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The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

H. Marshall Leicester Jr.
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Abstract

“Unimpersonated artistry,” the idea that narrators in the Canterbury Tales are intermittently replaced by the voice of the poet, is a notion common in Chaucer criticism. The idea arises from a confusion of voice with presence, and this confusion leads critics to posit preexisting characters and a preexisting poet whose combined traits constrain the meaning of the text. On the contrary, the poem is conspicuously textual, and the voices of the text create the characters and the narrator. Only by treating the pilgrims as the products, rather than the producers, of their tales can we construct their personalities. Similarly, we must construct the poet from his poem. The general narrator is not a naive “Chaucer the pilgrim” but a complex and sophisticated impersonator who withholds himself and directs us to the roles he plays in order to create himself as fully and complexly as possible in his poem.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 2 , March 1980 , pp. 213 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 230–31.

2 Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957), pp. 264–65. In a more general statement on the Canterbury Tales. on pp. 171–72, Muscatine observes: “No medieval poet would have sacrificed all the rich technical means at his disposal merely to make a story sound as if such and such a character were actually telling it. The Miller's Tale, to name but one of many, would have been thus impossible.” See also John Lawlor, Chaucer (New York: Harper, 1968), Ch. v. Jordan, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967). Ch. vi. Jordan is, on theoretical and historical grounds, the most thoroughgoing and principled opponent of the notion of consistent impersonation in Chaucer's work. In this connection the book just cited deserves to be read in its entirety, as does Jordan's “Chaucer's Sense of Illusion: Roadside Drama Reconsidered,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 29 (1962). 19–33. Middleton, “The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: ‘Ensamples Mo than Ten’ in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review, 8 (1973), 9–32. Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977). p. 165. Elizabeth Salter's reading of the Knight's Tale, in Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale (London: Edwin Arnold, 1962). pp. 7–36. is perhaps the most consistently developed in terms of the “two voices” of the poet. See also Paul T. Thurston. Artistic Ambivalence in Chaucer's Knight's Tale (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press. 1968).

3 Howard states the position admirably (pp. 123–24). I suppose no one would question that the Wife of Bath's and Pardoner's tales virtually demand this approach.

4 William Frost. “An Interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale.” Review of English Studies, 25 (1949) 290–304; Paul Ruggiers. “Some Philosophical Aspects of The Knight's Tale,” College English, 14 (1958), 296–302; P. M. Kean, “The Knight's Tale,” in her Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1972), ii, 1–52.

5 Richard Neuse, “The Knight: The First Mover in Chaucer's Human Comedy,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 31 ( 1962), 312–13.

6 See, e.g., Jordan, Shape of Creation, p. 181, where what is apparently envisioned is Chaucer the poet projecting Chaucer the pilgrim as the (intermittent?) narrator of the Knight's story. For an instance of how far this sort of thing can go. see A. P. Campbell, “Chaucer's ‘Retraction’: Who Retracted What?” Humanities Association Bulletin, 16, No. 1 (1965), 75–87.

7 Jordan once again provides the clearest example of this historicist form of argument, but D. W. Robertson also uses it, e.g., in the Introduction to his Chaucer's London (New York: Wiley, 1968), pp. 1–11, where he both specifies and generalizes such statements in his A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1962) as the following: “The actions of Duke Theseus in the Knight's Tale are thus, like the actions of the figures we see in the visual arts of the fourteenth century, symbolic actions. They are directed toward the establishment and maintenance of those traditional hierarchies which were dear to the medieval mind. They have nothing to do with ‘psychology’ or with ‘character’ in the modern sense, but are instead functions of attributes which are, in this instance, inherited from the traditions of medieval humanistic culture” (pp. 265–66; see also the discussion of the Friar's Tale that immediately follows). This whole line of argument probably originated with Leo Spitzer's “A Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio, 4 ( 1946), 414–22. Spitzer's argument is drawn from particular textual investigations and is relatively tentative about its conclusions. Judging from his remarks on Boccaccio, I am not at all sure that Spitzer would see Chaucer as a representative user of the “poetic ‘I,‘ ” but in any case I think his successors, unlike him, are arguing from “history” to texts, not the other way around. Spitzer's formulation has become fossilized in these Chaucerians.

8 G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1915), Ch. v; the famous phrases are on pp. 154–55. R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle of the Canterbury Tales (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1955).

