Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern

College Literature, Winter 2004 by Bossiere, Camille La

Trigg, Stephanie. 2002. Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern. Medieval Cultures Series, vol. 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $22.95 sc. xxiv 280 pp.

Near her first monograph's end, Stephanie Trigg reckons that Congenial Souls "no doubt . . . has offended or frustrated many readers." Prominent among these are Chaucerians unfriendly to her "refusal to offer a reading of a single Chaucerian poem." Her decision not to do so would seem to stand in direct "contradiction with the whole purpose of writing about Chaucer": surely, so Trigg's apparently cross-purposive decision not to enter into the business of hermeneutics invites the obvious question, "What kind of Chaucerian doesn't interpret Chaucer's poetry?" (2002, 234). The answer that immediately follows is crisp, clear, altogether consistent with the hypotheses that Congenial Souls works to demonstrate. Its author's contention is this: "it's impossible to separate the reading of Chaucer from the reading of Chaucerian discourse; that when we read Chaucer's poetry, we are necessarily reading through the conventions and traditions of editorial presentation, of criticism and commentary, and of the highly socialized models of reading communities, clustered around the familiar presence of a beloved author" (235). Now, what litterateur(e), especially in postmodern times, when culture studies are anything but neglected, could take all that much umbrage at what Trigg contends here?

This reader, for one, found nothing offensive or frustrating in Congenial Souls. Quite the contrary: I found its argument sympathetic, its scholarly achievement quite impressive. Trigg took a good ten years to write her book, and it shows. The first chapter, "Speaking for Chaucer," leads into terrain rich in signs of contemporary critical theorizing, with "canon" and "community" as the salient points of reference for a reading of the metaphysical assumptions more often than not "unconsciously" held by generation after generation of Chaucerians errant in their quest to find their master or companion's "voice" (2002, 26). In Chapter two, Trigg provides an informative account of contending models of authorship latent in the different ways in which Geoffrey Chaucer is named or renamed, "'signed'" by "himself" or "countersigned, in different ways, by readers in different periods" (72). The next chapter, "Writing Chaucer: The Fifteenth Century," implicitly delivers a cautionary tale to writerly readers (Lydgate, for example) humbly deferring to their master's authority, even as they make themselves authors in their own right (and so, ironically enough, give Chaucer new life). Trigg's sustained commitment to a historist method pays substantial dividends here as she recalls a crucial difference-between the medieval concept of "auctoritas" (in the sense of communally "authoritative," "a repository of wisdom") and the (post)modern carry-or burden?-of the private "auctor" (in the sense of "the performer of the work" (77-78)).

Much to the author's credit, the subsequent three chapters of Congenial Souls are substantially informed by an awareness of that considerable difference. "Loving Chaucer in the Privacy of Print: The Sixteenth Century" nicely brings together lines of development that converge in the study. And Chapter five, "Translating Chaucer for Modernity" on the case of Dryden (whose Fables Ancient and Modem provides Congenial Souls with its title), reflects on his status as inaugurator of the modern publicly private practice of Chaucerians who "imagine themselves into the presence of Chaucer, his books, and his other readers" (2002, 148). Readers not deeply theorized, so to speak, may be expected to find themselves closer to home in the next installment of Trigg's discourse, "Reading Chaucer outside the Academy: Furnivall, Woolf, and Chesterton," written as it is in a language accessible to non-specialists. Here, she calculates something of the price professional Chaucerians naturally pay for their exclusion of amateurish populists from their fold. That price: a self-isolation more or less consistent with a political economy of private enterprising. The last chapter, "Reforming the Chaucerian Community: The Late Twentieth Century," though, has a more encouraging story to tell, by holding out the prospect of a feminist project leading the way to a more embracing, more expansively communal understanding of what a Chaucerian might be. Students in her department, so Trigg observes by way of (self)encouragement, are "ravenous for feminist and 'theoretical' medieval studies" (224). There is hope yet.

Though neither frustrated or offended by Congenial Souls, I did experience moments of irritation, perhaps even tedium. First, let me say that I am not the sort of reader disposed to identify "I" with "we," which is something that Trigg's text quite frequently does (e.g. 2002, xiii, 72, 96). Nor do I find it especially congenial to be told what I feel about what I read. The fact is that this reviewer did not experience fascination while reading of the "fascinatingly mixed picture" of authorship portrayed by Trigg's reading of the manuscripts of the Siege of Thebes (96); nor can I say that I have ever found the rhetoric of David Aers' Chaucer (1986) "most shocking" (210). But I can say that repeated encounters with "site," "imbrication," "interpellation," "rubrication," and "self-conscious," for example, eventually came close to having a deadening effect on me. Nor did I find myself stimulated by such sentences as "There is no doubt that Chaucer's name signifies a powerful cultural effect in the early fifteenth century" (74), "The technology of print did not transform literary or material culture overnight" (140), and "For Virginia Woolf, the possibility of professional academic life and its accompanying scholarly decorum was a profoundly gendered question . . ." (186). Deja lu? And then, there is the matter of "absolutely" (32, 159), for me a bete noire. "By any account and from any perspective," Trigg writes, "Furnivall is a fascinating object of study" (160).