However, leaving aside the codicological fitness of the term, I want to take up Arthur’s invitation to rethink “fragments” as a literary-critical concept. This seems pressing in several ways. Chaucerians, for example should be protesting that Camelia Elias’s monograph The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre (2004) does not once mention Chaucer. Fragment, though, is not an innocent word. Fragmentation is a critical term that is particularly associated with modernism: think of the fragmentary structure and sentences of Joyce’s Ulysses, or T.S. Eliot’s reference in The Wasteland to a “heap of broken images … These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Eliot’s words mourn the iconoclastic destruction of a civilization (“broken images”), reclaiming its shattered pieces as hacked-off quotations and blocks of verse that can be ironically used to prop up a self that is threatened with imminent collapse. Eliot’s implied oppositions – heap/form, broken/whole, ruins/structure – suggest a yearning for a lost unity and coherence, to say nothing of a yearning for a lost past.

This is what Jean-François Lyotard is getting at when, in The Postmodern Condition, he declares that “modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one,” because it “allows the unpresentable to be alleged only as an absent content,” whereas the postmodern “alleges the unpresentable in presentation itself,” and refuses “the consolation of good forms.” Thus, Lyotard continues, “It seems to me that the essay (Montaigne) is postmodern, and the fragment (the Atheneum) modern” (81). An essay – an essai – is a testing out of ideas that is necessarily incomplete but which does not figure that incompleteness as a gesture towards “absent content” but rather as the condition of signification itself: a radical unsayability. The essay doesn’t ever regret that incompleteness and it doesn’t yearn for – or yearn to be – a decorous whole.

I know that we’re all now so past (or post) the postmodern, and I don’t in any way mean to suggest that we think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a postmodern enterprise, but in many ways the figure of the essay seems closer to the spirit of the Talesthan that of the (modernist) fragment: as Chaucer’s narrator impishly advises, “turne over the leef and chese another tale.” Arthur wants us to think of this as drawing attention to the physicality of the Tales (and it does), but it also embodies an attitude towards the project: you don’t like this one? then choose another. It enlists the reader as active participant in meaning-making: as Arthur says, “the entire project’s structure is subject to the reader’s imaginative intervention.” In fact, this is not at all like the project of the essay. However, it’s also very different from a “heap of broken images.” Much as I like the idea of Arthur’s queer, affirmative reclaiming of a “misguided or offensive” term and much as I like his claim that fragment “admirably conveys [a] sense of incompleteness not as loss but as interpretive invitation,” I find it hard to shake off the modernist implications of fragment and its associations both with loss and with a very traditional historicity. I see how one might be able to claim for fragment some of the senses that Heather Love claims for a queer history of loss in her Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), yet Arthur is not arguing that we see the Tales in terms of loss. But in any case “essay” embodies an aesthetic; it does not answer to the Tales’ codicological situation.

The nature of the Tales as we find them in their various manuscript matrices is not essay-like. Incompleteness of the project is not the same thing as aesthetic unpresentability. And – as far as we know – Chaucer is not responsible for the way the Tales appear in most of their manuscripts (Ellesmere may be an exception). Nor are the Tales postmodern. Despite Derek Pearsall’s playful call for a “loose-leaf binder edition of the Tales containing the Riverside fragments as a collection of moveable pamphlets” (Meyer-Lee, SAC 35, 63), the presentation of the Tales is not like that of B.S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates (1969), which contains 27 sections, presented unbound in a box, with a first and last chapter specified, but with the remaining 25 sections, which range from a single paragraph to 12 pages, designed to be read in any order. Despite the advice to turn over the leaf, and despite my concurring with Meyer-Lee’s judgment that the Tales exhibit a “dynamic, unpredictable, open-ended structure” (SAC 35, 61), they are not meant to be read in any order. Variations in their order, as he points out, are minimal. And Johnson’s work, which is about death and memory, draws its impact from the fact that printed books are bound, and that the concepts of “the author” and the “work” are in part an effect of this binding and can thus be productively flouted. None of this corresponds to the moment of production of the Tales. And while the Tales demand “the reader’s imaginative intervention,” they are not akin to the phenomenon of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The reader may be advised to turn the leaf, but the Tales do not offer, in any of their manuscript versions, an aleatory, random experience. They confront us with variance, but how to do justice to that variance? One of Meyer-Lee’s solutions – to go for a best-text ordering, namely, the Ellesmere order – does not adequately represent the relative incongruence between individual exemplars.

Arthur is right: even if we abandon the fragments, “we do, in any event, need some word or other for the various tale-groupings of the Tales project.” Patchwork? Collage? One thing I have discovered in the course of writing this post is that codicological categories do not adequately represent aesthetic ones. The problem of naming the nature of the Tales turns out to be also the problem of the vexed relationship between literary criticism and book history. Finding a term that will cover the codicological situation and that will also embody the aesthetic endeavor is a challenge.

