"Ahah! Hahahah! Hahaha! Haha. Whoo. Ha. Well, anyway, I guess you had to be there."
The above should be the last line of The Cook's Tale. Poor little Rodger, he didn't even get a "here ends the Cook's tale" from Chaucer - just the deafening sounds of crickets and the shuffled feet and jangling reins of a confused and underwhelmed audience of pilgrims and readers.
FYI, I love The Cook's Tale.
When I'm talking to people who haven't read this tale I sum it up for them with the following explanation:
"Once upon a time there were whores somewhere." If I have time after that, I may say "and a guy who played dice and stole from his boss. Oh yeah, and whores! I told you about the whores right?"
I know that there's only one whore in The Cook's Tale, and it's more about Perkin the Reveler, but that's no fun. And really, it's more about Rodger the Cook who totally missed the point of the Reeve's tale, and who missed the day in medieval grade school when the plague-ridden teacher explained what elements are required to complete a story before passing out and infecting a third of the class.
But I digress.
There are some critics who argue that The Cook's Tale is unfinished. I, personally, would argue that the tale is complete but that the Cook is a few fries short of a happy meal. Rodger may believe that he's totally done - he's told an amusing story about a funny character and he's just rolling along, keeping up with the other pilgrims - and good for him! Better for Chaucer, actually; including an idiot character early in the collection keeps things light - especially as a follow-up to the creepy feeling that accompanies the rapes in The Reeve's Tale.
I don't have a lot to say beyond that, which shouldn't surprise anybody after reading a tale that, including the prologue, is only 97 lines long. There's not an awful lot of material to examine in this sort of venue.
I'm sure if I were trying to be dry and professional, a good little college student, I could try to force a fifteen page paper in this space discussing all the serious issues at hand in The Cook's Tale, and maybe someday I will just to be snarky, but right now I'm just basking in the fact that Chaucer did a great job of pointing out that there always have been and always will be idiots in this world.
Showing posts with label Chaucer FYI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chaucer FYI. Show all posts
8.15.2010
Chaucer FYI - 4 The Reeve's Tale
Well, if it isn't obvious by now, then I've lost a little hope for humanity. The tale-tellers interact. Chaucer is clearly trying to hammer this point home in this tale; the Reeve's prologue is almost entirely about why he wants to have a story-time smackdown with the Miller, and the last line of his story is his final jab at the Miller.
Chaucer wanted his audience to be aware that his speakers were more dynamic than the speakers in other tale collections because it not only made him more interesting as an author, it made the tales themselves more interesting. Chaucer took almost all of his stories from a preexisting source, at least in part. Since they were around beforehand, Chaucer took pains not only to make them more artistic, but to give a good reason for re-telling the tales. The Reeve's Tale in particular had several sources and analogues, and was probably fairly well known as a folk story as well as a piece of German/French/Italian literature, so when Chaucer put his pretty English spin on it, it wasn't that much more compelling than any of the others - until, that is, he made the story into an act of vengeance. At that point, an oft-repeated albeit funny story had an additional draw. Now the reader isn't necessarily reading to find out what happens in the tale - they may already know - they're reading to find out what happens to the person telling the tale as well, and looking for any jokes or pokes Chaucer may have added that were directed at the object of the tale. In this manner, Chaucer managed to brilliantly revivify old stories in a wonderfully modern method. Hollywood, take note.
On to another point - we're going to get back to tale-teller interaction more with the Friar and the Summoner - I have to apologize to anyone reading this. It is unclear in my translation that the brothers Alain and John have thick, nearly incomprehensible, Northern Middle English accents. Some of that can be seen by their use of unusual aphorisms, but not as much is communicated as I would have liked. To Simkin, his family, and the warden of Cambridge they sound like utterly hilarious backwoods hicks, which is part of why Simkin thinks that he'll be able to trick them so easily as well as part of the reason that they so badly don't want to be tricked. I'm sorry - I was trying to translate more for verbal accuracy than for anything else, and if you're reading this alongside the Middle English, your original text should show this dynamic well enough.
Now on to shagging. "Swyved" is a word that I ranted about in my last Chaucer FYI post, so I won't go into depth on it, suffice to say that I was trying to find a euphemism for "copulated with" that was a single-word verb (rather two-word verb phrases such as "made love" or "had sex") that was bawdy enough to fit the tone of the story and English enough that Chaucer might have used it if it had been around in his time. "Screwed" "boned" "humped" and yes, even "fucked" were considered, and I just ended up deciding that "shagged" was the best choice to act as an equivalent to "swyved." I will say though, if you read it with an Austin Powers voice in your mind, you're going to make me very happy and very sad at the same time.
Well, I seem to have exhausted my ability to be wry for the moment, so I feel that now is the time to discuss a rather serious issue in this tale: rape in the time of Chaucer.
