What sholde I Moore seyn, but this Millere
He nolde his wordes for no man forbere,
But tolde his cherles tale in his manere.
M'athynketh that I shal reherce it heere.
And therfore every gentil wight I preye,
For Goddes love, demeth nat that I seye
Of yvel entente, but for I moot reherce
Hir tales alle, be they bettre or werse,
Or elles falsen som of my mateere.
And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere,
Turne over the leef and chese another tale;
For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale,
Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse,
And eek moralitee and hoolynesse.
Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.
The Millere is a cherl, ye knowe wel this;
So was the Reve eek and othere mo,
And harlotrie they tolden bothe two.
Avyseth yow, and put me out of blame;
And eek men shal nat maken ernest of game.
Here Chaucer successfully applies the theory of mediation which he arrived
at in the Troylus. And the Dantesque elements of the theory are
relevant building blocks. Chaucer is going to make a copy of original "mateere."
The "mateere" in this case is that of the Miller. The Miller, Chaucer is
quick to {163} point out, has his own position, too, his "manere"
as well as his "mateere," that of a "cherl," and Chaucer must respect that
position, "reherce" that manere" as well as the "mateere." But his copy,
while faithful to the original, must not be identical with it. His copy
must be a copy in order to posit the illusion of an original and thus the
illusion of a Miller in all his distinctive individuality. If there is
to be a Miller, he must be copied. If Chaucer does not copy the
Miller, thus negating possible identification of himself with his character,
there will be no (illusion of a) Miller, only a false image of a
Miller. He must copy the Miller to put the Miller "off there" where distance
helps generate the illusion of reality. To bring Dante to bear directly
on the text: if Chaucer subtracts from and then adds to his
"mateere" (like a Master Adam), he will reduce "mateere" and "manere" to
identity with his own version of them, and he will render them thus "irreferent,"
counterfeit, false. He will -- and the word is big with significance for
The Canterbury Tales -- falsen his "mateere" if he does not copy
it as faithfully as possible. But this means he must insist on the copy
as much as on the fidelity. If he is copying and not masking the fact that
he is copying, then the likelihood is greater than it would otherwise be
that he is not falsifying. The fact of copying is as important to the illusion
as the fidelity of the copy. Now, at the same time, it is true -- and this
truth is important to Chaucer's poetics -- that, even as he insists on
the copy and its fidelity, he censors the Miller, every bit as much
as the Narrator in Book 3 of Troylus and Criseyde censors the play
of Pandarus with Criseyde after Troylus's departure from the "stewe" (lines
1576-82). For Chaucer to inform us that he "moot reherce / Hir tales alle
... / Or elles falsen som of [his] mateere," is also to inform us, inevitably,
that the Miller's "tale" is a "cherles"; and that is, without question,
to censor. However, it is to censor without subsequent ban. Moreover --
and this is essential Chaucer -- it is to censor in such a way as to
enlist the censorship in support of (the illusion of) the reality
of the Miller. In other words, by following Dante's lead and insisting
on himself as mediator of what his audience reads, Chaucer has it both
ways: he censors the Miller and tells us in the process exactly what kind
of tale and language we are about to read, while at the same time and in
just this way, he insists on the autonomy, the independence, and the reality
of the Miller as character and free agent -- one does not censor a mannequin.
And all this he achieves, first and foremost, by intruding into
the text to tell us "I moot reherce / Hir tales alle." His very
visibility in the text is a guarantee that he is not a Master Adam or a
Pandarus forging a false image, in this case, of a Miller. His very subjectivity
-- the emphasis on "I" and "me" (lines 3167, 3170-73, 3175, 3181, 3185)
-- generates the true image of a Miller, wholly other (in the illusion)
than the signs which refer to him.1 Chaucer's
very {164} mediation or instrumentality posits a personality. Although
every pilgrim is Chaucer's version of or position on that pilgrim, his
theory of mediation enables him to discount the narcissism of his instrumentality,
thus to posit, precisely through the dialectic with his position, the (illusion
of the) reality of each pilgrim and his or her position.2
Every time Chaucer speaks, our position changes -- we have to take our
bearings again. And by keeping us on the move, he keeps us moved. Finally,
there is only Chaucer, only writing his text (Leicester 1980:220-21). There
is no naive Narrator; there are not three Chaucers (cf. Donaldson 1972:1-12).
