The Prologue as Performance: Notes Toward a Prospective Reading

But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,
Er that I ferther in this tale pace,
Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun
To telle yow al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me.
       (35–39)

The General Prologue presents itself prospectively as the record of an experience, but not the experience of meeting the pilgrims on the way to Canterbury. Rather, as Donald Howard has shown, the poem purports to represent the experience of the speaker in putting together the memory of that meeting, which took place at some time in the past, so as to give it to us reordered "acordaunt to resoun."^[13] This is the task he undertakes now, in the present of narrating, "whil I have tyme and space/Er that I ferther in this tale pace," after the pilgrimage itself has been completed. The experience is of course a fiction, the textual representation of a virtual "I" addressing a virtual audience "To telle

[13] Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales, 134–58.

yow al the condicioun/Of ech of hem." As I have suggested, the fiction is one of performance, the logocentric illusion, as we say nowadays, of a performer who unfolds his meaning to us as he speaks, but it is no less consistently presented for all of that. The poem keeps us aware of this fictional or virtual now of audience address from its beginning to its end, when "now is tyme to yow for to telle/ . . . al the remenaunt of oure pilgrimage" (720, 724). The rational ordering of the pilgrims is thus a project the narrator proposes at the outset of the prologue, one we watch him enact as the poem unfolds.

If the ordering of the pilgrims is a project of the narrator's, it does not initially seem difficult or challenging to him or to us. Like the famous opening sentence, with its effortless progression from the impersonal cosmic eros of seasonal change through vegetable growth and animal (or at least avian) sexuality to the amor spiritualis that drove Saint Thomas, the presentation of the pilgrims in the first half of the General Prologue is a richly embroidered and elegantly varied expression of "what everybody knows" about the shape of society.^[14] The progression of portraits from the Knight through the Wife of Bath is consistently, though complexly, structured on the time-honored model of the three estates. The tally of the pilgrims begins with a preeminent representative of the estate of milites and pauses for a moment to list the Knight's hierarchically ordered entourage—his son the Squire and his servant the Yeoman—before passing on to the second group, the three members of the regular clergy. As Mann notes (Medieval Estates Satire, 6), it would be more correct in conventional estates terms to place the clerical figures first, and this fact suggests that the estates organization is modified by hierarchical considerations of another sort: the Knight is in some sense the highest-ranking pilgrim. This displacement does not, however, affect the overall organization in estates terms. With the clerical figures too there is room for flexibility and play—the Prioress's entourage is also listed briefly at the end of her portrait. But here, as with the treatment of the Five Guildsmen as a single unit, the choice to stress the portrait as more basic than the individual person by brushing past the Second Nun and the Nun's Priest(s) points to the importance of estates classification over indi-

[14] See the fine discussion of the organization of the poem in Hoffman, "Chaucer's Prologue to Pilgrimage."

viduality as such. In any case, the basic structural outline is clear: three religious presented in order of official rank, a prioress, a monk as monastery official ("kepere of the celle"), and an ordinary friar. This grouping is followed by the inevitably more miscellaneous list of the pilgrims of the third estate, which by the late Middle Ages had become a kind of catchall for those who were not knights or clergy and which is itself variously carved up by other estates satires.^[15] The first part of the poem, viewed from a certain distance, displays a complex articulation of interrelated hierarchical schemata within a basic triadic structure continued through the Wife of Bath's portrait, at least in the sense that the portrait groupings continue to be divisible by three. The triad of the Franklin, the Five Guildsmen, and the Cook, for instance, outlines a modern, citified, bureaucratic, and competitive parallel—a knight of the shire, burgesses who aspire to rank,^[16] and a proletarian craftsman in the temporary hire of his betters—to the more traditional and naturalized sociomoral hierarchy of the first triad, the Knight, the Squire, and the Yeoman, who are bound together by ties of blood and homage.

If there are problems with the order I have sketched so far—and there are—they are not allowed to emerge in the unfolding of the poem for some time. Like the opening sentence, the order of the pilgrims in the first half of the prologue, which is rooted in conventional and collective norms, reflects "what everybody knows" about the exfoliation of natural and spiritual energies in springtime and the relation of these energies to the shape of society and its estates. This is perhaps one reason why the portraits in this part of the poem exhibit the relatively relaxed tone and the lack of overt moralization that Mann notes. These descriptions draw easily on the shared framework of assumptions in whose name our representative, the narrator, speaks. That the kind of loving the Squire currently practices is more closely allied to the energies of the animal soul than to the rational love of ecclesia and respublica his father embodies need not be spelled out. It is carried in the implications of the image that links him to the sleep-

[15] See Mann, Medieval Estates Satire, Appendix A, 203–6.

[16] Sylvia L. Thrupp, in The Merchant Class of Medieval London, has demonstrated how typical was the desire, in men of the Five Guildsmen's class, to crown a career in the city by buying land, moving to the country, and becoming gentry. These pilgrims thus "belong" with the Franklin in part because they are trying to become him.

lessly amorous birds of the first eighteen lines—"He sleep namoore than dooth a nyghtyngale" (98)^[17] —birds that are themselves balanced between the immanent "gravitational" love that moves the sun and the other stars through the round of the seasons and the focused and rational divine love that calls to and through the saint. Similarly, our common expectation that any literary friar will be a bad one makes it unnecessary for the narrator to condemn the pilgrim Friar explicitly. One reason the Friar's portrait is the longest in the prologue is the extreme popularity and ubiquity of antifraternal satire in the fourteenth century: there is a rich fund of conventional material to draw on, and the poet-narrator can count on this tacitly shared background to enforce his ironies.^[18]

As Mann's discussion of "worthy" may suggest, however, the precise placing of these pilgrims does create some difficulties, and, as I want to insist, these difficulties are experienced by the speaker, and experienced progressively. An overview of the pilgrims of the third estate reveals an increasing strain between what the poet's common culture tells him he ought to be able to say about people ("what everybody knows") and what his actual experience of trying to describe them provides. It is preeminently in this section of the poem that technical and scientific jargon and the language of craft, for example, become conspicuous, with the effects Mann notes: the felt absence of more widely applicable and less specialized role definitions, and a sense of the disjunction between the moral and professional spheres that emphasizes the fundamentally amoral character of professional expertise; think of the Shipman's navigational skill, which appears to make him a more efficient pirate, or the learning of the Doctor, whose tag, "He was a verray, parfit praktisour" (422), calls attention to the difference between his skills and the Knight's virtues (72). Details of dress and appearance become less informative. The end of the Man of Law's portrait, with its abrupt dismissal "Of his array telle I no lenger tale" (330), stresses how little we can learn about him from his off-duty dress, especially compared to the amount of symbolic information about character carried by the estates uniform of the Knight with his armor-stained "gypon"; likewise the portrait of the Friar with his

[17] See Hoffman, "Chaucer's Prologue to Pilgrimage."

[18] See Bowden, Commentary on the General Prologue, 119–145, and my discussion of the Monk's portrait above.

double-worsted semicope. The same indefiniteness characterizes such things as the Cook's "mormal," the name of the Shipman's barge, the Maudelayne (what would that mean if it meant?), and most of the details of the Wife of Bath's portrait: her deafness, her complicated love life, and her big hat. The Wife's portrait is the culmination in the poem of the progressive tendency of particular qualities of individuals to shift their area of reference from the exemplary to the idiosyncratic. The often-noted excellence of each pilgrim becomes rooted more and more in the existential being and activity of the individual and less and less in his or her representative character as the symbol of a larger group. The individual's place in a hierarchy becomes less important than his or her performances; consider again the difference between a "verray, parfit gentil knyght" and a "verray, parfit praktisour." These are persons whose stories we would have to tell to understand them—or who would have to tell their stories.

This need for more information is overtly recognized in the Wife of Bath's portrait, the only place in the portraits that refers beyond them to the tale-telling to come:

Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve,
Withouten oother compaignye in youthe—
But thereof nedeth nat to speke as nowthe.
       (460–62)

"What everybody knows" is not enough to account for the Wife either morally or socially, and the promise of more to come points to the narrator's awareness that she will have to do it herself later. As I have suggested, following Hoffman, the hierarchy of the opening lines of the prologue, in terms of which the pilgrims are organized and against which, broadly speaking, they are measured, is fundamentally a hierarchy of loves. It ought therefore to be possible "acordaunt to resoun" to place the Wife's loves in relation to that order. But that is just what the speaker does not do. The details of the Wife's portrait are as vibrant as the woman we sense behind them, but their vividness only stresses their lack of coherence in traditional terms. Prospectively neither we nor the speaker can arrange them in a hierarchy of significance with respect to the hierarchies of nature, society, and the divine order. It is clear that the question interests the speaker since he allows it to take over the latter part of the portrait. The list of the Wife's pilgrimages (463–66), a record of travel that competes with the Knight's, is made

an excuse to remind us, with an elbow in the ribs, that "She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye" (467)—unlike, no doubt, that proper father and head of an extended family unit. Her gap teeth and "hipes large" keep the issue before us, and the portrait ends "Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce,/For she koude of that art the olde daunce" (475–76). This continued fascination does not, however, allow the speaker to rest secure in a neutral, "objective" presentation of the Wife's love life and its place in the scheme of things, as his mildly chauvinist tone reveals. The Wife certainly raises the questions that gender and sexuality put to the standard, patriarchal hierarchies, questions of the relations between sensual love, "felaweshipe," marriage, amor dei, and remedia amoris, but these relations, as she will remind us in her prologue and tale, are matters of controversy, and the description of her here does not begin to resolve them.

It seems to me to be no accident that the portrait of the highly idealized and morally transparent Parson occurs at just this point, forming the strongest possible contrast to the ambiguities of the Wife of Bath. Even more significant, however, is the fact that now the organizing principle of the poem changes. After the closely linked Parson-Plowman grouping, the final five pilgrims are bunched together and announced in advance as completing the tally: "Ther was also a Reve, and a Millere,/a Somnour, and a Pardoner also,/a Maunciple, and myself—ther were namo" (542–44), As opposed to the complex complementarity and hierarchy of the ordering of the portraits in the first half, we are here presented with rather simple oppositions: two against five, bad against good. If the initial organization of the poem is indeed that of the three estates, we obviously do well to ask why the Parson's portrait is not included with the second, clerical, triad and why it interrupts the account of the third estate (to which all the remaining pilgrims in the list belong) instead. In the sort of sequential or prospective reading I am urging here, the question does not arise until we reach the Parson's portrait, but it certainly does arise then. The effect is to make the initial three-estates ordering, in retrospect, look much more selective and ad hoc than it did at first, much more the product of tacit choices and decisions on the part of the narrator who now alters and abandons it.

The two most striking features of the final sequence of seven portraits from the Parson through the Pardoner are, first, a drive to ultimate moral clarification that I will call apocalyptic, in the etymo-

logical sense of the word as an unveiling, a stripping away of surface complexity to reveal the fundamental truth beneath it,^[19] and second, the conspicuous emergence of the narrator as the source of this drive. The effect of the insertion of the Parson-Plowman dyad is to provide a golden "ensample" against which not only the remaining pilgrims but also the previous ones—the Parson's portrait contains a number of "snybbing" critical references to previous portraits such as those of the Monk and Friar—are measured and found wanting.^[20] Besides the animal imagery cited by Mann (Medieval Estates Satire, 194–95), which is itself susceptible of typological and physiognomical interpretation in malo, as Curry, Robertson, and others have shown, there are other patterns that cut across the last portraits and produce the effect of a uniformly wicked and worsening world. The Miller, whose badness is qualified by the energy of his animal spirits, carries a sword and buckler. The more sinister-sounding Reeve, who does not just defraud a few village yokels but undermines a whole manor from lord to laborers, carries a "rusty blade" (618, emphasis added), and the Summoner's failure to sustain and defend ecclesiastical order is pinned down by the allegory of his armory: "A bokeleer hadde he maad hym of a cake" (668). Read across the portraits and, once more, against the image of hierarchy and vigilant order embodied in the first triad, where the Yeoman keeps the Knight's weapons "harneised wel" (114) for use at need, the symbolic progression of weapons here implies that as evil becomes more spiritual and intense, its outward signs become clearer and more concrete emblems of the inner state, and that such progressive evils are increasingly revealed as demonic parodies of the good. The Summoner and the Pardoner in particular have the privatio boni theory of evil written all over them.

At the same time the narrator moves forward out of the relatively anonymous "felaweshipe" of "what everybody knows" into a position of isolated prominence as he takes a God's-eye view more akin perhaps to the Parson's. He says "I" more often; he addresses us more overtly, breaking off description to do so; he warns and exhorts and judges:

[19] And more or less in the sense that Morton W. Bloomfield uses it with respect to Langland in Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth Century Apocalypse.

[20] For example,"He was a shepherde and noght a mercenarie" (514) or "He was to synful men nat despitous,/Ne of his speche daungerous ne digne,/ . . . But it were any persone obstinat,/What so he were, of heigh or lough estat" (516–17, 511–22). See also Donaldson, "Adventures with the Adversative Conjunction," esp. 356.