Reading The Reeve's Tale for the first time was pretty jarring for me as I approached the end. I was excitedly waiting for a sneaky trick, wanting to find out what the brothers did to avenge themselves. Then Alain snuck up to the daughter's bed and became "aton" with her before she had a chance to cry out. Only about fifty lines later she is helping with his revenge and crying as he leaves the bed he was never invited into. Ahem. What!? Then John tricks Simkin's wife into his bed and they hump like bunnies all night long and she has no idea who she's in bed with. While part of my mind was amused by how Simkin's theft was being repaid, the rest of it was cringing away from the supposed "heroes" of the tale who were raping the wife and daughter of their host.
What can really be said about this? What can be offered as an excuse? In most of the other analogues, the stories have no character, they're just bawdy stories and everyone ends up laughing, so did Chaucer kick it up a notch to get a bigger laugh? Is this treatment of sex included because rape was funny in the 1300s? No; we can dismiss that theory. Did Chaucer think involuntary sex was hilarious? Probably not, no. So why does Chaucer include two fairly clear rapes in what is supposed to be a funny story? My theory is that Chaucer includes it to illustrate that while he is funny and clever and bright, the Reeve is not. I think that this tale approaches sex in this manner because it is the way that the bitter, old, wrathful Reeve would approach it - tastelessly, somewhat violently, and for the reason of perceived offense. I think Chaucer wants his audience to be uncomfortable with this story because he wants his audience to be uncomfortable with the Reeve - he is easing his readers into the very bottom of this particular downward spiral, which will come to a crashing, ridiculous end with The Cook's Tale, and which will leave the audience hungry for something "higher" that Chaucer then happily gives to us in The Man of Law's Tale. In this light, the inclusion of rape in The Reeve's Tale is brilliant - Chaucer is playing his audience like a fiddle, manipulating them into wanting to read the stories that he has written in the order that he chose to present them.
Sorry to sound like a nutcase fan-girl, but how unbelievably cool is that? One of the most "ick" moments in The Canterbury Tales may be there because the author wanted us to be grossed out enough to crave the "sentence" that is shortly going to follow.
Hats off, everyone. Chaucer is officially a badass.
Chaucer wanted his audience to be aware that his speakers were more dynamic than the speakers in other tale collections because it not only made him more interesting as an author, it made the tales themselves more interesting. Chaucer took almost all of his stories from a preexisting source, at least in part. Since they were around beforehand, Chaucer took pains not only to make them more artistic, but to give a good reason for re-telling the tales. The Reeve's Tale in particular had several sources and analogues, and was probably fairly well known as a folk story as well as a piece of German/French/Italian literature, so when Chaucer put his pretty English spin on it, it wasn't that much more compelling than any of the others - until, that is, he made the story into an act of vengeance. At that point, an oft-repeated albeit funny story had an additional draw. Now the reader isn't necessarily reading to find out what happens in the tale - they may already know - they're reading to find out what happens to the person telling the tale as well, and looking for any jokes or pokes Chaucer may have added that were directed at the object of the tale. In this manner, Chaucer managed to brilliantly revivify old stories in a wonderfully modern method. Hollywood, take note.
On to another point - we're going to get back to tale-teller interaction more with the Friar and the Summoner - I have to apologize to anyone reading this. It is unclear in my translation that the brothers Alain and John have thick, nearly incomprehensible, Northern Middle English accents. Some of that can be seen by their use of unusual aphorisms, but not as much is communicated as I would have liked. To Simkin, his family, and the warden of Cambridge they sound like utterly hilarious backwoods hicks, which is part of why Simkin thinks that he'll be able to trick them so easily as well as part of the reason that they so badly don't want to be tricked. I'm sorry - I was trying to translate more for verbal accuracy than for anything else, and if you're reading this alongside the Middle English, your original text should show this dynamic well enough.
Now on to shagging. "Swyved" is a word that I ranted about in my last Chaucer FYI post, so I won't go into depth on it, suffice to say that I was trying to find a euphemism for "copulated with" that was a single-word verb (rather two-word verb phrases such as "made love" or "had sex") that was bawdy enough to fit the tone of the story and English enough that Chaucer might have used it if it had been around in his time. "Screwed" "boned" "humped" and yes, even "fucked" were considered, and I just ended up deciding that "shagged" was the best choice to act as an equivalent to "swyved." I will say though, if you read it with an Austin Powers voice in your mind, you're going to make me very happy and very sad at the same time.
Well, I seem to have exhausted my ability to be wry for the moment, so I feel that now is the time to discuss a rather serious issue in this tale: rape in the time of Chaucer.
Reading The Reeve's Tale for the first time was pretty jarring for me as I approached the end. I was excitedly waiting for a sneaky trick, wanting to find out what the brothers did to avenge themselves. Then Alain snuck up to the daughter's bed and became "aton" with her before she had a chance to cry out. Only about fifty lines later she is helping with his revenge and crying as he leaves the bed he was never invited into. Ahem. What!? Then John tricks Simkin's wife into his bed and they hump like bunnies all night long and she has no idea who she's in bed with. While part of my mind was amused by how Simkin's theft was being repaid, the rest of it was cringing away from the supposed "heroes" of the tale who were raping the wife and daughter of their host.
