The Course: English 115b:

The Canterbury TalesNicholas Watson, BC 214(nwatson@fas.harvard.edu)

Teaching Fellow: Laura Wang(lwang@fas.harvard.edu)

April is the cruelest month breeding Whan that Aprille with his shoures swooteLilacs out of the dead land, mixing The drought of Merch hath perced to the roote,Memory and desire, stirring And bathed every veine in swiche licoureDull roots with spring rain. Of whiche vertu engendred is the floure…” (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) (Geoffrey Chaucer, The General Prologue)

What You Will Learn

To read deeply and begin to understand one of the great masterpieces of English literature – NOT as the early foundation for later writers that it is but as a poem that can still speak directly to the present.

To learn to think like Chaucer: through story and about story with the intense engagement and passionate detachment this involves.

In the process, to grasp Chaucer’s demanding and strange and influential notion of art.

To learn to read, aloud, Middle English, the earliest easily comprehensible version of our language.

To learn something of how literature, thought and society, worked during the late fourteenth century, in many ways a period of transition towards what we think of as the modern.

What You Have To Do

Learn to read Middle English.Read the poem (as well as some of

Chaucer’s earlier “dream” poems, House of Fame and Parliament of Fowles, as well as other works as assigned).

Attend class and section and contribute to both (this may include occasional responses and quizzes).

Write two papers.Become an expert on one of the Tales:

study it deeply, read about it, present on it, write about it.

What We Will Do

Hold sessions in office hours to teach you quickly to read Chaucer aloud and help you puzzle out the spellings etc.

Help those of you who wish to take part in a reading, on February 14, of the first Valentine’s Day poem in English, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles

Take you to the Houghton Library to look at medieval manuscript books and early editions of Chaucer

Give you extensive help with your research on the Tale you choose, and with presenting it and turning your work into a research paper

All the usual stuff

Resources to Help You Do It

METRO Middle English Teaching Resources Online Where to go for all your Middle English needs

The Geoffrey Chaucer Page (Chaucer at Harvard) Professor Larry Benson's magnificent center for the study of Chaucer, especially The Canterbury Tales.  Feel free to make use of the "interlinear translations" until your Middle English has steadied

The Middle English Compendium online (dictionary etc.)

Also: books on reserve (forthcoming); contact with a research librarian; the website Inter Libros for more advanced work in medieval studies

Argument

What is art for? Is art – especially the verbal art of narrative, or “fiction,” necessarily a positive force, or can it also be negative, corrupting, immoral, asking to be censored or, at least, treated with caution?   

Plato, after all, claimed that poets are liars and would have excluded them from his Republic.

Mind you, Plato also, after all, conveyed his philosophy in the form of fictional dialogues, showing that fiction is, among other things, a way of exploring truths.

Even that contradiction, though, suggests that these question have force, should not lightly be dismissed.

Argument

Why do these questions arise? In the case of literary art, “rhetoric” is part of the

answer to this question, “fiction” another. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion as distinct from the

art of argument. Argument seeks to convince us through reason. Rhetoric seems to move us through patterns of language, images, thoughts, irrespective of rational considerations.

Fiction is like rhetoric: it patterns human lives; it presents not what is but what might be; it organizes reality for ends of its own, whatever they may be.

Argument

We are all used to being acted upon by fiction: via novels, film, TV, advertising, and more.

We are all also used to the idea that art is good: it represents creativity, fulfillment; a kind of pleasure we call “aesthetic”; a space for critique of human institutions and of reality itself.

Besides, fiction has a powerful advantage over other modes of exploring truths, e.g. philosophy: its level of connectedness to our feelings and to the representation human lives.

This connectedness is one reason the truths of fiction are so often so complicated, so rich, so ambiguous.

None of this means, however, that we should take what the mode of art we call fiction and what it does for/to us for granted.

Argument

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are an exploration of the workings of fiction – and of the verbal arts in general – that refuses to make assumptions about what fiction is, what it does, and whether we can feel good about it.

The poem both asserts the distinctiveness of fiction – literature is not like other kinds of writing, nor life itself – and its intimate connectedness – literature is bound up with who we are, with how we interact.

In the process, the poem ultimately places itself under judgment: it admits the possibility that it may, as Plato claimed, be dangerous, ethically ambiguous, its role in human culture questionable.

But it also asserts its right to exist.

How Chaucer Experiments with Fictions

The Tales involve a double structure of tellers and listeners: there are two tellers, Chaucer and his pilgrims, and two audiences, the pilgrims and us, the readers; two levels of fiction.

Consequences:

1) One fictional level, the pilgrimage, comes to correspond to “reality.” Here we see the connections between stories and those who tell them and the effects of story-telling worked out in a number of ways.

2) This means that we cannot get away with thinking of fictions without also thinking about their effects, even if these effects are also fictional.

3) But it also removes us a long way from those effects. It produces “structural irony” or “ironic distance.”

How Chaucer Experiments with Fictions: Structural Irony

Levels of Fiction and Reality1) The tale (itself often a retelling of a known tale

and often in relationship to other tales)2) The teller (a “Canterbury Pilgrim”)3) The “inscribed” audience (the pilgrims in general;

the Host in particular; sometimes specific pilgrims)4) The scribe who inscribes them (Chaucer the

pilgrim)5) The author of the poem (Chaucer the author)6) The poem’s reader (us; also, in a real sense, God) (Result: a great echo-chamber of possibility)

How Chaucer Experiments with Fictions: Disclaiming Responsibility

But first I pray yow, of youre curteisye,

That ye n' arette it nat my vileynye,

Thogh that I pleynly speke in this mateere,

To telle yow hir wordes and hir cheere

Ne thogh I speke hir wordes proprely.

