Tale, The Franklin's Tale, The Monk's Tale, and The Manciple's Tale. In her analysis of The Wife of Bath's Tale, Grudin once again calls upon contemporary social conditions, specifically the repressive measures used against women's speech. She argues that these measures testified to the political frustration which women might have vented in language, and the male desire to keep disruptive manifestations in check. Chaucer, therefore, uses the figure of a woman, Grudin suggests, as a means of critiquing deductive readings which deny empirical reality. She sees this tale as the most radical example of the dialogic in the tales, in which there is no closing off of the speaker, except the critic's own, and as offering an anti-perspective to the intellectual authority systems of the time. This reading, although convincing, is slightly disappointing. Unfortunately, Grudin treats the Wife with too much respect. She misses the opportunity to have fun with the many-layered ambiguity the character represents, seeing her instead as simply a representative of "common sense, emotion and gusto," and a challenge to the exclusiveness and closed nature of systems.
Altogether, however, Grudin's book is as convincing as any single-focused analytical approach can be, in part because of the author's own attempts to avoid taking on an authoritative voice, and to engage instead in her own dialogic relationship with Chaucer's texts and with us, the readers of her work. She reiterates that the consciously imitated oral quality of Chaucer's work shows his interest in the social interactions of discourse. She suspects that he finds misunderstanding more fascinating than understanding. And she denies that the unfinished state of so many of Chaucer's works is, in fact, a defect in them, for in thus asking the audience to complete the text, Chaucer evades structural closure in favor of a continuing process that involves listener as well as speaker, and reader as well as writer. Grudin herself is palpably engaged, and encourages us to interact in the process through the insight and readability of her book.