Chaucer and the Ethics of Time by Gillian Adler (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer and the Ethics of Time by Gillian Adler Chad Schrock Chaucer and the Ethics of Time. By Gillian Adler. (New Century Chaucer) Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2022. x+230 pp. £70. ISBN 978–1– 78683–836–0. This book goes on a hunt whose quarry is time as Chaucer experienced and wrote about it. What Gillian Adler is looking for turns out to be Chaucer's primarily subjective view of time. Clocks were not that important to Chaucer's literary project, despite his treatise on their technological cousin the astrolabe. The timekeeping he was interested in went on inside people's heads. The Middle Ages tended to ethicize time by reproving its loss or waste, as if it were an objective quantity that could be lost or wasted. Chaucer accessed the ethics of time through concepts of temperance and prudence instead. One reckons with time properly by reckoning it properly as subjective as well as objective, as a diverse human phenomenon to engage with attentively and flexibly, wary of committing it to a particular end. The analysis in the body of the book proceeds primarily by applying two sets of distinctions. Chaucer's narrators use time to talk about time; sometimes their forms of time align with their content about time, and sometimes form and content do not align. His narrators also demonstrate awareness of history as an objective linear phenomenon, akin to Gérard Genette's 'story' (see e.g. p. 16), but their own narratological practice invariably complicates that linearity. For instance, Chapter 1 describes how the narrator in The Book of the Duchess invites John of Gaunt to grieve according to chronometric ethics: to disrupt his fixation on the past by means of irruptive achrony, to move from the trap of subjective memory into a future of public responsibility. We are free to sympathize with the Criseyde of Chapter 2because she does not know enough about her situation in time to make responsible ethical choices on behalf of the future she imagines. Even we and the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde who already know the end of her story share that ethical disorientation within her time that is Chaucer's refutation of his sources who blame her. Once the book has sprung Criseyde free of ethical critique, using time as a key, it springs the rest of its characters free from conventional ethical critique as well. According to Chapter 3, Geffrey in The House of Fame must 'wot myself best how y stonde' (quoted on p. 118), evaluate himself properly inside his own head because Fame's unstable judgements outside his head will let him down. Chapter 4 argues that the Parliament of Fowls escapes ethical cautions against wasting time by 'undermining end-focused conceptualisations of human experience' (p. 125). The story pitches our expectations towards an ending that never comes in order to End Page 259 teach us that our time is not wasted for not having got there. Finally, Chapter 5 identifies the Host's anxiety to spend the pilgrimage time wisely, before explaining how everyone on the pilgrimage, including the Host, but especially the Wife of Bath in her prologue, are in no such hurry, manifesting their own individual agendas in individual temporal forms. The book does not offer a coherent Chaucerian ethics of time. Its Chaucer abdicates providing a coherent ethics of time and settles for undermining the ethical systems of time that he knows. That rings true, looks like what Chaucer would do. The book also wears its learning a little lightly, ushers scholarly conversations far enough behind the endnote curtain that the academic stakes are not always clear in the body of the text. Instead, the book's strength lies in structuralist close reading of passages, fine-grained analyses that tease, parse, measure out narrative levels, achronies, descriptors of time. It is eminently citable as a compendium of narratological observations and conclusions about what Chaucer and his narrators do with time. Chad Schrock Lee University Copyright © 2024 The Modern Humanities Research Association