What can really be said about this? What can be offered as an excuse? In most of the other analogues, the stories have no character, they're just bawdy stories and everyone ends up laughing, so did Chaucer kick it up a notch to get a bigger laugh? Is this treatment of sex included because rape was funny in the 1300s? No; we can dismiss that theory. Did Chaucer think involuntary sex was hilarious? Probably not, no. So why does Chaucer include two fairly clear rapes in what is supposed to be a funny story? My theory is that Chaucer includes it to illustrate that while he is funny and clever and bright, the Reeve is not. I think that this tale approaches sex in this manner because it is the way that the bitter, old, wrathful Reeve would approach it - tastelessly, somewhat violently, and for the reason of perceived offense. I think Chaucer wants his audience to be uncomfortable with this story because he wants his audience to be uncomfortable with the Reeve - he is easing his readers into the very bottom of this particular downward spiral, which will come to a crashing, ridiculous end with The Cook's Tale, and which will leave the audience hungry for something "higher" that Chaucer then happily gives to us in The Man of Law's Tale. In this light, the inclusion of rape in The Reeve's Tale is brilliant - Chaucer is playing his audience like a fiddle, manipulating them into wanting to read the stories that he has written in the order that he chose to present them.
Sorry to sound like a nutcase fan-girl, but how unbelievably cool is that? One of the most "ick" moments in The Canterbury Tales may be there because the author wanted us to be grossed out enough to crave the "sentence" that is shortly going to follow.
Hats off, everyone. Chaucer is officially a badass.
8.14.2010
Chaucer FYI - 3 The Miller's Tale
After the honor, glory and nobility of The Knight's Tale, it is easy to see a fall in progress as The Miller's Tale is read and understood. Where the Knight was hyper-focused on the importance of degree and keeping distance between the various estates, the Miller happily mocks degree in a number of cases. At one point he describes something as "shining like a noble new struck in the tower;" this phrase has two meanings, which are at least partially lost in modern parlance. Modern readers don't know that a noble was a kind of circulated coin which, newly minted, shone very brightly - they are therefore likely to dismiss the line as a whole as incomprehensible, and thus will also miss the pun on newly created nobility, the "new money" of Chaucer's time. The Miller also jokes that Alison is essentially a "fine fling for a gentleman, or a good wife for a churl," which, after the high-flung ideals of love in The Knight's Tale is a rather pertinent jab at idealistic or unrealistic love as well as at the Knight's respect for degree.
The Miller lets us know from the start through such hints as those listed above, as well as his drunken rantings in his prologue that he is telling a base tale for base men, and it is in this way that we see him as the first, contemptuous, and reactionary example of tale-teller interaction. In The Reeve's tale we will see the Reeve reacting violently against the Miller for making fun of carpenters by making fun of a miller, and so on down the line for many of the tales. Somewhat ironically, it is appropriate that the Knight has no real opportunity to react against another tale-teller since his sense of honor associated with his degree would prevent him from insulting someone of a lower class.
Now onto my rant:
Translating Middle English into Modern English is difficult for a number of reasons. Some of these I've made little effort to address in my translation - I generally don't modernize syntax too much, I tend to leave in some of the articles that are superfluous in Modern English, I don't make much of an effort to hold punctuation to Modern English standards; that is because these things do very little to impede the translation of meaning to a modern reader. They may make reading my translation somewhat more frustrating, but they also make my translation all the more authentic. What I do have an issue with, however, is the difficulty found in translating some Middle English words into a Modern English vocabulary.
This was not as difficult, interestingly, in The Knight's Tale or the General Prologue where the vocabulary was held to a higher (and as it turns out, more lasting) standard. In The Miller's Tale, however, where the speaker is expected to be more colloquial, it is possible to see the depth of the losses we've experienced in the English language.
The Miller's speech is wonderfully funny, but frustratingly difficult to understand - which makes it hard for a first-time reader to appreciate the humor. Chaucer can't be blamed for this, but translators who are too frightened of offending a reader or treating "The Work" with anything less than reverence and kid gloves can and should be blamed for some of the trouble that readers have in approaching Chaucer.
There are four examples I would like to bring to the fore in The Miller's Tale. One is excusable, one is frustrating, one is infuriating, and one is unforgivable.
The first deals with one of the in-text notes in my translation of The Miller's Tale - the word "hende" according to many translators means simply "courteous" or "helpful." The reason this is excusable in a translation is that the pun is so close to lost that it would be difficult to elegantly convey it to a modern audience. Courteous, helpful Nicholas is handy. He is a handy man, not a handy-man, but one who is useful. That is enough, for basic readers - those who are not college students. College students should also be able to find out, without reaching for a Middle English dictionary or reading a few dry articles, that Nicholas is a grabby man. That his hands wander. If you are reading the original Middle English, perhaps you should be able to extrapolate that from the word "hende" and the context, but it is unlikely that overtaxed students will be able to on a single read-through. Please, for goodness' sake, footnote that sort of thing.