For this ye knowen al so wel as I,

Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,

He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan

Everich a word, if it be in his charge,

Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,

Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,

Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe.

He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother;

He moot as wel seye o word as another.

Crist spak hymself ful brode in hooly writ,

And wel ye woot no vileynye is it.

Eek Plato seith, whoso that kan hym rede,

The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.

Also I prey yow to foryeve it me,

Al have I nat set folk in hir degree

Heere in this tale, as that they sholde stonde.

My wit is short, ye may wel understonde.

How Chaucer Experiments with Fictions: Creating a Space of Ethical Ambiguity

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

How Chaucer Experiments with Fictions: Mine Host

Greet chiere made oure hoost us everichon,

And to the soper sette he us anon.

He served us with vitaille at the beste;

Strong was the wyn, and wel to drynke us leste.

A semely man oure hooste was withalle

For to han been a marchal in an halle.

A large man he was with eyen stepe --

A fairer burgeys is ther noon in chepe --

Boold of his speche, and wys, and wel ytaught,

And of manhod hym lakkede right naught.

Eek therto he was right a myrie man,

And after soper pleyen he bigan,

And spak of myrthe amonges othere thynges,

Whan that we hadde maad oure rekenynges,

And seyde thus: now, lordynges, trewely,

Ye been to me right welcome, hertely;

For by my trouthe, if that I shal nat lye,

I saugh nat this yeer so myrie a compaignye

Atones in this herberwe as is now.

Fayn wolde I doon yow myrthe, wiste I how.

The Host

12 For as there is one body, and hath many members, and all the members of the body when those be many, be one body, so also Christ.

13 For in one Spirit all we be baptized into one body, either Jews, either heathen, either servants, either free; and all we be filled with drink in one Spirit.

14 For the body is not one member, but many. 15 If the foot shall say, For I am not the hand, I am not of the body;

not therefore it is not of the body. 16 And if the ear saith, For I am not the eye, I am not of the body;

not therefore it is not of the body. 17 If all the body is the eye, where is hearing? and if all the body is

hearing, where is smelling? 18 But now God hath set members, and each of them in the body,

as he would. 19 And if all were one member, where were the body? 20 But now there be many members, but one body. (I

Corinthians, Chapter 12)

A Host

Host in the OEDHOST 1. An armed company or multitude of men; an army.

Now arch. and poet HOST 2. A. A man who lodges and entertains another in his

house: the correlative of guest. A man who lodges and entertains for payment; a man who keeps a public place of lodging or entertainment; the landlord of an inn. Often in archaic phr. mine (my) host = the landlord of such and such an inn.

HOST 3. A place of lodging or entertainment; a hostel, inn. HOST 4. A victim for sacrifice; a sacrifice (lit. and fig.): often

said of Christ. Obs. The bread consecrated in the Eucharist, regarded as the body of Christ sacrificially offered; a consecrated wafer.

The Host Swears: Blasphemy as Poetic Glue

Oure hooste lough and swoor, so moot I gon,

This gooth aright; unbokeled is the male.

Lat se now who shal telle another tale;

For trewely the game is wel bigonne.

Now telleth ye, sir monk, if that ye konne

Somwhat to quite with the knyghtes tale.

The millere, that for dronken was al pale,

So that unnethe upon his hors he sat,

He nolde avalen neither hood ne hat,

Ne abyde no man for his curteisie,

The Host Swears:Blasphemy as Poetic Glue

But in Pilates voys he gan to crie, And swoor, by armes, and by blood and bones, I kan a noble tale for the nones, With which I wol now quite the knyghtes tale. Oure hooste saugh that he was dronke of ale, And seyde, abyd, Robyn, my leeve brother; Som bettre man shal telle us first another. Abyd, and lat us werken thriftily. By Goddes soule, quod he, that wol nat I; For I wol speke, or elles go my wey. Oure hoost answerde, tel on, a devel wey!

The Host Swears Some More:Blasphemy as Poetic Glue

Owre hoost upon his stiropes stood anon, And seyde, goode men, herkeneth everych on! This was a thrifty tale for the nones! Sir parisshe prest, quod he, for goddes bones, Telle us a tale, as was thi forward yore. I se wel that ye lerned men in lore Can moche good, by goddes dignitee! The parson hem answerde, benedicite! What eyleth the man, so synfully to swere?

Collapsing the Space of Fiction:Chaucer’s Retraction

Now preye I to hem alle that herkne this litel tretys or rede, that if ther be any thynge in it that liketh hem, that therof they thanken oure lord Jhesu Crist, of whom procedeth al wit and al goodnesse. And if ther be any thyng that displese hem, I preye hem also that they arrette it to the defaute of myn unkonnynge, and nat to my wyl, that wolde ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had konnynge. For oure book seith, al that is writen is writen for our doctrine, and that is myn entente.

Wherfore I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes …

Collapsing the Space of Fiction:Chaucer’s Retraction

… and namely of my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns: as is the Book of Troilus; the Book also of Fame; the Book of the xxv. Ladies; the Book of the Duchesse; the book of Seint Valentynes Day of the Parlemen of Briddes; the Tales of Counterbury, thilke that sownen into synne; the Book of the Leoun; and many another book, if they were in my remembrance, and many a song and many a leccherous lay; that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne.