Let me deal first with my own disappointment. I expected this collection of ten essays to contain substantial new work. But with the exception of one essay all of the chapters have previously appeared in other places. Presented here in only "lightly revised" (ix) versions, they are also, as Lee Patterson admits, "quite disparate" (viii). Despite his attempt to argue that they share a common set of concerns, they remain rather stubbornly their original, singular selves. And they are not recent; save the new chapter, the essays date from 1981 to 2001. So this volume is not a monograph in the usual sense of the word. No rationale for the collection is offered, and the essays bear no necessary relation to each other. That a university press would seek to publish a book like this says something about the politics of academic publishing. However, Acts of Recognition represents half a career of reading and thinking about medieval texts from one of the leading critics in medieval studies. Approached in this way, as a kind of retrospective of Patterson's particular brand of influential historicist literary criticism, the volume is undeniably rich and interesting.
The "Preface" begins by acknowledging "the grip of the past on the present" and the "responsibility of the present to the past" (vii). So far, so general. These twin "dialectics" impose an obligation on the critic to do justice to the past, but--and here things get more interesting--they also lead to greater self-awareness: "only in understanding the dead as fully and accurately as we can are we able to understand ourselves" (viii). Patterson here means society as a whole, but it's hard not to read this also as an affirmation that the critical method he advocates is a form of moral education and self- making. Above all, he claims, "whatever the text...and whatever the people..., the values at issue remain contemporary values" (viii), by which Patterson intends not just that all criticism is inevitably presentist but that the past enables us to understand the present. These are generalisms; the essays, however, offer greater specificity.
A key phrase is "act of recognition" (219), which gives the book its title. Taken from the chapter "'Rapt With Pleasaunce': The Gaze from Virgil to Milton," the phrase describes a moment in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy when the anxious prisoner fixes his gaze on Lady Philosophy. It's an example of what Patterson calls "the entranced gaze upon a significant image" (218), a gaze that Patterson finds repeatedly in medieval and Renaissance literature, and for which Book I of the Aeneid provides "a crucial precedent" (218). The point of this gaze is "not only that full knowledge cannot be mediated by images, but that the gaze is one pole of a dialectic of which the other is some form of discursive exposition" (218). (Patterson's prose has a number of these overwrought moments). Put more simply, because rapture is an evasion of understanding, a guide is needed to break the trance. But the incomplete gaze of rapture is complemented by the guide's self-scrutinizing inner gaze. Lady Philosophy withdraws into "self-contemplation as she prepares to unfold the mysteries of the summum bonum to her pupil" (219). So the act of recognition is a double gaze: from pupil to teacher, and from teacher to within herself. I would argue that for Patterson this pedagogical scene is analogous to the scene of literary interpretation. When we turn our rapt gaze on a medieval work, we must avoid being merely seduced. Rather, we need a wise (Virgilian) guide--Patterson himself?--to "disarm its dangerous seductions and...unlock the riches its object contains" (218). But that guide must also engage in self-searching in order for the value of the object/text to be recovered "at the highest level" (219). I am not entirely sure what this last phrase means, but the metaphors in this passage figure the critic in several flattering poses: as sacred interpreter, as sober contemplative, and as heroic wrester of concealed meaning from the text.
Although Patterson elsewhere in this volume abjures a humanist agenda, because it privileges the autonomy of the individual and ignores the shaping role of "social practices and institutions" (12), his focus here on the elucidation of textual richness and on what Heather Love calls "the ethical exemplarity of the interpreter" [1] reveals his critical practice to be strongly humanist. As Love argues, the figure of the privileged messenger has been highly important in "maintaining a humanist hermeneutics in literary studies," because of the pedagogical imperative inherent in much literary criticism. There is, then, a certain logic to the fact that Patterson's second chapter, "The Disenchanted Classroom," is on teaching Chaucer, because at the heart of his historicist theory and practice is a humanist pedagogical model. This chapter contains the clearest articulation of his critical method, one familiar to us because it is still the dominant way of reading medieval texts: "Historicism wants to understand nothing less than what Chaucer meant when he wrote his poems, what the poems meant to the society within which they circulated, and...how the poems connect not just to the self-aware intentions of the poet and the explicit expectations of his audience but to larger patterns of social practice and ideology" (46). The main problem with this is that it views both the archive and texts as self-contained and inert. As John Frow argues, "The historicity of texts is not a matter of the singular moment of their relation to a history that precedes them, because that moment is in its turn endowed with meaning in a succession of later moments, as well as in the lateral movement of texts across cultural boundaries." [2] Far from being a threat to historicism, this dynamic means that we need not less but more history. It's important to be clear, as well, that Patterson, unlike Fredric Jameson, isn't interested in what the text doesn't know about itself. He doesn't read as a resisting reader but as the very opposite: one that wants to fall in with the text.