9 Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer's Poetics (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), p. 3.

10 Jordan is particularly good at evoking the element of “the girlhood of Shakespeare's heroines” that often finds its way into this sort of interpretation; see “Roadside Drama.” esp. pp. 24–26.

11 Quotations from Chaucer are from F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1957).

12 In what follows I ought to acknowledge a general obligation to the work of Jacques Derrida, perhaps more to its spirit than to any specific essay or formulation. For a representative discussion of the problem of presence and a typical critique of “logocentric metaphysics” see “Writing before the Letter,” Pt. I of Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 1–93.

13 See Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Miami Linguistics Series, No. 8 (Coral Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971). Chapters xviii and xx are especially helpful, but the whole section (Chs. xviii-xxiii, pp. 195–248) is of value.

14 One might observe in passing that many “structuralist” discussions of voice in literature seem plagued by the same confusions as Chaucerian ones. See, e.g., Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970). where he remarks of the discourse of the traditional novel that it “alternates the personal and the impersonal very rapidly, often even in the course of the same sentence, so as to produce, if we can speak thus, a proprietary consciousness which retains the mastery of what it states without participating in it” (p. 140). There is not space here to deal with this extraordinary idea, but see Jonathan Culler's sympathetic and skeptical discussion of this notion and related ideas in Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press. 1975), pp. 189–205.

15 There are a number of tales—the Prioress' is one and the Shipman's another—that suggest how this happens whether the speaker intends it or not.

16 E.g.. “A clerk hadde lithcrly biset his whyle. / But if he koude a carpenter bigyle”: “What! thynk on God. as we doon. men that swynke”: “She was a prymerole a piggesnye, / For any lord to leggen in his bedde, / Or yet for any good yeman to wedde” (i.3299–300, 3491, 3268–70).

17 See Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 77–89.

18 Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA, 69 (1954), 928–36; rpt. in his Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone, 1970). Howard discusses the topic in his “Chaucer the Man,” PMLA, 80 (1965), 337–43.

19 See Rosemary Woolf, “Chaucer as a Satirist in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” Critical Quarterly, 1 (1959), 150–57.

20 I suspect that this confusion has to do with a natural desire on the part of critics to evade the feelings of contingency and responsibility that haunt the act of interpretation. If the voice of the text is assumed to be that of an external subject, one justifies what one reads out of the text on the authority of a poet who must have “meant” to put it in. See Donaldson's brilliant and humane critique of stemma editing on similar grounds in “The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts,” Speaking of Chaucer, pp. 102–18.

21 See Major's valuable and neglected article “The Personality of Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA, 75 (1960), 160–62.

22 See Jill Mann's excellent discussion in Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 17–37, esp. p. 20.

23 See Arthur Mizener, “Character and Action in the Case of Criseyde,” PMLA, 54 (1939), 65–81, and Robert P. apRoberts, “The Central Episode in Chaucer's Troilus,” PMLA, 77 (1962), 373–85.

24 This observation suggests that a paratactic style is particularly conducive to producing the kind of effect I am describing, because the information (syntax) that would specify the connection between statements is left out. See Erich Auerbach, “Roland against Ganelon,” in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Garden City. N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday. 1953). pp. 83–107. Parataxis is one of the main descriptive techniques of the General Prologue, particularly noticeable in the three central portraits of the Shi pman. the Physician, and the Wife of Bath, but widely employed throughout. Further, the structure of the Prologue itself is paratactic (composed of juxtaposed independent portraits), and so is that of the poem as a whole (composed of juxtaposed independent tales).

25 I have neglected B. H. Bronson's criticisms of Chaucer the pilgrim and related matters (see esp. his In Search of Chancer [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press. 1960], pp. 25–33), because my assumptions about the relations between literary and oral cultures in Chaucer's poetry start from a position very nearly opposite to his. I agree with him, however, that the problem of performance in Chaucer is worth further study: in fact, I think it is a central theme throughout the poet's career. In the Canterbury Tales, the frame exists precisely to provide a literary representation of the ordinarily extratextual and tacit dimensions of storytelling in writing. The poem presents not merely stories but stories told to an audience that is part of the fiction, and this circumstance allows Chaucer to register the effects of a range of conditions of performance.

26 In preparing this article, I was assisted by a grant from the Research Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California, Santa Cruz; I am grateful for this support.