There is only the one, extraordinarily sophisticated Chaucer -- so self-conscious
of his poses that he will never falsify his text. For six centuries now
we have believed in his character(s). Chaucer's position, so clearly visible
if often difficult to construe,3 prevents
his imposition upon the Miller. His own position, moreover, opposes not
only the Miller's ("M'athynketh that I shal reherce it heere") but also
that of "every gentil wight." The "gentils" such as those who so unanimously
ap, proved of The Knight's Tale (A 3113) have their position, their
"manere," their version of the truth, too; and Chaucer's differs from,
is op-posed to, that position, again in order for him to posit the illusion
of reality. When Chaucer enters his anti-Pandaric plea -- "demeth nat that
I seye / Of yvel entente" -- he is establishing the (illusion of the) reality
of the "gentils" -- not only those who are on the pilgrimage with him but
also those who are (in the fiction) in the audience which he is this moment
addressing. When Chaucer takes his position, he adopts the pose of one
who finds drunken millers slightly abhorrent and certainly churlish in
their manners, though fascinating in their vitality, and this is also the
pose of one who defers to "gentils." The net result of his pose is to
compel his audience to declare their own positions by the choices which
they make.4 If the audience choose
not to hear a "cherles tale," then they may "turne over the leef and chese
another tale." But this choice makes them responsible for what they
read. Indeed, reading ("legenda") always carries with it the responsibility
of choice ("legenda").5 To read is to
choose, and it is to choose necessarily versions of the truth, such as
"gentillesse" or "moralitee" or "hoolynesse" or "harlotrie." All these
versions of the truth have each its legitimacy but, at the same time, each
its limitations, too. Indeed, truth is inversely proportional to the limitedness
of the given version of it -- almost that is an epigraph, if a bit clumsy,
for The Canterbury Tales. And if the audience choose their truth
"amys" (although it may well be the truth about them), they cannot blame
Chaucer since he only rehearses the numerous versions or positions. His
pose is necessarily a "game," a play or a fiction,6
since only in fiction can he copy a Miller or anyone else and
remain himself, not falsified nor falsifying. "And men shal nat maken
ernest of game" by imposing their ver-{165} sions of reality or
of truth on a poet's fictional positions, his poses in "game." In the Prologue
to The Cook's Tale Herry Bailly is right that "'a man may seye ful
sooth in game and pley"' (CkP A 4355), but Hogge of Ware is also
right, and perhaps nearer to Chaucer's own position, when he rejoins, ""'sooth
pley, quaad pley," as the Flemyng seith"' (line 4357). If a "true joke"
(one could almost say, "earnest joke") is a "bad joke" (Davis 1979:110),
so is a true fiction, already a monstrous hybrid, a bad fiction because
it is a false or "irreferent" fiction. I am here extending (I hope not
stretching) the proverb into Chaucer's poetics of reference, and I am following
the proverb's lead in complicating the everyday, received senses of "true."
A true fiction is a bad fiction because, like a false coin, it looks like
its original, or fiction, but is, in fact, tainted with a dross of personal
desire -- desire which has designs on others. A true fiction, as in the
case of Herry and Hogge, has it in for someone or something -- innkeepers
and cooks, of course, would be natural enemies (CkP A 4358-61);
as Hogge says to Herry: "'But er we parte, ywis, thou shalt be quit"'
(line 4362; emphasis added). Such fiction is in deadly earnest: I will
call it, this true fiction, designing (on others); the other sort,
"true" fiction, I will call designed. The former, earnest and designing
fiction, is fiction which serves commoda privata" when, in fact, fiction
should serve "commoda publica."7 True
fiction, then, serves a "private interest" and is corrupt; "true" fiction
serves a "public interest" (where "public" must not be assumed to be tainted
with modern senses of "government" or "the state") and is a kind of universal
vow and vowing which binds together community.
True or designing fiction and its consequences Chaucer
brilliantly illustrates in The Miller's Tale with "hende" Nicholas's
fiction of the flood.8 Like a coarser
Pandarus, "hende" Nicholas -- "handy" at all sorts of artifice as he is
-- "engineers" a plot (fiction) to be his "meene" to Alisoun and her favors.
It is a false fiction, true in the perverse sense, and very earnest, because
it designs upon "sely John" the carpenter and indeed finally harms him
bodily. At the same time (Chaucer never rests with one position when he
can maneuver from two or more) a true or designing or earnest fiction depends
for its success upon the impressionability of imagination (MilT
A 3611-13):
Lo, which a greet thyng is affeccioun!
Men may dyen of ymaginacioun,
So depe the impressioun be take.