"Wel I woot he lyed right in dede" (659). The effect is well represented by the Manciple's portrait, which is, notoriously, not about the Manciple but about the lawyers he works for. As the speaker moves toward the end of the portrait, he idealizes them more and more, stressing the power for social good bound up in them who are "able for to helpen al a shire" (584) and then managing to suggest that it is somehow the Manciple's fault that they do not help: "And yet this Manciple sette hir aller cappe" (586). Because the speaker so conspicuously wrenches us away from the Manciple, he calls attention to himself and his own social concerns. For this reason, among others, all this apocalyptic processing registers, I think, as a failure of vision on the narrator's part. In sequence and in context it looks like a reaction to the complexities and uncertainties of classification and judgment generated by the enterprise of the first half of the General Prologue , a retreat to simpler and more rigorous standards of moral classification that, because its psychological motives emerge so clearly, also looks like name-calling, a product less of objective appraisal of the pilgrims in question than of the speaker's own wishes and fears about the evils of society.

The pattern of this psychology is fairly precisely that of what I have called "masculine" disenchantment since it is focused on the ways human agents like the Manciple and the Summoner manipulate and subvert what should be a transcendent and stable order, and is marked by nostalgia for what it knows has been lost. The Summoner is an actively disenchanted cynic, whose perversion of what ought to be the justice of God is accompanied by an articulate conviction that it is only the justice of men as corrupt as himself: "'Purs is the ercedekenes helle,' seyde he" (658). If the speaker protests this blatant assertion, he seems nonetheless to agree that it is all too often true, as the Pardoner's portrait affirms even more strongly:

But with thise relikes, whan that he fond
A povre person dwellynge upon lond,
Upon a day he gat hym moore moneye
Than that the person gat in monthes tweye;
And thus, with feyned flaterye and japes,
He made the person and the peple his apes.
       (701–6)

Like the pilgrims in their tales, the narrator of the General Prologue does not simply use categories to make neutral descriptions but also

has attitudes toward the descriptions he makes and the things he describes. The pervasive symbolic processing of the end of the portrait gallery shows that there is more at stake for him here than the features and foibles of individuals. By the end of the prologue the pilgrims are being made aggressively to stand for estates as images of the state of society. Once again it seems no accident, in retrospect, that the tale of the pilgrims ends with the Pardoner, the darkest example and the most trenchant spokesman of an attitude the speaker here comes close to sharing.

This reading of the narrator's psychology is the more convincing, at least to me, because of the character of the passage that immediately follows the portraits. An address that begins confidently with a straightforward statement of what has been achieved, "Now have I toold you soothly, in a clause" (715), becomes more and more tentative and apologetic as it proceeds and more and more nervous about the effect not only of what remains to say but also of what has already been said:

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 kan hym rede,
The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.
       (725–42)

The passage is dogged by the speaker's repetitions of the attempt to deny responsibility for the descriptions of the pilgrims he is about to give and haunted by his sense that the denials are not convincing

because he is too clearly responsible for the descriptions he has already given. He ends oddly, after a discussion of the tales that are to come, where we might have expected him to begin, with an apology for having failed to order the pilgrims correctly, and this peculiarity suggests what is really on his mind: "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" (743–45).^[21] In strong contrast to the atmosphere of shared understandings and common agreements he projected at the beginning of the prologue, the speaker here appears nervously isolated, as if surrounded by an audience of Millers, Manciples, Reeves, Summoners, and Pardoners, whose accusation of "vileynye" he might have some cause to anticipate.

What seems to happen in the performance represented in the General Prologue is that two rather different procedures of classifying the pilgrims, which I have called hierarchical and apocalyptic and which seem to correspond in emphasis to the classificatory and the moralizing impulses respectively in estates satire, are adopted and then discarded by the speaker. In the final movement of the poem he turns to the pilgrims themselves, in part as a way of getting himself off the hook. The movement of the prologue is within two versions of "resoun," understood, as it can be in Middle English, as a translation of Latin ratio.^[22] The distinction I have in mind is between, on the one hand, underlying cause, the reasons in things that are patterned on the rationes seminales in the mind of God, the basic rational structure of reality; and, on the other hand, account, argument, and especially opinion, as with the Merchant: "His resons he spak ful solempnely,/Sownynge alwey th'encrees of his wynnyng" (274–75). The poem goes from an account "acordaunt to resoun," which seems to want to claim the first definition, to the moment when the Knight begins his tale, "As was resoun,/By foreward and by composicioun" (847–48)—that is, according to an explicitly man-made, ad hoc, and open-ended ratio or plan, the tale-telling project, which will require the activity not of the narrator but of the pilgrims themselves in telling their tales and

[21] Laura Kendrick notices the changing tone of this apology in Chaucerian Play , 144–45.