The frustrating example of translation or glossing is at the "ers" end of the story, occurring in only the last couple hundred lines. The frustrating word is, of course, "ers." I remember the first time I read this tale; I saw the word on the page, looked at it, read it in context and thought to myself "no, Chaucer wouldn't talk about some guy kissing some girl's ass. I should check in the glossary." Then I did check the glossary, and "ers" wasn't in it. Then I checked a few translations; I found "bum," I found "buttocks," and I found "behind," but I didn't find anything that looked like "ers." That's when I had my first encounter with a Middle English dictionary, one that first defined "ers" as buttocks, but at least conceded that it was "colloquially, ass." An ass is an ass! Not a bum or a buttock! Chaucer used the word for a reason, and "ass" is a hell of a lot closer to the Middle English than "buttocks" is, and a lot more appropriate for the person telling this tale. Sanitizing the language of a potty-mouthed, drunken Miller so that a modern reader's delicate sensibilities won't be offended makes no sense; especially since the word that's being tidied up can be spoken on network television and in PG rated movies. Congratulations, you just made Chaucer more puritanical than Disney. You heathens!
The fourth, infuriating, example of translator frustration I want to discuss involves another in-text note I made to the reader. "Queynte," with various spellings, has many meanings in Middle English. It can mean clever, sly, strange, supernatural, occasionally rural (as an extension of strange), and according to the glossary of The Riverside Chaucer, can mean an "elegant, pleasing (thing)" - wait, that doesn't make any sense - or "i.e., pudendum" - well, that's better. I can type "pudendum" (a word I had honestly not encountered before a line note in this textbook) into Google and find out that it's a rather outdated way of saying "vagina." Not only does this textbook - which is honestly, a pretty good text - go out of its way to avoid saying "vagina" by being so vague as to say "elegant, pleasing (thing)" in its stead, when the book actually gets around to saying "vagina" it doesn't bother to use a word for the part, even a medical word, that anyone this century has ever heard of, no - they use an outdated Latin word that literally means "something to be ashamed of." Tell you what, I'm not ashamed - Nicholas grabbed Alison by her cunt. Ta-da! Now, wasn't that simpler than the hair-pulling exercise that The Riverside Chaucer put us through?
The unforgivable sin that I came across while translating may actually seem rather minor in comparison. At the end of The Miller's Tale, after we've been through ass kissing, cheating, trickery, and the general delightful nastiness of the characters the Miller sums up for us. How kind. One of the last things we hear about was how "swyved" the carpenter's wife was. Seeing an unfamiliar word, I looked at the note at the bottom of the page. Then, unable to believe the callousness of the editor, I looked it up in the back of the book, then another translation, then in a dictionary (which I can forgive because dictionaries aren't supposed to be read.) According to all these sources, "swyved" means "copulated with." Can we please, possibly, in any way, make that definition more clinical, less interesting and less funny for readers who are already trying to muster the strength to wade through a book that is rapidly falling out of our curriculum because it's inaccessible to modern audiences? Nicholas and Alison weren't copulating! Okay, well technically they were, but putting it that way in a translation or a glossary makes it sound like Alison wasn't cheating on her husband with their boarder before having her stalker make out with her ass only to have that same stalker burn a strip of skin as wide as a hand off her lover's ass with a hot plow blade just before her husband broke his arm by falling out of a barn because he thought Noah's flood was coming. Can we at least say "made love" or "had sex," because "copulated with" just doesn't quite fit the tone of this circus/soap opera of a story, now does it?
The Miller lets us know from the start through such hints as those listed above, as well as his drunken rantings in his prologue that he is telling a base tale for base men, and it is in this way that we see him as the first, contemptuous, and reactionary example of tale-teller interaction. In The Reeve's tale we will see the Reeve reacting violently against the Miller for making fun of carpenters by making fun of a miller, and so on down the line for many of the tales. Somewhat ironically, it is appropriate that the Knight has no real opportunity to react against another tale-teller since his sense of honor associated with his degree would prevent him from insulting someone of a lower class.
Now onto my rant:
Translating Middle English into Modern English is difficult for a number of reasons. Some of these I've made little effort to address in my translation - I generally don't modernize syntax too much, I tend to leave in some of the articles that are superfluous in Modern English, I don't make much of an effort to hold punctuation to Modern English standards; that is because these things do very little to impede the translation of meaning to a modern reader. They may make reading my translation somewhat more frustrating, but they also make my translation all the more authentic. What I do have an issue with, however, is the difficulty found in translating some Middle English words into a Modern English vocabulary.
This was not as difficult, interestingly, in The Knight's Tale or the General Prologue where the vocabulary was held to a higher (and as it turns out, more lasting) standard. In The Miller's Tale, however, where the speaker is expected to be more colloquial, it is possible to see the depth of the losses we've experienced in the English language.
The Miller's speech is wonderfully funny, but frustratingly difficult to understand - which makes it hard for a first-time reader to appreciate the humor. Chaucer can't be blamed for this, but translators who are too frightened of offending a reader or treating "The Work" with anything less than reverence and kid gloves can and should be blamed for some of the trouble that readers have in approaching Chaucer.
There are four examples I would like to bring to the fore in The Miller's Tale. One is excusable, one is frustrating, one is infuriating, and one is unforgivable.