Here "ymaginacioun" may mean "plot" or "scheme" as well as "imagination" (Davis 1979:79). But these meanings only enhance Chaucer's point. Imagination and the products of imagination, such as fictions, may be anything but disinterested (they may be designing), and one had best be careful of "affec- {166} cioun." The reader, we already know from Antigone's lyric (see Chap. 9), is as responsible as the author; and gullibility will bring forth true or designing fictions: "Never give a sucker an even break," as the saw has it. Different as they are, Criseyde and John are one in their failure to detect the falsifications perpetrated upon them. "They that have ears to hear, let them hear" (Matt. 11.15). But at the same time, the Father of lies, "when he speaks a lie, speaks his own and from his own" (John 8.44), and indeed, every liar, such as "hende" Nicholas or Pandarus, speaks his "own" or "from his own" when he lies -- that is why he is so hard to hear. Even the poet speaks his "own" or "from his own" if he is not careful, for when he "lies" -- that is, makes a fiction -- in the process of his "lie" he is gazing intently at himself (else he could not write), and thus he risks being another Narcissus, artificer of the consummate true (that is to say, false and "irreferent") fiction -- so true, so earnestly true, that it killed him.
Chaucer's theory of mediation saved him from the fate of Narcissus.
With this assertion we reach a crucial juncture, and it will be of help
to summarize briefly before taking the next step. The theory accounts for
the instrumentality by which Chaucer posits the characters of his pilgrims.
By insisting on himself, by interposing himself between, say, the Miller
and us, Chaucer compels us to ask why he is complicating our perception
of his narratives in this way (cf. Leicester 1980:221). And once we have
asked that question, we are no longer innocent audiences but active participants
in the text -- readers in the double sense of "legenda." Moreover, the
theory reveals that if we are not such self-conscious readers and choosers
we may well wind up being counterfeiters or falsifiers of fiction -- we
may well try to "quite" others with fiction, spending fiction as if it
were coin.
We are poised here, I think, for a major breakthrough
into the structure of The Canterbury Tales. In fact, every pilgrim
"quites" someone or something with the tale he or she tells (even the Knight,.
who "quires" his version of disorder in the world). Every pilgrim is an
unredeemed, unself-conscious narcissist. Selfhood depends on taking a position,
but if one's position is only in opposition to. . ., then one's opponent
radically circumscribes one's self. Not in opposition, then, but in relationship,
in mutual and just exchange, is freedom of the self posited. The Canterbury
pilgrims repeatedly fail in such relationship, fail in community, because
they are forever opposing or "quiting" someone or something; even though
we occasionally hear some such formula as "God save al this faire compaignye"
(KnT A 3108), we are never allowed to forget at the same time that,
for example, the Friar and the Summoner cannot stand each other (FrP
D 1265-68). And since the sphere of economics, {167} the marketplace,
is the space where community, mutual and just exchange, is most visible
and strenuously tested, Chaucer posits economics, "quiting," as the structure
of relations in The Canterbury Tales.9
Economics is their genetic origin -- economics understood, by Chaucer and
his contemporaries, probably under the category of ethics from the perspective
of positive justice.10
Opposition is indisputably one of the most basic
phenomena of The Canterbury Tales, if not the most basic phenomenon.11
Indeed, recent scholarship has argued that binary oppositions are
the organizing principle of the poem as a whole (Patterson 1978:375-76).
In addition to the exchange between Herry Bailly and Hogge of Ware, consider,
for example, the Miller once again (MilP 3126-27):
"Quiting" is, to conclude the argument now, an instance of reference.
The Miller refers to the Knight, the Merchant refers to the Clerk and the
Wife, the Franklin refers to the Squire, and the Parson refers to everyone.
