Rosemarie McGerr - Chaucer’s Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse

McGerr, Rosemarie. Chaucer’s Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
(Available in the Knox Library)

Also used a book review to further understand the text:
Scala, Elizabeth. “Book Review: Chaucer’s Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse.” Notes and Queries. 46, no. 3 (1999): 379-82.
(Available on LION)

McGerr’s book plays around with ideas about the Medieval uses of closure and whether or not Chaucer rejects those concepts in his major works. I focused on the sections on the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s Retraction primarily. McGerr tries to avoid the major contributions by other Chaucerian scholars and hopes to remove any theorizing from her own discussion. The book focuses more on a historical background about the time period rather than being a strict and conventional literary theory. In this view, religious justification or “Augustinian moralism” is placed as the central basis for Chaucer’s motives and his rejection of the commonplace conclusions of other works of the time period. At times, it seems that McGerr is supporting Chaucer’s unique style of poetry and form, with his own set of meanings and interpretations of storytelling, but also falling prey to traditionalist reading of Chaucer that rejects him on subject matter and intent. McGerr’s discussion of The Canterbury Tales and its ending focuses on the juxtaposition of “the Parson’s Tale” and “Chaucer’s Retraction.” The view of the retraction is that it was written for the reader’s curiosity and search for closure and/or meaning in the ending of a work. McGerr states that Chaucer is actually showing that the reader solely provides any meaning. The discussion of the use of language also goes into the reader’s interpretation, as opposed to any of Chaucer’s intentions for the work. She feels that Chaucer may have put the whole of the responsibility on how all the poetry and prose rests on his original language and then how it is interpreted and defined. For some of the discussions on the works we had not read as well as other topics (especially on the topic of dream sequences) were hard for me to follow. I found the book review by Scala to try to understand some of the unclear portions of the text. Scala explains that there are many articles and books about Medieval culture and Chaucer that McGerr rejects or omits which might have made her arguments clearer. Some of these include: Sturges’s Medieval Interpretations, which gives a greater depiction of the background of the works in the secular and religious divide. Also she mentions John Burrows “Poems without Endings” is mentioned which focuses on the unfinished and fragmented works of the time, like The Canterbury Tales, and when the genre became popular in the post-Romantic era. Apparently, according to Scala who knows the sources available, feels that many of the contradictions to the book are not mentioned in the text. Chaucer’s Open Books is an interesting read, but it proves that without a basis in literary or rhetorical theory, an author overly challenges his or herself by making it that much harder to write, read, and interpret.