The first deals with one of the in-text notes in my translation of The Miller's Tale - the word "hende" according to many translators means simply "courteous" or "helpful." The reason this is excusable in a translation is that the pun is so close to lost that it would be difficult to elegantly convey it to a modern audience. Courteous, helpful Nicholas is handy. He is a handy man, not a handy-man, but one who is useful. That is enough, for basic readers - those who are not college students. College students should also be able to find out, without reaching for a Middle English dictionary or reading a few dry articles, that Nicholas is a grabby man. That his hands wander. If you are reading the original Middle English, perhaps you should be able to extrapolate that from the word "hende" and the context, but it is unlikely that overtaxed students will be able to on a single read-through. Please, for goodness' sake, footnote that sort of thing.
The frustrating example of translation or glossing is at the "ers" end of the story, occurring in only the last couple hundred lines. The frustrating word is, of course, "ers." I remember the first time I read this tale; I saw the word on the page, looked at it, read it in context and thought to myself "no, Chaucer wouldn't talk about some guy kissing some girl's ass. I should check in the glossary." Then I did check the glossary, and "ers" wasn't in it. Then I checked a few translations; I found "bum," I found "buttocks," and I found "behind," but I didn't find anything that looked like "ers." That's when I had my first encounter with a Middle English dictionary, one that first defined "ers" as buttocks, but at least conceded that it was "colloquially, ass." An ass is an ass! Not a bum or a buttock! Chaucer used the word for a reason, and "ass" is a hell of a lot closer to the Middle English than "buttocks" is, and a lot more appropriate for the person telling this tale. Sanitizing the language of a potty-mouthed, drunken Miller so that a modern reader's delicate sensibilities won't be offended makes no sense; especially since the word that's being tidied up can be spoken on network television and in PG rated movies. Congratulations, you just made Chaucer more puritanical than Disney. You heathens!
The fourth, infuriating, example of translator frustration I want to discuss involves another in-text note I made to the reader. "Queynte," with various spellings, has many meanings in Middle English. It can mean clever, sly, strange, supernatural, occasionally rural (as an extension of strange), and according to the glossary of The Riverside Chaucer, can mean an "elegant, pleasing (thing)" - wait, that doesn't make any sense - or "i.e., pudendum" - well, that's better. I can type "pudendum" (a word I had honestly not encountered before a line note in this textbook) into Google and find out that it's a rather outdated way of saying "vagina." Not only does this textbook - which is honestly, a pretty good text - go out of its way to avoid saying "vagina" by being so vague as to say "elegant, pleasing (thing)" in its stead, when the book actually gets around to saying "vagina" it doesn't bother to use a word for the part, even a medical word, that anyone this century has ever heard of, no - they use an outdated Latin word that literally means "something to be ashamed of." Tell you what, I'm not ashamed - Nicholas grabbed Alison by her cunt. Ta-da! Now, wasn't that simpler than the hair-pulling exercise that The Riverside Chaucer put us through?
The unforgivable sin that I came across while translating may actually seem rather minor in comparison. At the end of The Miller's Tale, after we've been through ass kissing, cheating, trickery, and the general delightful nastiness of the characters the Miller sums up for us. How kind. One of the last things we hear about was how "swyved" the carpenter's wife was. Seeing an unfamiliar word, I looked at the note at the bottom of the page. Then, unable to believe the callousness of the editor, I looked it up in the back of the book, then another translation, then in a dictionary (which I can forgive because dictionaries aren't supposed to be read.) According to all these sources, "swyved" means "copulated with." Can we please, possibly, in any way, make that definition more clinical, less interesting and less funny for readers who are already trying to muster the strength to wade through a book that is rapidly falling out of our curriculum because it's inaccessible to modern audiences? Nicholas and Alison weren't copulating! Okay, well technically they were, but putting it that way in a translation or a glossary makes it sound like Alison wasn't cheating on her husband with their boarder before having her stalker make out with her ass only to have that same stalker burn a strip of skin as wide as a hand off her lover's ass with a hot plow blade just before her husband broke his arm by falling out of a barn because he thought Noah's flood was coming. Can we at least say "made love" or "had sex," because "copulated with" just doesn't quite fit the tone of this circus/soap opera of a story, now does it?
8.11.2010
Chaucer FYI - 2 The Knight's Tale
In the first FYI section that I wrote, there was a brief discussion of "sentence and solace" that I wanted to continue here, using The Knight's Tale as an example.
Sentence and Solace fluctuate in The Canterbury Tales, and ironically enough this first tale is the best example of the two ideas balanced in one story - in a sense, progress toward the original goal of the tale-telling contest stops here. The Knight's Tale has a complex presentation of the "high" theme of love, pays close attention to honor and fealty, is cautious with the subject of class and is respectful to those of "hye lynage" while managing to capture the interest and empathy of "low" readers and listeners (for the most part.) No other tale in the whole collection makes such an attempt to be both meaningful and enjoyable; the tale of Custace is more a recounting of sorrows and a vehicle for judgment than a balanced story, Chaucer's Tale of Sir Topas is entirely solace while his Tale of Mellibee is entirely sentence. While the two are juxtaposed and almost exactly central to the tales, they are not balanced together though they help the balance of the collection as a whole.
