Dolores L. Cullen's Chaucer's Host:Up-So-Doun, a book apparently intended for a general audience, aims both at instructing its readers how to read Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as an allegory, and also, more specifically, at understanding the defining role that the Host plays in this allegory. She announces her bold thesis early on in her study: Chaucer's Host is an allegorically encoded figure of the Host, the Eucharist, Christ himself guiding the pilgrims to Canterbury/heaven, and, therefore, Cullen spends over half of the book preparing us for this claim by repeatedly asserting that the poem is an allegory and by attempting to teach us to read allegory as a discourse that hides what the poet is actually saying, before she proceeds to decode the Host, unveiling finally what no one has noticed since Chaucer penned his poem.
After a "Preface" that introduces not so much her argument about, but rather her enthusiam for, Chaucer and his "word game" (13), her first chapter sets up in four pages, as its title indicates, "The Problem," which turns out to be a problem with how critics read Chaucer (not allegorically). In her second chapter, "The Proposal," Cullen begins to explain, again in four pages, her thesis about the Host. In the next four chapters -- "Why Would Chaucer Create Covert Complexities?," "How Could Chaucer Accomplish a Hidden Meaning?," "Why Hasn't This Identity Been Seen Before?," "What Makes Discovery Possible?" -- Cullen ranges widely, sampling from a variety of medieval texts, as she tries first to demonstrate Chaucer's allegiance to allegory -- because, she argues, allegory was the dominant literary discourse of the Middle Ages, ergo it was for Chaucer, too; second, as she sketches somewhat broadly for us the threatening historical forces (Cullen reminds us several times that Chaucer lived in the age of the Great Schism and the Inquisition, for instance) that would make Chaucer wish to veil the truth behind allegory; and third, as she identifies in a brief six-century overview of Chaucer criticsim why we have lost the ability to read Chaucer allegorically. In the last half of the book, Cullen becomes more analytical, "collecting" (76) in her chapter, "What Are the Characteristics of the 14th-Century Image of Christ?" the variety of these images available in the Fourteenth Century, though she is especially interested in late medieval drama. Finally, Cullen gives us a very long chapter in which she reads very particularly the words in which Chaucer imagines his Host. To give one example, she reads the line in which the Host tells the pilgrims "But ye be myrie, I wol yeve yow myn heed" (I 782), which she translates for her readers as "But be you merry, I will give you my head!", and continues, "Once again we could pass over the words, sidestep the gesture. But don't you find the words startling?" We are supposed to be startled. First, we can see this as a lightly veiled offer of Christ's willingness to die for pilgrims. Consider a second, and equally significant, interpretation of the offer of his head, which is an image of the Mystical Body, a way of meditating upon man's relationship to God (109).
It may be obvious by now that Cullen's is an astonishingly naive book, though not necessarily because she wants to find Christ among Chaucer's pilgrims, and one, consequently, that I would consider really, really wrong for its intended non- specialist audience. A full catalogue of the book's problems would be unhelpful and, finally, unkind to the book's author, for there is much that Cullen simply does not know about Chaucer, about literature, about medieval literature and the Middle Ages, about Middle English, and about scholarship on any of those topics. Cullen holds, the back cover informs us, an M.A. (presumably in English) from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. For this book, we are told, she is in an "omnidirectional pursuit of anything and everything that might prove helpful in playing the word game" (39), that is, reading Chaucer. Unfortunately, she does not know what would help, and what actually does hurt, her project.
Cullen strikes me as an innocently inadequate reader of Medieval literature in general and Chaucer in particular. What's troubling about this book is not so much her free ranging through a variety of works, assuming that the same discursive and ideological rules and strategies govern, for example, the Cursor Mundi, The Dream of the Rood, and the Wakefield Cycle; it's not, similarly, her dismissive and/or distortive readings of literary scholars -- two noteworthy examples of the latter are Angus Fletcher on allegory and V.A. Kolve on medieval drama and on Chaucer's imagery, and a noteworthy absence is Robertson, who gets only a few relatively inconsequential citations. Nor is it her inability with Chaucer's language (see above example), nor her unfamiliarity with scholarly procedure -- her Chaucer citations (provided in the endnotes because she translates Chaucer herself in the text) come from Baugh's 1963 Chaucer's Major Poetry, and she turns to the 1968 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica for her background information on, to name a few examples, "Lollards" and the "Plague." To be frank, Cullen -- more enthusiast than scholar -- needed to be saved from herself by the editors at Fithian Press (which, a representative of that press told me, publishes books on a variety of subjects from trade books to poetry), who at least might have helped somewhere between manuscript submission and printing by getting some advice from a Chaucer scholar. On occasion, in fact, Cullen can show evidence of sophisticated thinking: at one point she begins to address, for instance, the gaps that Chaucer leaves in his narrative and the attention he simultaneously draws to those gaps -- but then with unintentional self-irony, unlike Chaucer, she covers the subject in a moderate-length paragraph, only promptly to drop the subject, producing the same kind of gap in her critical narrative that she has been describing, and moves on to another (44).
More troubling to me is that Cullen, after two college degrees and her own study, is simply unable to read the Canterbury Tales as literature, which makes me worry about its potential effect on the novice reader of literature for whom the book was written. She seems completely uninterested in, or unaware of, the narrative frameworks in which Chaucer embeds his poem, especially, the most obvious of Chaucer's frameworks: the poem as a tale-telling game. And not only is she fully insensitive to the dynamics of humor and aggression that inform the Host's role in administering the game, she resists a critical reading of him at all -- not only does she bristle at unflattering interpretations of him (she is particularly upset that scholars cast him as money grubbing), she has no inclination to see him as part of the human world of the pilgrims. Hard to do, this. Even more alarming, she is upset that we read Chaucer comically. Her final paragraph intones, "Comedy of the Canterbury Tales has held the interest of audiences for generations. We may now be ready for the serious drama behind the curtain fashioned six hundred years ago by Geoffrey Chaucer" (147). Beyond this statement's melodramatic awkwardness, it becomes her final confession that Chaucer has not made her laugh or even amused her. If there was ever a litmus test I would support being applied to Chaucer criticism, especially to a book that would introduce Chaucer, it would not be any particular critical or philosophical approach, but rather whether or not the critic understands a joke. By the way, in case anyone is wondering -- she does not choose to examine the Host's response to the Pardoner and his tale.
But most troubling of all for me is that for all the book's religious investments, Cullen grants the poem itself no power in its "revelations" to transform or raise our understanding, for the Middle Ages or for now, of the complicated, conflicted desires for meaning and transcendence that inform whatever texts we write and pilgrimages we choose to pursue. Perhaps, finally, I can't expect her to give me much insight into issues concerning modes of medieval literary construction (though, again, that's what she wanted to do for the uninitiated), but I could at least have had some sympathy for even some touchy- feely effusing about how Chaucer can teach us to be better or, at least, less self-deceived people, because I believe Chaucer can do that, too, though in a different way than Cullen might imagine. Cullen's Canterbury Tales contains truths that, when correctly interpreted, only produce a self- satisfaction at discovery and possession, and such truths render, paradoxically, the cultural formulations of our myths, mysteries, and aspirations as a code that one breaks. Chaucer in his self-irony and in his narrative complexities, I think, approaches his culture's modes of thinking and desiring much more humbly and respectfully. I would like the new reader of Chaucer to learn that first.