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Fiction and Game in The Canterbury Tales

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SOURCE: "Fiction and Game in The Canterbury Tales," in The Critical Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer, 1965, pp. 185-97.

[In the following excerpt, Josipovici explains the function of the game motif as a method of resolving immoral aspects of the "Miller's Tale" and "The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale," and as a method of ironic self-revelation that reveals the folly of the pilgrims.]

Wherever we turn in The Canterbury Tales [quotations are taken from The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. by F. N. Robinson (1933)] we are faced with a conflict between the moral and the immoral, the edifying and the unedifying, the religious and the secular. This conflict is first suggested by the narrator in the "General Prologue"; it provides the theme of a number of the headlinks; it forms the substance of the Pardoner's Prologue and Epilogue, and dominates the Parson's Prologue; and the work concludes with the Retractation, which appears to reflect Chaucer's final stand on this central issue. Yet The Canterbury Tales, unlike so many medieval works, including Troilus and Criseyde, does not find itself irremediably split in an attempted allegiance atone and the same time to the religious and to the secular. Although the conflict between the two stands at the centre of the poem it does not imply any submission by Chaucer to the conventions of his age at the expense of his artistic design. On the contrary, Chaucer uses this conflict to conduct a bold and original strategy whose aim is to free his poem from moral jurisdiction and ensure its autonomy as a fictional construct. The first enunciation of the conflict occurs towards the close of the "General Prologue." The narrator has just finished telling of the dress, appearance, and number of the pilgrims, and explained why they were all assembled at the Tabard. Before going on with his story he pauses and addresses the reader:

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.
He may nat spare, although 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.

On the face of it Chaucer is here merely protecting himself against possible charges of immorality. He is, he says, a mere reporter of stories and events. He writes down what he sees and hears, and he would be failing in his duty as impartial recorder were he to pass over in silence those tales that might cause offence: neither the manner nor the matter of the tales are to be imputed to him. The narrator appeals to a higher authority, truth, fidelity to fact, to exonerate him from charges of bawdiness. But beneath this concern lest he be accused of indecency lies another, and graver, concern: to free his poem from the bondage to reality and ensure its status as fiction. Paradoxically this can only be done by having the narrator insist on his purely reportorial status. The explanation of this paradox lies in the frequently noted fact that the pilgrim narrator of The Canterbury Tales is not to be identified with Chaucer, but is the poet's ironic creation….

It is not only in the "General Prologue" that the pilgrim narrator affirms his purely reportorial status. He repeats his assertion in the Prologue to the "Miller's Tale," where his passive role is emphasized by making the drunken miller insist on telling his bawdy tale despite the vigorous efforts of the Host and the Reeve to stop him. It seems that he is determined to tell his story whether the pilgrims like it or not, and the narrator warns his readers that those who are squeamish should move on to less offensive tales. And he concludes:

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.

In other words, if the reader should choose to read the ensuing tale he should not be offended even if it does turn out to be bawdy because none of it is meant to be taken seriously, it is all part of a game. Chaucer is once more assuring us that this is a fiction and not to be confused with reality. Unlike the pilgrims, who must listen to the Miller whether they like it or not, the reader is free to skip the tale if he chooses; but even if he doesn't, to take offence at such a tale is to make the same sort of error as is made by those listeners who send money for the relief of the heroine of a radio serial. It is to forget that The Canterbury Tales is not a veridical report but a game played by Chaucer with his readers.

Chaucer is able to introduce the notion of game at this point because here his game with the reader coincides with another game, played within his poem by the pilgrims. It is the pilgrim narrator as well as the poet who insists that the words of the Miller are only a "game." The kind of relationship which Chaucer has established between himself, his poem, and the reader, is mirrored in the relationship established within the poem between the pilgrim storytellers, their material, and their audience.