The text of The Knight's Tale may seem bone dry and unpleasant to us (as well as to at least one pilgrim - the Miller) but its solace is drawn from the romantic tradition - that is to say, from tales in the Roman style. So many people today think that "romance" stories are about busty women falling for emotionally closed-off bad boys, but in an older sense romantic works relied on an interplay of conventions which told a story in a specific (somewhat archaic) style. Romances were stories that involved a grand tradition - such as the documentation (and fictionalization) of a famous character, Alexander the Great for example. They were adventure stories which described the more-than-human feats of their characters, epic quests to conquer foreign lands and kill strange beasts, and in Europe in the late medieval and early renaissance periods they developed into chivalric adventures glorifying the honor and chivalry of the main character as he followed his quest to win his lady's hand. This is the sort of quest that we can clearly see in Arcite and Palamon's pursuit of Emily. They stray from some of the romantic conventions, occasionally in major ways; Arcite certainly isn't acting chivalrous when he lies about his identity for several years, and neither is Palamon when he drugs his jailer to escape from prison. But overall the tale adheres to and occasionally mockingly exaggerates romantic conventions. This duplicity, complimenting the style by using it well while at the same time satirizing it, is another example of Chaucer balancing the tale's sentence and solace; even to a contemporary audience the Knight would have occasionally sounded pompous and outdated, but in spite of that his story remains compelling. In this way Chaucer achieves a greater balance between meaning and pleasure because the story, while pleasurable to hear of its own merit, is occasionally made more enjoyable from the viewpoint of the frame story where the reading audience can laugh along with the other pilgrims at the antiquated audacity of the Knight.
One of the reasons the Knight sounds so outmoded is because he himself was an example of a dying system. With the peasant uprisings in England that happened in Chaucer's time, plague killing half of the working class population, and kings being corrupted and corrupting the country the Knight's fixation on division of degree seems desperate and a bit ridiculous. Over and over again in his tale you hear of people given gifts according to their degree, in line according to their degree, seated according to their degree and generally behaving appropriately for their degree. The Knight, in telling this particular tale, is acting according to his degree however he is doing at a time when degree is beginning to mean less and less.
For modern audiences, this is sometimes confusing, but let's put it this way: "degree" or "estate," depending on context, means class. In Chaucer's time, there were arguably four estates: the nobles, the clergy, the peasants and the emerging merchant class. The three (or four) estate system was beginning to break down as peasants gained more political power in the 1300s and were able to demand higher wages and act as free men rather than as serfs tied to the land. The Knight's constant emphasis on degree and estate may have something to do with the fact that he is the only character in The Canterbury Tales who stands on the highest rung of a teetering ladder. Even in his own party he has a free Yeoman who doesn't fit into the three estate system, and outside of his little group he's surrounded by a Merchant, Miller, Reeve, Dyer, Haberdasher, Tapestry-Maker, Clerk, the Wife of Bath and Chaucer the Pilgrim - none of whom neatly fit into any of the three estates, to say nothing of the pseudo-religious professions which were polluting the estate of the clergy.
However it is partially thanks to the Knight's obsession with proper old forms and acting according to his degree that one of the most interesting aspects of The Canterbury Tales as a collection first comes to light.
The tale-tellers themselves are often far more interesting than their stories since their personalities, petty disagreements, political infighting, imagined offenses, and desire to shock the other tale-tellers often lends a greater meaning to many of the different tales.
The Knight is not reacting to anything other than his drawn lot as well as his lot in life when he tells the tale of Arcite and Palamon, but the Miller is most assuredly reacting to the high style and stuffiness of the Knight, as well as possibly some contempt of the Reeve, when he tells his tale. The Reeve in turn tells a tale that is reactionary to the Miller's Tale, and so on throughout the collection. The interplay between tale-tellers is particularly virulent when it comes to The Summoner's Tale and The Friar's Tale, but we'll get there when we get there - it's a long slide downhill from here.
Which brings me to my final point in this FYI - at this point in The Canterbury Tales, we are on a descent. In many ways, the Knight's Tale is the apex of the Canterbury Tales. It is full of noble ideals, told in a compelling manner, not reactionary, and occasionally wholly removed from the idea of a common contest. Ann W. Astell has an interesting perspective on The Canterbury Tales that sees the stories as a progression inward from the uppermost heavens (ruled by Saturn according to the knowledge of Chaucer's time - and it is Saturn who rules the Knight's Tale) down to earth and back again, which is detailed in her book "Chaucer and the Universe of Learning." Astell's theory supports the idea of descent both according to the heavens and to the morality of the tales. When we hit the Cook's Tale we will have temporarily hit rock bottom, but that's a story for another day. Don't worry, we'll move back up again, then much farther down than rock bottom, and finally reach a few more peaks and valleys; but for now we are on a descent, sliding morally away from the Knight and his estates. Good riddance, I say, because descent is more amusing than a noble hike up hill, so with that we close the book on our Knight, for the moment, and we'll see you again in the FYI after the Miller's Tale.
