Essay on Chaucer’s "General Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales

If we treat Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales too narrowly as an historical record, as purely sincere observational reporting, there are bound to be a few casualties among its fictional elements. Perhaps first among these elements is the reporter himself, Chaucer the pilgrim, and the role he plays in the Prologue and the links between the Tales. Once we have dispelled the outmoded notion that Chaucer the poet shares the same wide-eyed naiveté as his narrator seems to, however, a temptation to simplify the nature of their relationship to one another in quite the opposite fashion surfaces. In recoiling from such an assumption about the poet's identity, it would be easy to over-compensate and place an unadulterated reflection of Chaucer himself instead as the front-man for the Canterbury Tales. We would then have an incurably clever and ironic reporter for a narrator setting out from an actual Tabard Inn, his eyes peeled for every idiosyncrasy, his pen handy for the transcription of every detail–to the last boiled shin–so his audience might see them just as he did. Reading in this way, we might even allow ourselves to ascribe every fatuous or inane piece of commentary made about his fellow pilgrims–of which there is no shortage–either to some resident societal peculiarities of the Middle Ages or to Chaucer's own sardonic sensibility.

While this notion of a tongue-in-cheek Chaucer may provide us with an unarguably better foundation upon which to construct the whole man than a roly-poly simpleton of a poet would, such a reading, I believe, would dangerously distort our critical perception of both Chaucer the pilgrim and the fiction in which he is rooted. In particular, it would at the very least muddy our sense of Chaucerian irony to see through the eyes of a scholar acutely aware of the significance beneath everyone in his company, one that ironically seasons his evidence for our pleasure and instruction. To my reckoning, just the reverse of this narrative strategy would seem more consistent with the feel of the Canterbury Tales. So instead, let us suppose here a fully fictional, constructed narrator-pilgrim that is, for the most part, happily unaware of the significance of his surroundings and company. Granted, he must be allowed the occasional lucid insight so as not to seem a perfect buffoon, but in general he is as much the product of his creator's penchant for ironic characterization as his fellow travelers.

Under this light, several things happen to our sense of Chaucer's work and all of its residents. Most striking of these effects, perhaps, is the smooth reconciliation that becomes possible between the Canterbury Tales and the extant literary tradition to which they are so closely, though adroitly, related. Chaucer's project is now recognizable as an innovative branch of the same literary family as, for example, William Langland's Piers Plowman, the population of which bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Canterbury pilgrims.

It seems to have been up to Chaucer, then to turn this troupe of ancient satirical stock characters into real people from the outside in, as it were, with all their traditional faults draped loosely upon them. The consummate showman, ambitious to the core, Chaucer seems to have been trying to do his contemporaries one better and assembles all of his characters for a pilgrimage and has them described by another pilgrim who records faithfully their faults one by one, but is humorously unable to recognize them as faults for he also is but a caricature, one of the poet himself. And as such he represents the primary filter through which both poet and poem must be read.

This is most evident in Chaucer the pilgrim’s description of his companions. If, for example, we believe that Chaucer the poet liked his Prioress, even though he did satirize her somewhat, albeit very gently, Chaucer the pilgrim was utterly taken with her. In the first twenty-odd lines of her portrait (118 -38) he lays her qualities on thick, completely exhausting in the process, among other superlatives, the adverb ful. Indeed, the Prioress seems to have reduced the narrative to a nearly childish catalogue of virtues that are only understood in one degree.

Though it seems clear enough, supposing we believe our narrator, that the Prioress is the very picture of a lady, she is hardly a perfect nun. Of course, though Chaucer does pack her portrait visibly with abuses that may have been typical of medieval nuns, taken on their own they are mostly harmless and superficial. Nonetheless, their presence in the portrait is impossible to disregard unless they’re come upon with the same innocent enthusiasm as Chaucer the pilgrim. For he is so swept up in his admiration of her that completely misses the blatant implications of such a high-profile nun. While it may be tempting to read the pilgrim’s appreciation for the Prioress as an actual reflection of the sophisticated, living Chaucer who may likely have preferred amiable, worldly nuns to good nuns, such a redundant slathering on of superlatives hardly seems appropriate. Rather, this aspect of the pilgrim’s manner seems more the response of an overwhelmed bourgeois, fully dazzled by the elegance of high society. This, I believe, is one aspect of the character through which Chaucer the poet intended us to first see the world of the Canterbury Tales, one that can't help but warmly affirm for us how things seem, while its architect implies through his design how things are.