It is the Host who first suggests that the pilgrims play a game to relieve the boredom of the journey to Canterbury, and it is he who lays down the rules for this game when the company assents to his suggestion. Each person is to tell two tales on the way to the shrine and two on the way back; the teller of the best tale is to be given dinner by all the other pilgrims; and anyone who fails to abide by the decisions of Harry Bailly is to pay a forfeit. The pilgrims agree to these rules, and, with the drawing of the shortest "cut" by the Knight on the following morning, the game is on. The ensuing tales, then, are not simply stories told to pass away the time on the road to Canterbury; they are part of a game, with rules of its own, which all the pilgrims have e of The Canterbury Tales stands a game, mirroring that other game, which poet and reader have agreed to play. Both games take place within a context of real life, but, because they are games, the participants are answerable to none of the laws which govern real life, but only to those rules which they have agreed upon beforehand.

The Host, who has set himself up as arbiter, has, it soon transpires, very clear ideas as to what it is he requires from a story. His words to the Clerk form perhaps the best summary of his attitude:

Telle us som myrie tale, by youre fey!
For what man that is entred in a pley,
He nedes moot unto the pley assente.
But precheth nat, as freres doon in Lente,
To make us for oure olde synnes wepe,
Ne that thy tale make us nat to slepe.

The primary requirement is that the story must not be boring. The Host is willing to listen to a tale in the high style or the low style, in prose or verse, a saint's life or a fabliau. But if he considers the tale boring then he has no hesitation in cutting it short and asking for something better. The ultimate crime of the story-teller is to send his audience to sleep, for to do so is to destroy the very raison d'être of the story: you cannot very well tell a tale without listeners, as he points out to the Monk.

It is partly for this reason too that the Host warns pilgrim after pilgrim not to preach. A sermon for the Host represents the acme of boredom. But there is another reason for his dislike of preaching, which is related to the desire that a story should hold the listener's interest, but which must not be confused with it. What the Host particularly dislikes about preaching is that the preacher has designs on his listeners. Although Harry Bailly never loses a chance to attack or ridicule preachers, he has nothing against them as such. His attitude is that they have no place in his game. The whole point of a game, after all, is that it is freely joined, that the only laws are the rules that have been agreed upon beforehand. Hence propaganda of any sort, however exalted the motive, has no place in a game.

The Parson is obviously the chief offender in this respect. In the "General Prologue" we see him as an ideal figure who, with the Knight, the Plowman and the Clerk is contrasted to all the other pilgrims by the fact that with him the word does indeed stick close to the deed: "first he wroughte, and afterwards he taughte." In all the other ecclesiastics—and most of the laymen—the gap between the word and the deed, the habit and the person, is more or less large, and one of the functions of the irony in the "General Prologue" is to reveal the degree of deviation. In the Prologue we are given an idealized description of the Parson, and we have to accept it since we are not allowed to see him in action. But later, on two separate occasions before he tells his own tale we do so see him, and in both he is involved in a quarrel with the Host.

In the Epilogue to the "Man of Law's Tale" Harry Bailly turns to him and asks him for a tale, "by Goddes dignitee." The Parson's only answer is to reprove him for swearing; whereupon he turns to the other pilgrims in mock surprise, and warns them that they "schal han a predicacioun," that "this Lollere heer wil prechen us somwhat." But at once the Shipman leaps in:

"Nay by my fader soule, that schal he nat!"
Seyde the Shipman; "heer schal he nat preche;
He schal no gospel glosen here ne teche."

This time the Parson subsides into silence, but the next time he and Harry Bailly clash it is he who wins the victory. For some unknown reason Chaucer changed his mind about the number of tales he was going to tell, and in the Parson's Prologue it transpires that all the tales have been told except for that of the Parson. The Host thus turns to him:

"Sire preest," quod he, "artow a vicary?
Or arte a person? sey sooth, by thy fey!
Be what thou be, ne breke thou nat oure pley;
For every man, save thou, hath toold his tale …
Telle us a fable anon, for cokkes bones!"

But once again the Parson reprehends him. He will take part in the "pley," but only on his own terms:

"Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me;
For Paul, that writeth unto Thymothee,
Repreveth hem that weyven soothfastnesse,
And tellen fables and swich wrecchednesse …
For which I seye, if that yow list to heere
Moralitee and vertuous mateere,
And thanne that ye wol yeve me audience,
I wol ful fayn, at Cristes reverence,
Do you plesaunce leefful, as I kan."

