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Chaucer’s Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse by Rosemarie P. McGerr (review)

Few of us these days are likely to quarrel with the proposition that Chau­ cer's poems offer challenges to interpretation rather than pat conclu­ sions. Rosemarie McGerr's contribution to reading Chaucer's openness is her steady insistence on placing the poems in dialogue with medieval (rather than modern or postmodern) discourses on the issue of closure. This strategy has the advantage of including many medieval voices, in­ teresting in themselves, in the discussion of Chaucer's poetics. There are, of course, many ways to evade closure and many kinds of closure to evade. The introductory chapter canvasses a good many of them and concludes that, although strong closure was always advised in the rhetorical treatises, medieval writers found various playful ways to keep their texts open. Although it is probably true that rhetorical theory places more stress on closure than poets deliver in practice, much of the quoted argument for closure could be interpreted as a broader call for self-consciousness about rhetorical or artistic effects. Once established as the rhetoricians' desideratum, "closure" in Chaucer's Open Books is used to suggest the assertion of unmodified truths, which is probably not the experienced sense of the endings of many, perhaps most, medieval texts. The blurred distinction between poetic closure for "greatest impact on the audience" (p. 24) and the closure of great human dilemmas (like God's view of human love) ends up claiming openness of one sort or another for most of the valued texts of the era. It would take a more detailed argument than that presented here, for example, to show that Roland is deliberately unclosed because it ends with Charlemagne's la­ ment when Gabriel commands his return to the battlefield. None the less, McGerr's discussions of so many evasions of closure in French and English texts nicely undermines a still-prevalent popular assumption that a formidable hegemony banished playfulness from medieval writing. In historicizing the issue of closure, McGerr places Book of the Duchess in the tradition of the dernande d'amour as well as that of the dream vision and Home of Fame in the circular structure of the rondeau. The two po­ ems exhibit different kinds and degrees of openness: for if the goal and conclusion of the Duchess is the "moment of recognition and sympathy" (p. 54) between the dreamer and the Black Knight, there is certainly a