Whole-hearted approval of the values to which his societal superiors subscribe is seen again in his portrait of the Monk. If the Prioress’s appeal to him is through elegant femininity, the Monk’s is through his imposing image as a real man’s man. Chaucer the pilgrim is as pleased with the Monk as the Monk is with himself, and seems to accept him on his own terms without supposing that such terms may run contrary to those of his station. For instance, in the wake of the Monk’s self-congratulatory rationalization of his love of hunting, our narrator eagerly chimes in:

And I seyde his opinioun was good:
What sholde he studie, and make himself wood,
Upon a book in a cloistre alwey to poure,
Or swinken with his handes, and laboure,
As Austin bit? How shal the world be served?
Lat Austin have his swink to him reserved! (183-8)

Once he has finished wallowing in his admiration of socially important people on the pilgrimage, however, the pilgrim’s tone changes for he can now concern himself with the bourgeoisie, members of his own class for whom he does not have to show such profound respect. Interestingly, it is not until this section of the Prologue that Chaucer’s own voice seeps audibly into the narrative and his poet and pilgrim personae seem to blur together somewhat. Indeed, he can even afford to be a little patronizing at times, as in his little joke about the feigned diligence of the Lawyer (322). Further, in addition to such oblique assertions of his own moral superiority, the portraits of his class-mates seem to go far in implying, somewhat cynically, that the primary middle-class motivation is for profit and property, for his interest and admiration for the other bourgeois pilgrims is centered mainly in their material prosperity and their ability to increase it.

He starts, appropriately enough with the out-and-out money-grubber, the Merchant, and after turning aside for that lusus naturae, the academic Clerk, proceeds to the Lawyer, who, despite the pilgrim's little joke, is the best-paid ever; the Franklin, twenty-one admiring lines on his expensively satiated appetite; the Guildsmen, cheered up the social ladder, 'For catel hadde they ynough and rente' (373); and the Physician, again the best and richest. In this series the portrait of the Clerk seems to stand out, pristine; but while the Clerk may represent an ideal to us–and to Chaucer, who’s image is hard not so see in the bookworm–the pilgrim's sense of values in his joke about the Clerk's failure to make money seems strangely infused with a more personal flavor–as if the poet were reaching into the narrative and planting an ironic snare for his real societal peers that might rib him about his own bookishness.

None of this is meant to imply that the pilgrim was wholly incapable of recognizing a true miscreant when he saw one. He could, provided the wrongdoer was a member of the lower classes and his transgressions were blatant enough: Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, and Pardoner are all acknowledged rascals. However, it can hardly be accidental–as if anything Chaucer applied his pen to was– that in all these cases there loomed the object of making money. Further, while the pilgrim–shown earlier to be conscious of life’s finer aspects–does deplore such matters as the Miller's brutish language, he also betrays his admiration for such a competent criminal on those very grounds. The equally repellent Summoner, a practicing bawd, seems partially redeemed both by his apparent skill as 'a gentil harlot' (647), and by the fact that for a moderate bribe he will neglect to summon. Implicitly shaded in these degrees, then, Chaucer the pilgrim comes to appear himself as less than ethically adamant.

One might reasonably ask, then, how this ostensibly uncertain sense of values may be reconciled with the enthusiasm he shows for the rigorous integrity for the actually virtuous characters like the Plowman and Parson, but I am not sure that there is any basic inconsistency here. It is the nature of the pilgrim to admire all kinds of superlatives, and the fact that he often admires those devoid of, or opposed to, genuine virtue does not inhibit his equal admiration for virtue incarnate. Innate and uncluttered virtue like the Parson’s presents no problems to the well-intentioned observer, but in a world consisting mostly of imperfections and massaged truths, accurate evaluations are difficult for a pilgrim who, like most of us, is a little naive, ill-equipped to either apprehend all that we see or see all that there is to apprehend.