Sentence and Solace fluctuate in The Canterbury Tales, and ironically enough this first tale is the best example of the two ideas balanced in one story - in a sense, progress toward the original goal of the tale-telling contest stops here. The Knight's Tale has a complex presentation of the "high" theme of love, pays close attention to honor and fealty, is cautious with the subject of class and is respectful to those of "hye lynage" while managing to capture the interest and empathy of "low" readers and listeners (for the most part.) No other tale in the whole collection makes such an attempt to be both meaningful and enjoyable; the tale of Custace is more a recounting of sorrows and a vehicle for judgment than a balanced story, Chaucer's Tale of Sir Topas is entirely solace while his Tale of Mellibee is entirely sentence. While the two are juxtaposed and almost exactly central to the tales, they are not balanced together though they help the balance of the collection as a whole.
The text of The Knight's Tale may seem bone dry and unpleasant to us (as well as to at least one pilgrim - the Miller) but its solace is drawn from the romantic tradition - that is to say, from tales in the Roman style. So many people today think that "romance" stories are about busty women falling for emotionally closed-off bad boys, but in an older sense romantic works relied on an interplay of conventions which told a story in a specific (somewhat archaic) style. Romances were stories that involved a grand tradition - such as the documentation (and fictionalization) of a famous character, Alexander the Great for example. They were adventure stories which described the more-than-human feats of their characters, epic quests to conquer foreign lands and kill strange beasts, and in Europe in the late medieval and early renaissance periods they developed into chivalric adventures glorifying the honor and chivalry of the main character as he followed his quest to win his lady's hand. This is the sort of quest that we can clearly see in Arcite and Palamon's pursuit of Emily. They stray from some of the romantic conventions, occasionally in major ways; Arcite certainly isn't acting chivalrous when he lies about his identity for several years, and neither is Palamon when he drugs his jailer to escape from prison. But overall the tale adheres to and occasionally mockingly exaggerates romantic conventions. This duplicity, complimenting the style by using it well while at the same time satirizing it, is another example of Chaucer balancing the tale's sentence and solace; even to a contemporary audience the Knight would have occasionally sounded pompous and outdated, but in spite of that his story remains compelling. In this way Chaucer achieves a greater balance between meaning and pleasure because the story, while pleasurable to hear of its own merit, is occasionally made more enjoyable from the viewpoint of the frame story where the reading audience can laugh along with the other pilgrims at the antiquated audacity of the Knight.
One of the reasons the Knight sounds so outmoded is because he himself was an example of a dying system. With the peasant uprisings in England that happened in Chaucer's time, plague killing half of the working class population, and kings being corrupted and corrupting the country the Knight's fixation on division of degree seems desperate and a bit ridiculous. Over and over again in his tale you hear of people given gifts according to their degree, in line according to their degree, seated according to their degree and generally behaving appropriately for their degree. The Knight, in telling this particular tale, is acting according to his degree however he is doing at a time when degree is beginning to mean less and less.
For modern audiences, this is sometimes confusing, but let's put it this way: "degree" or "estate," depending on context, means class. In Chaucer's time, there were arguably four estates: the nobles, the clergy, the peasants and the emerging merchant class. The three (or four) estate system was beginning to break down as peasants gained more political power in the 1300s and were able to demand higher wages and act as free men rather than as serfs tied to the land. The Knight's constant emphasis on degree and estate may have something to do with the fact that he is the only character in The Canterbury Tales who stands on the highest rung of a teetering ladder. Even in his own party he has a free Yeoman who doesn't fit into the three estate system, and outside of his little group he's surrounded by a Merchant, Miller, Reeve, Dyer, Haberdasher, Tapestry-Maker, Clerk, the Wife of Bath and Chaucer the Pilgrim - none of whom neatly fit into any of the three estates, to say nothing of the pseudo-religious professions which were polluting the estate of the clergy.
However it is partially thanks to the Knight's obsession with proper old forms and acting according to his degree that one of the most interesting aspects of The Canterbury Tales as a collection first comes to light.
The tale-tellers themselves are often far more interesting than their stories since their personalities, petty disagreements, political infighting, imagined offenses, and desire to shock the other tale-tellers often lends a greater meaning to many of the different tales.
The Knight is not reacting to anything other than his drawn lot as well as his lot in life when he tells the tale of Arcite and Palamon, but the Miller is most assuredly reacting to the high style and stuffiness of the Knight, as well as possibly some contempt of the Reeve, when he tells his tale. The Reeve in turn tells a tale that is reactionary to the Miller's Tale, and so on throughout the collection. The interplay between tale-tellers is particularly virulent when it comes to The Summoner's Tale and The Friar's Tale, but we'll get there when we get there - it's a long slide downhill from here.
