Medieval for a Cause

Last year I wrote about Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in April; this year, in keeping with that same spirit of spring, I read a prose retelling of the work. My online hours may have been spent keeping up with current events, and my walks may have entailed enjoying the flowers while tuning out modern noise, but my mind was in the Middle Ages. I wasn't sorry to absent myself, at least sporadically, from some of this week's sound and fury. Going medieval isn't always bad.

I think you need to read at least some of the tales as Chaucer wrote them to get the flavor of the language, even if it slows down your comprehension. One of the most memorable experiences I had in an English class was hearing Middle English verse read out loud while we mastered pronunciation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other works. For the first time, I could hear the underlying rhythms of the English language--hear it clearly as music--with the sense of the words taking second place to the sound. However, if I were teaching The Canterbury Tales, I would also have the students read a modern retelling so that they could enjoy the stories as stories.

To fully appreciate them, it's true: you have to read the entire work, or the bulk of it, and that would probably only take place in a course devoted to Middle English poetry. It's an ambitious project to read them all but worth it. It's not just the stories in themselves, but what they say about the people who tell them, and their listeners, that makes the Tales so much fun. You have, among others, the opening story told by a long-winded knight, a series of unflattering and/or bawdy tales told with the purpose of annoying someone else, the unforgettable forthrightness of the Wife of Bath, the stark morality of the Pardoner's tale of the three wastrels, and the folksy humor of the Nun's Priest's tale of the sprightly Chanticleer who outfoxes the fox.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about "Chaucer's Retractions," which comes at the very end. This is Chaucer, still in character as one of the pilgrims, turning aside, just as the company is approaching its goal, to offer a private speech in defense and/or apology for all his works, including the Tales he has just concluded. In spirit, it's a little like the series finale of some long-running TV show in which of one of the characters wakes up, and you find it was all a dream. After so much irreverence, crudity, and satire, Chaucer in effect takes it all back, just in case there was something in there that might have offended God or man. Of course, his failing to do this until the last dirty joke has been told leads you to question his sincerity, but the seriousness of his prayer also seems to hedge his bets. After all, death could come suddenly, and there was no sense taking any chances. If there's humor in this retraction, it's a dark humor, as I read it, laced with a sense of mortality.

A medieval pilgrim stopping in the woods unavoidably makes me think of Dante's pilgrim, who lost his way in a similar place before seeking his salvation. I'm also jumping ahead a couple of centuries to Shakespeare's Prospero, who, having used the magic arts to regain control of his fate, gives them up in the end, saying, "This rough magic I here abjure." Although Chaucer's purpose, to instruct, seems very different from Prospero's, they are both in effect using their creative power to shape things to their will. All of Chaucer's characters are subject to his whim, just as the inhabitants of Prospero's island are subject to his, until they're released. There's an inevitability to this release, but it's also a little sad, a letting go.

April is a great time to read The Canterbury Tales. You can rest your eyes by looking out the window at the trees leafing out and the flowers budding and put yourself in company with the pilgrims setting out on their journey, which, by the way, begins with crossing a stream. (Is The Canterbury Tales, in some sense, an underworld journey? This is a question I would put to my class of imaginary students, who may someday be actual ones.) I let time elide like that the other day at the coffeehouse while finishing the Tales, and it was as if the fourteenth century and the twenty-first blended together and became one, a Frappuccino of centuries. It was as if no time had passed at all since the pilgrims first gathered at Starbu--, I mean, the Tabard Inn.

Rogue's Gallery

According to Chaucer, April is the month when people "long to go on pilgrimages." In his day, when the urge hit, people struck out for Canterbury to see the cathedral and its relics. Of course, that was England in the Middle Ages, but something like the same idea probably still applies. Spring break commonly falls in April, though trips to the beach or Disneyland are much more common than pilgrimages to holy shrines nowadays.

When I was younger, I took it for granted that people were just more pious in the Middle Ages, but now I suspect that for many pilgrims, devotion was just an excuse for a vacation, a break from the everyday grind. For them, going to Canterbury was something like going to Daytona, or even Vegas.

I've actually been to Canterbury, though I didn't do it according to the Chaucer plan. I arrived there on a bus, in the month of July, with my camera and my grandmother. (This was the same summer I traipsed around half of southern England looking at Gothic buildings.) I was very interested in what you might call the numinous properties of Gothic, but I wouldn't term myself a pilgrim in the strict sense of the word. I was more interested in aesthetic, historic, and imaginative inspiration than in a religious experience, and I wasn't disappointed in what I saw.

I remember that Canterbury Cathedral could be seen from a long way off across the countryside; once it came into view it towered over everything else. I imagine that for medieval pilgrims, regardless of their original motivations for taking the trip, the constant and ever more dominating presence of the object of their journey must have been awe-inspiring, perhaps a bit like approaching the doors of heaven. It would have been the presence around which everything else arranged itself, like Wallace Stevens' jar upon the hill in "Anecdote of the Jar." This was probably true even for the most jaded.

Can you imagine traveling with such a crowd today? I suppose it wouldn't be unlike a bus tour or a cruise, in which you're thrown in with such a random sampling of humanity that there's no telling who you might be sitting next to, knave, fool, criminal, or saint. Although it's been a while since I read The Canterbury Tales, my recollection is that while the last group was in short supply, the other three categories were amply represented. Perhaps it's unfair, since it's been a while since I read the Tales, but when I ask myself now if I would have chosen to take such a journey with a crew like that, the answer is no. It may just be that the rogues stand out more in my memory. It's also true that I've never been one for group travel to begin with.

Of course, I'm being a little facetious. Chaucer's idea, I think, in depicting such a cavalcade of characters is to provide amusement. It's a comedy, with all the vices (and virtues, naturally) of humanity on display. You're meant to recognize, with a wry smile, characters that remind you of people you know (and perhaps yourself, if you tend toward introspection). The Canterbury Tales is, after all, a species of armchair travel. You're not actually on the trip--you're at one remove from it. Except insofar as life itself is a journey . . . but never mind that . . . Chaucer has made it possible for you to just sit back and enjoy this one.

If you're making any spring journeys of your own, safe travels. Watch out for the other guy and all that. As for me, I'm going no farther than the local coffeehouse, where you may see me ensconced with Paul Theroux's The Pillars of Hercules. I've gone by sea, by air, by rail, by land, and on foot, but right now armchair travel is what I like best.