[22] See the excellent account of the word and its medieval uses in McKeon, Selections from the Medieval Philosophers , 2:488–90.

of the reader in putting together and evaluating the various performances. This movement is paralleled by a shift in the meaning of the word "tale" from "Er that I ferther in this tale pace" at the beginning of the prologue to the force the word takes on contextually in the apology just quoted. In the first instance the primary meaning would seem to be "tally," "reckoning," in the sense of a completed list or account, which is also one of the primary meanings of ratio. By the time the end of the portrait gallery is reached, however, the developed sense of the speaker's contribution to the way the list has unfolded lets the meanings "Canterbury tale"—that is, traveler's tale, whopper— and more generally "fiction," "story," such as the pilgrims will tell, speak out. These transformations of "tale" and "resoun" have in common the disenchanted view in the more technical sense that they enforce of the enterprise of the poem and its speaker.

I began by suggesting that the General Prologue actively challenges the traditional assumptions of estates satire. An analysis of the prologue's detailed representation of the practice of classifying establishes that the poem is in fact not an estates satire but a critique of an estates satire in the mode of deconstruction. That is, its narrator's gradual and eventually conspicuous questioning of his own procedures operates as a miming of traditional classifications so as to bring out gradually the tensions and contradictions that underlie and constitute them. As the representation of an unfolding experience, the poem is also a representation of the coming into something like discursive consciousness of the problematic character of what begins as the relatively unreflective practical activity of classifying people, and it presents that coming into consciousness as an awakening to disenchantment. The speaker of the poem eventually encounters his own agency, the inescapable likelihood that he has made use of estates conventions to create rather than discover the order of society, so that the General Prologue turns out to be, like the tales that follow, much more a representation of the voice generated by a certain kind of activity in the moment-by-moment, line-by-line process of describing than an objective narration. The stalking horse of this enterprise is indeed the performing narrator, a self-conscious version of Chaucer the pilgrim, who appears to find himself enmeshed in the tensions and bedeviled by the impasses that lead to what I take to be a central theme of the prologue, the question of what it means to judge and classify one's fellows. If the speaker feels

and fears that he may have falsified the pilgrims in describing them, the corollary is that the poem is indeed a performance in exactly the way that the tales are. It is the self-presentation of a speaker, far more the Poet's portrait than an account of the other characters, who must now be expected to present themselves in their tales. What for the represented speaker is an experience of disenchantment is for the textualizing poet the representation of practical disenchantment.

It is one thing to have such an experience but quite another to write it down, in particular to make a written representation of a failed performance. If the aim is to give a satisfactory account of the pilgrims, one might start over on a different plan or, having learned one's lesson, discard the prologue. But to read the poem prospectively as a fictional performance—a reading it initially encourages—is finally to be made aware of the inadequacies of that mode of reading, and this awareness I take to be one of the aims of the representation. From this point of view, what the poem is criticizing, in estates satire and elsewhere, is the notion that once having heard what you say, I know what you mean and who you are. This is the assumption that seems to underlie the speaker's project to classify a group of pilgrims whose own performances he has already heard before we have gotten to them. It is the logocentric supposition that would make of the prologue a version of Derrida's characterization of Hegel's preface to The Phenomenology of Mind : something written last and put first, something meant, in an odd way, to do away with the need for the work itself.^[23] What replaces this notion, what moves into the gap created by the undoing of definitive classification and interpretation, is the notion of reading and rereading, or to put it another way, the replacement of the poem as performance by the poem as text. The General Prologue ends, in a typically deconstructive move, with an act of différance , a deferring of

[23] See "Outwork, prefacing," in Dissemination , 2–59. The supplementarity of prefacing is presented by Derrida pretty much as something Hegel encounters (or is oblivious of), outside his project, unwillingly, as an effect of a blindness. In this sense Chaucer's prologue is unlike one view of The Phenomenology of Mind because the poem is patently not finished and does not, therefore, form a completed system and because the prologue itself points conspicuously to the inadequacy of its prefacing. Hence it becomes, as I say in the text, an analysis of the impulse to such completion rather than an instance of it. What if these things were true of "Hegel" as well? Though de Man raised this question with respect to Derrida's reading of Rousseau in Blindness and Insight , and Harry Berger, Jr., has raised it about the reading of Plato in "Plato's Pharmacy," it has never to my knowledge been followed up.

the meaning of the pilgrims and the pilgrimage as something different from what the poem as performance achieved. The deferral is what makes the difference, and makes difference possible, because it frees up the prologue to be reread as a piece of writing in all sorts of new conjunctions with the tales. And of course it frees up the speaker too, who is not really, or at least not only, the somewhat more ambitious version of Chaucer the pilgrim that my performance analysis has been making him out to be, a matter to which I will now turn.