The figure who emerges from these two scenes is not that of the ideal ecclesiastic of the "General Prologue," but a type as common as the Friar and the Summoner: a medieval Puritan rigidly opposed to any form of swearing and to all but overtly moral tales on the grounds that they are lies and hence conducive to sin. And as we must weigh the words of the Friar and the Summoner against their deeds, so it would be incorrect to see Chaucer everywhere behind the Parson. Medieval scholars have for a long time now been stressing that it would be wrong to see the "Parson's Tale" as deliberately boring in the way that the "Monk's" is meant to be, and they have insisted that there is no irony in the apparent discrepancy between the Host's admonition to "be fructuous, and that in litel space," and the length and dryness of the ensuing sermon. Sermons in the middle ages were one of the only forms of entertainment, they remind us, and men were quite used to even longer ones than the Parson's. At the same time they have been pointing out that it was traditional in the middle ages to end a collection of tales with a particularly moral one, as Boccaccio does in the Decameron, for instance. Such warnings are certainly necessary, for there is nothing easier than to foist one's own sympathies on an ironic writer. But they tend, I believe, to do less than justice to Chaucer's artistry, and to blur the larger patterns of the poem.

In his Essay on the "Vita Nuova" C. S. Singleton has convincingly argued that only Dante, in the whole of the middle ages, was able to reconcile, artistically, human and divine love. Even Troilus and Criseyde, so poised a work in almost every respect, ultimately fails to reconcile the two, and, however one may justify the moral with which it ends, is a lesser work for the failure. The problem, of course, is not simply one of reconciling the love of woman and the love of God. It is equally the problem of reconciling the work of art with the Cot rest in the creations of this world, but must use them to come to God. As such, the problem is less epistemological than artistic. Dante's solution was to make of Beatrice an analogy for Christ. Beatrice is not an allegory of Christ, as Renaissance interpreters believed. Only through her, as Singleton and Charles Williams have shown, can Dante come to God. The method of analogy was never Chaucer's, but in the Canterbury Tales he hit upon a solution that left him as much artistic freedom as Dante had enjoyed, but of a kind new to the middle ages. He stressed the fact that his poem was a fiction. What this means is that every episode, every statement in the poem is enveloped in a web of irony which cannot be broken by reference to laws or rules in operation outside the fictional construct. So that if, from one point of view we assent to the rightness of the Parson's telling the last tale of all, and accept as the necessary prelude to salvation a sermon on penitence, from another the ironic device of the fictional narrator permits us to question the validity of the Parson's methods, and frees us from taking at its face value the retractation which follows. The Parson's sermon becomes an element of the poem, to be listened to as morality by the pilgrims, but read as fiction by the reader. For if the game devised by the Host breaks down at the close of the journey, the game played by Chaucer with his readers holds to the end.

What the Host objects to in the Parson is his tendency to destroy the game by substituting his own rules for those agreed to by the pilgrims. But Harry Bailly is not so disinterested himself as he would have one believe. To begin with there is the question of the prize dinner. Whoever wins, part of the spoils will go to the keeper of the Tabard who has undertaken to prepare the meal. But there is another, less material advantage which accrues to the organiser of the game: his role as docent allows him to indulge his love of mockery and sarcasm and his need toder cover of the rules. Thus he can insult the Cook and the Monk to their faces, while avoiding their censure by immediately reminding them to

… be nat wroth for game;
A man may seye ful sooth in game and pley.

The Parson refuses to play the game. He confuses fiction with falsehood, and stands firm in his determination to preach a sermon rather than tell a tale. The Host plays the game, but he is even more at fault than the Parson for he plays it for his own ends. So long as it is he who is making the jokes he is only too eager to invoke the game as an excuse; but as soon as the joke turns on himself he forgets all about the game and its rules in his blind anger at the joker. As the Pardoner concludes his tale the Host finds that for the first time the joke is on him, and he does not like it.

