The Canterbury Tales

The plan of the book as compared to Boccaccio’s Decameron

The device of the framing fiction – to gather together a group of people and make them tell stories – was common in the Later Middle Ages. There is no evidence Chaucer ever read Decameron. Even if – as seems likely – the English author never knew about his Italian precedents, the technique itself was in the air.

Even if the framing device of the book was not original, Chaucer’s artistic exploitation was quite different from Boccaccio:

- Boccaccio’s tellers belong to the same social group, unlike Chaucer’s;

- in Boccaccio, in fact, tales are attributed to tellers at random, the choice of a story to tell is hardly conditioned by the teller’s temperament or background. In Chaucer’s book there is fascinating accord between the tellers and the tales attributed to them;

- Boccaccio’s main interest is in the stories, not the tellers, in fact, there are hardly any characters at all.^{^[1]} For Chaucer, the tales appear more of a means of revealing a character than an end in themselves.

Also, the stories are framed with prologues and epilogues and linked by narrative exchanges between the pilgrims.Chaucer conducts two fictions simultaneously, that of the individual story and that of the pilgrim to whom he has assigned it. The second fiction is developed through the General Prologue, and also through the ‘links’, the interchanges between stories. We are given at once a story and a drama.

In addition to it, there is the figure of the narrator, who is in the very midst of the pilgrims. The image of the reporter is a half-burlesque version of Chaucer himself. He partakes in all the activities and relationships, and assesses things from within. We feel that his attitude and cast of mind permeate the book and create additional semantic overtones. That was a new approach, which Mathew Arnold called “a human point of view”.

The Characters

The pilgrims are first introduced in the General Prologue. At first sight their pen-portraits appear as a mere accumulation of detail, for the most part haphazard. In fact, Chaucer chooses his detail with great care, in order to give an integrated sketch of the person being described. We are given typical, generic features. The names are not included; we see the characters as representatives of certain trades of social groups, and the motley gathering becomes a comprehensive picture of medieval society, a collective picture of England:

- the upper classes are represented by the Knight and his son, the Squire (they are also warriors);

- the Doctor, the Man of Law, the Clerk of Oxford, the Poet give a glimpse of the liberal professions;

- there are representatives of monastic orders: the Friar, the Monk, the Prioress;

- the land is represented by the Plowman, the Miller;

- the trade – by the Shipman and the Merchant;

- crafts – by the Wife of Bath, the Carpenter, the Weaver, etc.

. The types of people that Chaucer’s fictitious pilgrimage includes had long inhabited literature as well as life.

But the initial appearance of flatness is deceptive. The more one reads, the more complex and significant the portraits become. Chaucer provides entertainment on the most primitive level, and at the same time, increases considerably the reader’s ability to comprehend reality. What seems at first sight a haphazard accumulation of detail (their pen-portraits in the General Prologue) turns out on lose reading to be full of slight innuendo, subtle irony and smart observations of human nature. The characters are not full-blown literary symbols: they mediate between the world of types and that of real people.

(E.g. The Prioress with her absence of vocation and love of jewelry represents the typical features medieval satirical literature condemned nuns for. Chaucer shows clearly her inability to be what she professes to be, a nun. But instead of enhancing her weaknesses, the poet also shows the great human charm of what she is, a woman. Another aspect of her personality is her ambition to be a lady, which Chaucer laughs mildly at. The elements of the portrait are divided between the critical and the admiring, express the paradox without attempting to resolve it.)

The older allegorical tradition establishes immediate connections between the abstract and the concrete, the corporeal and the spiritual. The medieval poet sees through his objects to their ideal symbolic essence. Chaucer’s method is different: he watches, observes and compares.

Compare, for instance, Chaucer’s book with the Vision of Piers Plowman by Langland. Langland also presents a collective image of society, all the life’s ‘field full of folk’, between the Tower of Truth and the Dungeon of Evil. But his book is an allegory of human existence. In Chaucer there is not a second, symbolic or allegoric plane, behind the pilgrims. His Knight is not the Valour personified, nor is his Miller or Wife of Bath a mere illustration for one of the deadly sins. Chaucer introduces a new system of measurements into literature. He does not measure his characters against moral issues, against vice or virtue. It is in their interaction that the moral qualities of each are revealed.

The Canterbury Tales as an encyclopedia of medieval genres

The Canterbury Tales is a whole poem, not simply a collection of tales from among which one might pick self-contained masterpieces. Its unity is not altered by the fact that it remained incomplete. Each tale has its own individuality and can be enjoyed in and for itself, but in relation to other stories it has a far richer significance.

None of the tales in the book is original; the pilgrims tell tales, not invent them. That explains their lack of originality. The tales come from every corner of medieval literature, as diverse and uneven as one could wish. They represent all the genres existing.

Examples:

- the Knight’s tale – a traditional verse romance

- the Miller’s tale – a fabliau. (also mind that it follows the Knight’s tale, making a subtle parody of the latter, which adds to the fun)

- the Franklin’s tale is taken from a Breton lay

- the Monk’s tale – element of tragedy of martydom

- the Manciple’s tale – a fable

- the Prioress’s tale. The Prologue begins with the opening line of Psalm 8, recited in nunneries. Thus the Prologue is in effect a hymn to the Blessed Virgin, and her tale is a tale of a miracle performed by the Virgin

- The Tale of Sir Thopas – a witty and elegant parody of the contemporary romance, both in subject and in form. Romance itself had an aristocratic heritage. By the fourteenth century, however, the subject and form of romances had become sadly debased. Stories of heroic knights set in sing-song rhyme scheme were recited by minstrels for audiences of middle-class burgers. Hence the idealism of romance came to be tailored for a middle-class mentality, and the form itself became tedious and cliche. ‘The Tale of Melibeus’ – a heavy prose homily (sermon), and so on.

Chaucer, however, never follows the genre conventions rigidly. Rather, he plays with the reader’s expectations, questions the validity of the existing literary forms, and parodies them. Various forms of narration are used as a tool of exploring reality, and become an object of investigation themselves. The author pokes fun at the lifeless and empty forms (The Tale of Sit Thopas, or the Monk’s Tale), brings together the high and the low (The Nuns’ Priest’s Tale). More importantly, he does not deny any forms, but allows them to co-exist and counteract as various relative points of view.

A genre becomes simply a ‘point of view’, a mode of vision; and a sensitive reader feels that certain truths expounded by the tellers are conditioned more by the conventions of the genre, and can on no account be seen as ‘universal’.

The tales are artistically uneven and diverse, genuine masterpieces along with flat and lifeless narrations, heavily didactic or plain boring. Surprisingly, it is probably explained by Chaucer’s ingenuity as a poet. When writing a tale, he goes by the possibilities and the cultural background of the ‘teller’. Besides, if there is a story contest, there are supposed to be losers as well as winners. According to some scholars, his deliberately ‘bad’ tales are literary parodies. The tellers try to imitate art, not life, which makes the stories far-fetched and artificial.^{^[2]}

4. Chaucer is sometimes called the last great poet of the Middle Ages. Chaucer was brought up on French and Latin literature and on scholastic medieval philosophy. As for the themes and poetic form the Canterbury Tales stays within medieval literary tradition.

But Chaucer’s realism, the broad perspective of life and his ironic attitude to reality are signs of a new literary method, and a new, more modern outlook.

In The Canterbury Tales poetry turned to the study of man and manners. It’s more than just a literary innovation; it’s a milestone in the development of literature. Men are no longer measured against abstract moral ideas, but against other men.

Chaucer’s other contribution to the new literary method is the choice of the point of view. The story is told not by an outside viewer; the narrator is one of the pilgrims, who reports and assesses things as he sees them. The advantage is the ability to grasp what Matthew Arnold called ‘really human point of view’.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the part Chaucer played in English versification. He imported the decasyllabic line from French and under the Italian influence made it pliable. It became the heroic couplet –the surpassing vehicle of much great poetry in English.

His other achievement was the use of London dialect of the language. He found it rough, poor – and left it so rich that English poetry was fully equipped. In his works English acquired a subtlety, a flexibility and a polish that at once made it an equal of French and Italian.

Chaucer had a European consciousness to enable him to render in English the dominant themes and attitudes of European literature and at the same time the English national consciousness to allow him to present the English scene as it had never been presented before. His work reflects his century completely (not in fragments). He is often able to discern permanent features beneath the garment of a day, to penetrate the everlasting springs of human action. His truthful pictures of his age and his country contain a truth that is of all time and all countries.

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