How do we represent the state of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales? Arthur Bahr, Associate Professor in Literature at MIT, responds to Robert J. Meyer-Lee’s recent essay, “Abandon the Fragments.”[1]

The title of this post is intended to evoke that of Robert Meyer-Lee’s recent essay “Abandon the Fragments.” Bobby’s position and my own are in fact closer than our apparently dueling titles would suggest, however, for he has convinced me that The Riverside Chaucer’s characterization of the Canterbury Tales as “surviv[ing] in ten fragments” (5, cited by Bobby on 48) misrepresents the codicological evidence. He also convinces me that, as originally conceived, this editorial characterization assumes without justification that Chaucer had a definite, implicitly singular plan for the shape of the Tales that he failed for some reason to enact. I do not, however, believe that the term “fragments” need be interpretively restrictive in this way. I will propose here that the word’s suggestion of physicality and incompleteness, both of which I regard as integral to the distinctiveness of the Tales as a literary project, makes “fragments” a useful term for critical practice, albeit one in need of considerable refinement along many of the lines that Bobby’s essay astutely suggests.

In calling “incompleteness” a salient feature of the Tales, I do not mean to endorse the belief that Chaucer not only “‘left’ the work ‘incomplete’ but also failed to execute a ‘final revision’ and hence in some way presumably intended such finality” (57, with inset quotation of the third edition of The Riverside Chaucer, 5). As Bobby demonstrates, this scenario implicitly regards the fragments as imperfect pieces of what was intended to be a seamlessly constructed edifice. In fact there are many other, more interesting, and (to me, Bobby, and others) more persuasive ways of reading both the Tales itself and how it came to assume the various manuscript forms it now has. Bobby argues, and I agree, that Chaucer appears to have “sought for the Tales a much more dynamic, unpredictable, open-ended structure” than that which the lexicon of fragments, as originally coined by editors, imagines (71). But words whose original uses may have been misguided or offensive can be affirmatively reclaimed (notes this queer reader). We could do something similar with the vocabulary of the fragments, and regard them not as so many half-empty glasses but rather as productive reminders of how little is securely knowable—and thus how much is productively interpretable—about the conceptual and material disposition of the Tales. So long as we remember that fragments need not add up to a single coherent whole (nor indeed ever have been intended to add up to such a whole), the word admirably conveys this sense of incompleteness not as loss but as interpretive invitation.

And we do, in any event, need some word or other for the various tale-groupings of the Tales project. One reason Bobby gives for preferring “blocks” to “fragments” for this purpose is that the former lacks the latter’s connotation of physicality (49; he calls “blocks” his “preferred term” at 51). I think that the suggestion of physicality is worth holding onto, however, not because it reflects the as-it-really-was of Chaucer production practice (Bobby nicely worries the widespread assumption that Chaucer’s own physical exemplars and today’s editorial fragments correspond), but because it recalls the Tales’ famous invitation that we “turne over the leef and chese another tale” than the Miller’s if we so desire (I.3177). As I and others have argued, this is a funny-but-serious (and seriously funny) joke, in that it uses the Tales’ very first inter-tale stitching to suggest that the entire project’s structure is subject to the reader’s imaginative intervention. I would contend (again, with others) that we should not lightly dismiss the fact that Chaucer figures this invitation as physical activity.

Nor is it clear to me that Bobby’s preferred term “blocks” in fact avoids the suggestion of physicality as he claims; I immediately thought of building blocks, for example, that can be assembled into a variety of structures. That even a critic who resists imputing physicality to Chaucer’s work has chosen a term that can in fact be so interpreted may further suggest how central physicality actually is to the Tales. One final point in favor of “fragments” over “blocks” is that it reinforces how many other Chaucerian texts appear to be fragmentary (Legend of Good Women, House of Fame, Anelida and Arcite), helping us to see both the Tales generally, and in particular incomplete and/or fragmentary tales like those of the Cook, Squire, and Sir Thopas, as part of this broader Chaucerian motif. (It also foregrounds the difficult and important question of intentionality that the “and/or” of my last sentence attempted none too subtly to finesse.)

I called this post “Celebrate Fragments” instead of “Celebrate the Fragments” by way of embracing the possibility of different, differently represented, and differently valenced fragments than those canonized by the Riverside, for I agree that, “even if one finds the idea of fragments desirable, its current application is rather sloppy. … As a kind of one-size-fits-all editorial labeling, it is too crude an instrument for its purposes” (76). This post is therefore intended as an enthusiastic taking-up of Bobby’s exhortation that we engage in a thorough and collective rethink of how we use the term fragments in reference to the Tales, as both codicological designation and literary-critical concept. I hope that the observations I have laid out here offer grounds for engaging more fully in that collective rethink—here, in the comments, and in the many other venues that the New Chaucer Society affords us—before abandoning the fragments altogether.

I would like to thank Bobby Meyer-Lee for graciously agreeing to be “responded to” in public.

[1] Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 47-83.

Arthur Bahr holds the Alfred Henry and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Chair at MIT. His book, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London, has recently been published by University of Chicago Press (2013).