The Columbia History of British Poetry (18 page)

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his reflections, "For al that comth, comth by necessitee: / Thus to be lorn, it is my destinee" (958-1082), Chaucer's appropriations from Boethius inform the narrative with philosophic and moral values, transforming Boccaccio's engaging narrative of a failed love affair with its personal, practical message to his most noble lady into a serious meditation upon the place of love in the world. In the words of the narrator's prologue to Book III, based on the eighth meter of Book II of Boethius, "God loveth, and to love wol nought werne, / And in this world no lyves creature / Withouten love is worth or may endure" (12-14).
Chaucer's use of Dante in the
Troilus
, while not as extensive as the Boethian adoptions, is of equal importance, for it reflects his intention to analyze on his own terms, just as Dante had done with his poetics of love in the
Commedia
, the significance of the courtly love tradition in the context of Christian doctrine. Different as they are, the trajectories of the lovers Dante and Troilus take much of their direction from the conventional wisdom of courtly love that the quality of the experience of love must be valued over its originating erotic desire and end. The ascent of Troilus's soul to the eighth sphere (a motif borrowed not from the
Filostrato
but from Boccaccio's
Teseida
) after Troilus's death at the hand of Achilles, both reported in the much debated "palinode" at the end of the poem, suggests that Chaucer did not want Troilus's experience as lover to be utterly dismissed. Despite its failure in this false world's brittleness, and its absolute supersession by the love of Christ, to which the "yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she" (V.1835) are recommended, it lingers, though forever lost, in the memories of the poets and their old books.
All of these Chaucerian literary interpolations, to which the narrator refers as things he has "in eched for the beste" (III.1329), enabled the poet to transform the Boccaccian story into his own complex masterwork. Not least among its complexities is its narrator himself, the sorrowful instrument who tells the double sorrow of Troilus, how he came "fro wo to wele, and after out of joie" (I.4). At times speaking, perhaps, as much for Chaucer the poet, who is his ultimate "auctor," as for himself, the narrator has license to expand the narrative record with ten lyric amplifications, but he finally must admit that he has no control over Criseyde's "trouthe'' and the tragic outcome of the story. Like Pandarus, his surrogate within the poem, who seeks to bring about a love affair for his younger, at times maddeningly inept, friend, the narrator must finally give up on having things his own way, although, from
 
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the unique sympathy of his more distant perspective, he would never say, as does Pandarus (V.1732), that he hates Criseyde.
The artistic and emotional involvement of the
Troilus
narrator with the story helps to create a sense of distance between its action and its audience, an effect that critics have long admired. The move from this narrator to the narrator of
The Canterbury Tales
entailed one further step in Chaucer's development of this aspect of his art. Although reminiscent of the narrator of the dream visions, who awakens and reports all that he has dreamed, Chaucer's pilgrim also resembles Dante's pilgrim in that he professes to have have taken a journey, a recollective record of which he now shares. Pilgrim Chaucer, unlike Dante's pilgrim, is not the central character or protoganist, but he does occupy a place within the poem's narrative action. It is an ordinary place, in that he is but one of a group of pilgrim characters come together at the Tabard Inn on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury, but it is also a central place because it is in his memory that the pilgrims, their tales, and their interactions along the way have been stored. Of the twenty-three pilgrims who tell tales, only the pilgrim Chaucer is a poet, and it is his memory that yields the account of their pilgrimage with its tale-telling contest.
The relationship between this pilgrim narrator and Chaucer the poet, and to some degree even Chaucer the man, has engrossed students of
The Canterbury Tales
, and indeed one's view of the relationship may have serious ramifications for how the entire work will be regarded. Arguments have been made in favor of keeping the three Chaucers strictly separated, with the pilgrim acting as a first-person fallible narrator; or of viewing them as indistinguishable from one another within a single figure who makes the necessary introductions of the social, moral, and authorial dimensions of his performance to the audience. Some readings stress Chaucer's literary pedigree, others his actual social status, as keys to understanding his significance as narrator of an extremely ambitious and complex, if unfinished, work. "Chaucer's plan" for
The Canterbury Tales
, whatever it may have been, has been identified, too closely perhaps, with the proposal made by the Host of the Tabard Inn, Harry Bailly, that each of the thirty pilgrims tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on their return. Like Pandarus, the Host acts as surrogate artist, attempting to order the story telling along the way. Just as Pandarus cannot save the love affair he has so carefully orchestrated, the Host cannot retain control over the sequence of the
 
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contest of tales he has arranged, in fact, loses it as soon as the first tale is told. After the Knight, who tells the first tale by virtue of drawing lots, completes his romance, the Host invites the Monk to match it, only to have the drunken Miller push himself into the sequence. The Knight's winning the draw as a serendipitous manifestation of hierarchy, allowing the pilgrim with the highest social rank to begin the game, and the Host's ability to manage the company are illusions of order.
The pilgrim narrator, for all of his alleged naïveté or simplicity, does not seem to share in these illusions. Twice he indicates, once near the end of the General Prologue and again in the Miller's Prologue, that he has subordinated his personal preferences and taste to the way things happened and the need to report them accurately and truthfully, which is to say, in their exact language. As narrator, he alone has, of course, the advantage of hindsight and already knows who said what, when and how. Unlike his distancing, sometimes disquieted, book-bound counterpart in the
Troilus
, this narrator conveys his experience of the event fully and without judgment or reservation, and leaves the burdens of discernment to his readers. Yet the transparency of much of his reportage has given rise to the recent debate over the attribution of certain passages that seem inappropriate to their tellers in the narration of some of the tales.
The relationship between the General Prologue (this title is a modern invention) and the various narrative links and tales, many of which have their own prologues, has been and remains a major concern for most Chaucerians. In one of the earlier, and for years most frequently taught, approaches to the structure of the entire work, the gallery of portraits was understood as a kind of program naming the dramatis personae of a fiction whose form was as dramatic as it was narrative. With each prologue and tale constituting a speech, or dramatic monologue, that invited analysis of character, a special emphasis could be given to the head links and end links as the sources of the poem's drama with all its conflicts and resolutions, the ultimate resolution being reserved for the traditionally allegorical representations of the way and end of the journey, in the words of the Parson, "Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage / That highte Jerusalem celestial" (X.50-51).
Another way of reading
The Canterbury Tales
has emphasized the realism of the pilgrims' characterizations and is heavily invested in the
 
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few topographical and internal references, e.g., to a tale just told or to one about to be told, made in the links as a way of ordering the sequence of tales according to geographic verisimiltide. No small amount of effort and ingenuity has gone into attempts to shift and reorganize the sequence of the fragments or groups of tales that are not explicitly connected to suit ideas of order suggested by scholars who harbor a deep desire and sense of prerogative to finish Chaucer's work for him. Since there is no objective way to eliminate the inconsistencies in the arrangement of tales in the best manuscripts, the Ellesmere order, with its discrepancies, is generally accepted as the closest we can get to Chaucer's intentions for the poem at the time of his death.
The dramatic and realistic approaches concentrate upon the question of the appropriateness of each tale to its teller, often based upon correlations between social class or type of teller with genre of tale, with the General Prologue portrait as the starting point. But recent views also propose that the tales just as easily, in fact more meaningfully, define and determine the portrait than the other way around; or that the real drama of the work lies not in the personality differences of its pilgrim tellers but in the stylistic individuality and variety of their tales. These critical mood swings between favoring the frame and favoring specific tales or groups of tales are inevitable. But one thing upon which almost all Chaucerians appear to agree is that whatever the poet took from the literary and oral traditions of his time as a starting point, be it Boccaccio's
Decameron
as a proposed model for the framed collection or an anonymous French fabliau as a source of one of the churls' tales, he makes it over into something completely his own.
If the postmodern critical notion that participation in genre inevitably means difference is correct, then the participation of a powerfully innovative imagination such as Chaucer's must mean unusually great difference. Almost every medieval type of narrative and mode of writing available to him, romance, fable, fabliau, saint's life, miracle tale, sermon, parody, satire, confession, appears in
The Canterbury Tales
, with a major and equal distribution of just over half of them into three major categories, the courtly, bourgeois, and religious: the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Squire, and the Franklin tell romances; the Miller, the Reeve, the Summoner, and the Shipman tell fabliaux; and the Man of Law, Clerk, Physician, and Second Nun tell hagiographic tales. The Chaucerian handling of every one of them virtually destroys the possibility of their being used as effective models of imitation.
 
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Most read of all of Chaucer's work, the General Prologue has elicited responses much like those to
The Canterbury Tales
as a whole. The incomparable gallery of portraits has gone through a process of study in which, at first, the focus was on identifying historical individuals as their bases, then on classifying and defining them as representatives of social types, and finally, on placing them within the literary tradition of medieval estates satire. None of these focuses works as well separately as they all do in concert, showing once again that it is the larger picture that enriches our study of Chaucer.
As the unforgettable opening lines of the General Prologue announce, behind their singular phrasing of the venerable poetic convention of the spring opening and all that follows in its wake, there stands an English maker, ready and able after the practice of a lifetime, to write the comedy to which he refers in his "Go, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye" stanza in the
Troilus
: "Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, / So sende myght to make in som comedye!" (V.1787-1788). Both Chaucer's tragedy and his comedy have taken their places with that highest standard of "alle poesye," to which every subsequent book is ''subgit."
Further Reading
Brewer, Derek, ed.
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Writer and His Background.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990.
Dinshaw, Carolyn.
Chaucer's Sexual Poetics.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Donaldson, E. Talbot.
Speaking of Chaucer.
New York: Norton, 1972.
Howard, Donald R.
The Idea of the Canterbury Tales.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Kiser, Lisa J.
Truth and Textuality in Chaucer's Poetry.
Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991.
Leicester, H. Marshall, Jr.
The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Mann, Jill.
Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Class and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

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