Moreover, "quiting" exposes instrumentality. We can see the workings of
each pilgrim's language as he or she tries to persuade the world of his
or her truth. We can weigh the self-aggrandizing exordium -- "'Experience,
though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To
speke of wo that is in mariage"' (WBP D 1-3) -- we can judge the
self-masking attempt upon our pity -- "'but of myn owene soore, / For soory
herte, I telle may namoore"' (MerP E 1243-44) -- we can take the
measure of self-doubting rhetorical gambits -- "'And Jhesu Crist, that
is oure soules leche, / So graunte {170} yow his pardoun to receyve,
/ For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve"' (PardT C 916-18). Chaucer
structured his text with the economics of "quiting," vertical as well as
horizontal, precisely in order that we might see the instrumentality, in
order that we might see the Narcissus in each pilgrim. The tentativeness,
the contingency, the uncertainty, the unpredictableness of the Canterbury
tales and the Canterbury pilgrims derive, just as they do in real life,
from the randomness of personal and often passionate relationships in a
nonetheless strongly if also mysteriously boundaried world. Of such a world
the marketplace is perhaps the most fitting microcosm. And of the market,
place an inn is perhaps the truest center ("At nyght was come into that
hostelrye Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye, / Of sondry folk, by
aventure yfalle in felaweshipe" (GP A 23-26; emphasis
added). And the Tabard is where it all would have ended, in the fellowship
of a meal, had it not ended in a different Economy -- the Economy that
transumes even pilgrimages since it is their reason for being (judgment;
Salvation).14
The economic structure of The Canterbury Tales,
in which reference appears as "quiting" (consider the Wife of Bath's "'I
ne owe hem nat a word that it nys quit"' (WBP D 425;
emphasis added), enables Chaucer to explore the ethics of reference. Reference
is not only verbal nor only literary but also personal and behavioral.
The ways in which people connect words and things reflect the ways in which
people love. The Wife of Bath, for example, is more loving than the Merchant
because, in spite of herself, she does not tyrannize the relation between
words and things, as he certainly does when, for example, he reduces the
Song of Songs to "olde lewed wordes" (MerT E 2149), assuming and
hoping that we too will assume that the song means no more than January's
lust. At the same time, the Wife is insufficiently self-conscious of the
fact that the ways in which she connects words and things involve the publication
of her "privitee" -- "'I hadde the beste quoniam myghte be"' (WBP
D 608). As the pilgrims speak, so they behave; as they behave, so they
speak. Indeed, their speech is their behavior. Hence our understanding
of their speech must be ethical understanding. Ethics is the science best
suited to helping us under, stand The Canterbury Tales, for ethics
is "the science which treats of behavior."15
Ethics, the system of ways in which people behave and especially
behave verbally, will recover Chaucer's poem for our understanding.
And this because Chaucer, the one Chaucer in his
many poses, desires a world of justice, where each is rendered his due.16
But if a man is to render each his due, he must know and understand and
sympathize with the due of each. He must be able to recognize the various
masks of desire, be able to distinguish each man and woman from his and
her Narcissus. He must appreciate that Narcissus is necessary to every
man and woman, for without {171} self-love there is no life, but
he must also be able to distinguish person from image -- "And I seyde his
opinion was good" (GP A 183), and we know instantly that his opinion
was not very good at all, we know, and know there is, a gap between the
Monk's person and his image, between his position and his pose (Leicester
1980:220). So that he might distinguish the many persons in life from the
many images of themselves they pretend to others, Chaucer invented his
(potentially vast) "distinctio" collection of pilgrims. 17
In a kind of daringly tentative synecdoche, they add up, and the effect
is consciously additive, to the whole creature Man, as the many distinctions
of a scriptural term add up to its whole meaning.18
The fictions they tell, in the same daringly tentative synecdoche, add
up to all the fictions of Man. And this is Chaucer's vision. If he embraces
Man, he can understand and sympathize with men. If he understands and sympathizes
with men, he can embrace Man. Obeying this vision, he can be the poet of
each pilgrim without being the sort of poet that each pilgrim represents.
He can manage to avoid by fictionally indulging the narcissism of each.
Thus he can render each his due. He wears the mask of each in order to
discover his or her person; he endures the errors of each in order to learn
his or her truths; he pays each of them homage even as he laughs at the
follies of each. He renders them each his or her due. Poetry its method,
economics its structure, Man its Content, justice its end -- such is the
poem we call The Canterbury Tales.
In the next three chapters I attempt to analyze the tales of the Wife
of Bath, the Merchant, and the Pardoner from the perspective of Chaucer's
theory of mediation. These three are tales in which money and exchange
and falsification of one sort or another dominate. They are thus ideal
test cases since not only is their structure economic but also their content
is economics and, in the strict sense, commercial. Each chapter proceeds
with an introductory summary of the contemporary economic data and developments
significant to an understanding of that pilgrim and his or her tale; it
continues with a close reading of the tale and concludes with an attempt
to illuminate the character of each pilgrim -- in particular, what in that
character makes him or her the sort of poet Chaucer wishes not to be. Finally,
the Epilogue surveys the entire argument of the book and enters some reflections
on the "Retracciouns" and reference.{172}