"The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale" stands at the centre of The Canterbury Tales. It reveals the final turn of the ironic screw. Other tales had been told with another end in view than the winning of the prize dinner. The Miller had told a tale about a carpenter who aimed higher than was natural and so fell lower, and the Reeve had replied in similar vein with a story about a miller. The pilgrims could sit back and laugh at the knaves who fool others only to be fooled in their turn through lack of self-knowledge, and the reader could laugh with them. But the Pardoner has designs upon the whole company of pilgrims, and so, implicitly, upon ourselves, the readers.

What the Pardoner does is to tell the company that he is going to fool them, and then to go ahead and do it. As the pilgrims drink in the conclusion of the tale of the three rioters and submit to the inevitable moral:

Now, goode men, God foryeve yow youre trespas,
And ware yow fro the synne of avarice!
Myn hooly pardoun may yow alle warice,
So that ye offre nobles or sterlynges,
Or elles silver broches, spoones, rynges.

they automatically reach into their pockets, only to be brought up sharp by the sudden realisation that the Pardoner is only going through his old routine, which he had explained at length in his Prologue. The reaction of the Host is violent in the extreme:

But, by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond,
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.

The Pardoner grows speechless with indignation at this, and a fight seems to be about to break out when the Knight interposes, reminding Harry Bailly of what he had himself so often said to cover up his own insults, that all this is nothing but a game:

Namoore of this, for it is right ynough!
Sire Pardoner, be glad and myrie of cheere;
And ye, sire Hoost, that been to me so deere,
I prey yow that ye kisse the Pardoner.
And Pardoner, I prey thee, drawe thee neer,
And, as we diden, lat us laughe and pleye.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the Host is angry because the Pardoner has asked him for money. What arouses his indignation is that the Pardoner has fooled him. The Pardoner is not out to make money off the pilgrims, otherwise he would never have revealed to them so candidly his methods of doing so in his Prologue. What he is out for is to prove the power of his words, and in order to succeed he has to make the pilgrims see that he has been able to fool them despite their previous knowledge of his methods. In that moment between the conclusion of his tale and the outraged cry of the Host, the moment when the power of his rhetoric wears off enough to be recognised as such, he has won his victory. And as the power he is allowed to exercise over others under cover of the game seemed more important to the Host than the money he might make over the prize dinner, so we may be sure that the Pardoner would not have foregone his mental triumph for all the relics in the world.

But what in fact has the Pardoner done that was so obnoxious? After all, he has only played the game to its limits. His tale is the very reverse of that of the Parson, since it accepts itself as merely a tale. Although on the one level it is aimed at making a fool of everybody, on another level it is not aimed against anyone—except those who refuse to recognise it as a fiction, a tale told as part of a game….

"The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale" stands at the centre of The Canterbury Tales because it is a paradigm of the whole poem. All the tales, and the poem as a whole, can be seen as an effort to bring to the consciousness of the reader the fact that it is easier to lay down rules for others than to abide by them oneself, easier to invoke the game when it is oneself who is making the jokes than when one is the victim of a joke. This is the theme of the tales of the Miller, the Reeve, the Merchant, and the Nun's Priest. But it is also the theme of the debate between the Miller and the Reeve, the Friar and the Summoner. The Miller is as blind to the mote in his own eye as is John the Carpenter, the gull of his tale. But the Reeve, who points this out to him, and goes on to tell a tale of a gulled miller, is equally blind. All the pilgrims and the characters in their tales are quite capable of seeing the folly of others, but none is capable of seeing that he too is tainted. And the regression from John the Carpenter to the Miller to the Reeve can end only with one person: the reader. After he has laughed with the Miller at John, and with Chaucer and the Reeve at the Miller, and with Chaucer at the Reeve, the reader suddenly finds, as the Host found at the close of the Pardoner's tale, that the joke is on himself. And at this point there us only one way of escape: to acknowledge one's folly and learn from the game. The Pardoner's ironic self-revelation is a mirror of Chaucer's insistence that his poem is not truth but fiction.

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