Which brings me to my final point in this FYI - at this point in The Canterbury Tales, we are on a descent. In many ways, the Knight's Tale is the apex of the Canterbury Tales. It is full of noble ideals, told in a compelling manner, not reactionary, and occasionally wholly removed from the idea of a common contest. Ann W. Astell has an interesting perspective on The Canterbury Tales that sees the stories as a progression inward from the uppermost heavens (ruled by Saturn according to the knowledge of Chaucer's time - and it is Saturn who rules the Knight's Tale) down to earth and back again, which is detailed in her book "Chaucer and the Universe of Learning." Astell's theory supports the idea of descent both according to the heavens and to the morality of the tales. When we hit the Cook's Tale we will have temporarily hit rock bottom, but that's a story for another day. Don't worry, we'll move back up again, then much farther down than rock bottom, and finally reach a few more peaks and valleys; but for now we are on a descent, sliding morally away from the Knight and his estates. Good riddance, I say, because descent is more amusing than a noble hike up hill, so with that we close the book on our Knight, for the moment, and we'll see you again in the FYI after the Miller's Tale.
8.04.2010
Chaucer FYI - 1 The Prologue
In every part of The Canterbury Tales there are elements that are fascinating, funny, noteworthy, brilliant and perplexing. The General Prologue is an appropriate introduction to the vast depth that Chaucer displays throughout the tales, but perhaps most importantly it serves as the reader's introduction to the character of Chaucer the Pilgrim, an entity which cannot be wholly separated from Chaucer the Author but stands as one of the great puzzles in English literature.
In my mind Chaucer the Pilgrim is inextricably tied to one of the central themes of The Canterbury Tales, the divergence and convergence of "sentence and solas," or meaning and pleasure.
The General Prologue is almost entirely on the "solas" side of this dichotomy; Chaucer the Pilgrim is irreverent in his descriptions of his fellow travelers, quickly switching between listing their flaws and naming them as "good fellows" or "fine men" or "tender-hearted." Not all of the pilgrims receive a dose of his backhanded praise - the Knight for example really is a pretty decent sort, and the Parson and his brother are introduced in glowing phrases that fairly well match their characters. The Summoner and the Pardoner, on the other hand, are slyly (and not always subtly) criticized before Chaucer the Pilgrim says of the Summoner that "a bettre felawe should men nought fynde" (648) and calling the Pardoner "a noble ecclesiaste" (708).
Clearly Chaucer the Pilgrim is being free with his praise, which should serve as a warning to his readers that Chaucer's praise is a double-edged sword; one which can defend a man's honor or sever him from it as the author sees fit.
In this early portion of the text there is something of a carnival atmosphere, which is hardly befitting the beginning of a pilgrimage, that flows as freely as the Host's wine and the narrator's cheer. Readers at this point don't know what to expect - there is nothing to define the "sentence" of the tales so far when a Prioress is being mocked for her misplaced fastidiousness and a Merchant is being praised for his ability to commit fraud. The "sentence" of the Tales comes later in the individual stories told by the pilgrims, but also later in the development of Chaucer the Pilgrim, who makes a fascinating transition through the course of Chaucer the Author's work.
All in all, the General Prologue is a terribly exciting place to be for a reader. The world of the Tabard Inn is topsy-turvy as its inhabitants are examined and found to be quite an interesting group of road companions wending their way to Canterbury and inviting the reader to join them in their adventures.
In my mind Chaucer the Pilgrim is inextricably tied to one of the central themes of The Canterbury Tales, the divergence and convergence of "sentence and solas," or meaning and pleasure.
The General Prologue is almost entirely on the "solas" side of this dichotomy; Chaucer the Pilgrim is irreverent in his descriptions of his fellow travelers, quickly switching between listing their flaws and naming them as "good fellows" or "fine men" or "tender-hearted." Not all of the pilgrims receive a dose of his backhanded praise - the Knight for example really is a pretty decent sort, and the Parson and his brother are introduced in glowing phrases that fairly well match their characters. The Summoner and the Pardoner, on the other hand, are slyly (and not always subtly) criticized before Chaucer the Pilgrim says of the Summoner that "a bettre felawe should men nought fynde" (648) and calling the Pardoner "a noble ecclesiaste" (708).
Clearly Chaucer the Pilgrim is being free with his praise, which should serve as a warning to his readers that Chaucer's praise is a double-edged sword; one which can defend a man's honor or sever him from it as the author sees fit.
In this early portion of the text there is something of a carnival atmosphere, which is hardly befitting the beginning of a pilgrimage, that flows as freely as the Host's wine and the narrator's cheer. Readers at this point don't know what to expect - there is nothing to define the "sentence" of the tales so far when a Prioress is being mocked for her misplaced fastidiousness and a Merchant is being praised for his ability to commit fraud. The "sentence" of the Tales comes later in the individual stories told by the pilgrims, but also later in the development of Chaucer the Pilgrim, who makes a fascinating transition through the course of Chaucer the Author's work.
All in all, the General Prologue is a terribly exciting place to be for a reader. The world of the Tabard Inn is topsy-turvy as its inhabitants are examined and found to be quite an interesting group of road companions wending their way to Canterbury and inviting the reader to join them in their adventures.
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