Still, Patterson has an extraordinarily impressive and eclectic range. He writes on Chaucer (Canticus Troili, The Complaint of Mars, Troilus and Criseyde), but most of the essays are on non-Chaucerian topics: pedagogy, Sir John Clanvowe's poetry, Thomas Hoccleve's Series (and the Regiment of Princes, Letter of Cupid and Male Regle), Lydgate's poetry, the "heroic laconic style" (from Beowulf to the self-sacrificing Captain Lawrence Oates of Scott's hapless Antarctic expedition), Neil Ker's Epic and Romance, the genre of Chaucerian complaint, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal. But he also refers, in passing, to texts as diverse as Mum and the Soothsegger, Gower's Tripartite Chronicle, Piers Plowman, the Nibelungenlied, A.E.W. Mason's 1902 book The Four Feathers, the Aeneid, Dante's Commedia, and Paradise Lost . The book also treats the history of medieval criticism (Exegetics vs. New Criticism), book history (a chapter on Beinecke MS. 493, the manuscript that contains Hoccleve's Series and Regiment of Princes, and Lydgate's Danse Machabre), poetic identity, Henry V's political identity, and ecphrasis.
Patterson moves around and between these texts and their social contexts with enviable dexterity and impressive erudition. By and large, he does not discuss religious or devotional texts, apart from Hoccleve's Remonstrance against Oldcastle. But he concludes the book with a chapter on St. Francis of Assisi. Originally written in 2001, the essay adumbrates some themes that medievalists have since taken up in more theoretical terms, especially human-animal interactions (the wolf of Gubbio) and Franciscan attitudes to nature more generally: the meaning of the wilderness; the Book of Nature; nature as an occasion for contemplation; saintliness as a way of recovering "the original paradisal relation of man to animal" (238). Patterson is moved above all by the conflict Francis experienced between his humanity and his sanctity. Francis's piety, he argues, is "displayed and achieved only through strategies that witness to the very complexity he wishes to erase" (248): this is an incisive and novel insight into devotional self-making.
The one new essay, "Genre and Source in Troilus and Criseyde"(Chapter 8), is somewhat disappointing. It seeks to answer two linked questions: why the poem is defined as a "tragedye" and why Chaucer used Il Filostrato as a source. Boethius's definition of tragedy as "a dite of prosperite for a tyme, that endeth in wrecchidnesse" is not, Patterson maintains, the model for Chaucer; rather, tragedy means (via Dante) an epic of antiquity that treats of public matters and of history. Pausing for a moment to dispose altogether of the wrong-headed notion that the poem is a romance (medieval romances deal with knightly adventures, not the amorous and the erotic), Patterson argues that Il Filostrato was chosen because Chaucer wanted "to explain the meaning of an original catastrophe by exploring the origins of a catastrophic love affair" (208): both are a failure of "trouthe." But it is not possible to conclude from the poem what the relationship is between "small individual choices" and "the large events of history" (214). Patterson says that these questions are "pressing" (214), but there does not seem to be much at stake in his raising them.
The press's decision to let the essays stand with only minimal stylistic revisions impacts considerably on the volume's usefulness. The opposition between exegetics and New Criticism, so brilliantly analyzed in "Historical Criticism and the Development of Chaucer Studies" (Chapter 1), was important in 1987 but it no longer "remains in force" (2). Patterson has missed the opportunity to bring the essay up to date by integrating subsequent discussions, such as Carolyn Dinshaw's 1989 "Reading Like A Man" [3] or Steven Justice's "Who Stole Robertson?", [4] or indeed by showing how the opposition plays out in the discipline now.
A new generation of readers will nevertheless find much here to provoke and entertain. Patterson is at his most engaging in his polemical mode, as when he argues that "the literary sensibility of the contemporary academy is still dominated by a romance aesthetic" (175) or when he briskly disposes of pedagogical clichés about social empowerment that take their cue from Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He also touches, albeit in rather defeatist mode, on urgent questions facing the humanities today: "does writing have any effect upon the world, whether moral or practical, or is it simply ornament and compensation?" (183). He does not, however, provide any answers.
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Notes:
1. Heather Love, "Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn," New Literary History 41 (2010): 371-91 (at 375).
2. John Frow, "On Midlevel Concepts," New Literary History 41 (2010): 237-52 (at 244).
3. Carolyn Dinshaw, "Reading Like a Man: The Critics, The Narrator, Troilus, and Pandarus," in Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 28-64.
4. Steven Justice, "Who Stole Robertson?" PMLA 124.2 (2009): 609-15.