Chaucer the Pilgrim

Donaldson's formulations of Chaucer the pilgrim are made with an awareness of the complexity of the actual performance situation, which he images as social: the author (Chaucer the man), reading aloud to a court audience, projects a fictional caricature of himself (Chaucer the pilgrim), which both masks and emphasizes the complex ironic sensibility Donaldson calls Chaucer the poet. When he asserts "the probability—or rather the certainty—that [the three Chaucers] bore a close resemblance to one another, and that indeed, they frequently got together in the same body" ("Chaucer the Pilgrim," I), Donaldson is close to an image of the poet as subject, a site from which multiple selves, roles, and so on emerge simultaneously and undecidably. Such oxymoronical characterizations of the poet's "elusion of clarity"^[1] as "that double vision that is his ironical essence" ("Chaucer the Pilgrim," II) reflect similar intimations of the absence, in the last analysis, of a determinate Chaucer.

Nonetheless, Donaldson is concerned in "Chaucer the Pilgrim" and elsewhere to construct a self for the fictional pilgrim, a distinct, fin-

[1] The phrase is taken from Donaldson, "Chaucer and the Elusion of Clarity."

ished personality whose attitudes toward all the other pilgrims he describes in the General Prologue can be made fully consistent with a set of root tendencies or traits in him: snobbishness, overreadiness to please, Babbittry, and the like. In "Chaucer the Pilgrim," at least, these traits again appear to be grounded in social typification. Donaldson is aware of the estates tradition as a general background of the poem, which he refers to in passing as "the ancient stock satirical characters" that "it was left to Chaucer to turn . . . into real people assembled for a pilgrimage" (9). For him, however, these classifications are of interest not as what lies behind the depicition of the pilgrims (as they are for Mann) but as a source of the attitudes of the speaker, whose membership in the third estate is loosely held to account for his personality, "a bourgeois exposed to the splendors of high society, whose values, such as they are, he eagerly accepts" (4). Though there is much to be said for this turn toward the historical and institutional situation of the poet (which he normally brackets out of his readings, often for good reasons),^[2] Donaldson himself does not follow it out far, nor does he fully textualize the poet's self-representation. The idea of Chaucer the pilgrim requires that in any given passage we first decide what Chaucer the pilgrim means by what he says and then what Chaucer the poet means by what the pilgrim means, and this division of the speaker leaves a certain residual uncertainty about the distinction between the voice of the text and a presence behind and beyond it who somehow guarantees the meaning we find there. Some of Donaldson's characterizations of Chaucer the poet take on a distinctly metaphysical cast:

Undoubtedly Chaucer the man would, like his fictional representative, have found [the Prioress] charming and looked on her with affection. To have got on so well in so changeable a world Chaucer must have got on well with the people in it, and it is doubtful that one may get on with people merely by pretending to like them: one's heart has to be in it. But the third entity, Chaucer the poet, operates in a realm which is above and subsumes those in which Chaucer the man and Chaucer the pilgrim have their being. In this realm prioresses may be simultaneously evaluated as marvellously amiable ladies and as prioresses.
          (II)

A moment's reflection establishes that this third realm can only be the text; that is where Donaldson reads the simultaneous double evalu-

[2] See the quotation from Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry above, p. 36.

ation. The text is here being hypostatized, in the New Critical fashion that locates Donaldson's own historical situation, as an "entity" that hovers in a paradoxical nonplace that is both in the text and outside it, somewhere between the two institutional sites called the work and the author.^[3]

But even at the level Donaldson is working at, the representation of the self, I do not see the need to reify these tensions in the text into separate personalities of the same speaker, and I think this way of talking about the narrator of the General Prologue has proved misleading because it has promoted not just the detextualization but the oversimplification of the speaker as well. It has encouraged us not only to treat him as if we knew who he was apart from his utterances and could predict his responses but to treat him as more of a simpleton than the evidence warrants. The general personality traits of Chaucer the pilgrim have themselves become reified in the Chaucer criticism of the last thirty years, and this frozen concept of the character has fostered a carelessness in reading that Donaldson himself rarely committed. I suspect that the success of this reified partial object, despite a few attempts to put him back together,^[4] has been due in large part to a natural desire on the part of critics to evade the feelings of contingency and responsibility that haunt the act of interpretation and the indeterminacy of the text.^[5] The notion of Chaucer the pilgrim at least offers an homme moyen sensuel with whom we can feel we know where we are and whose apparent mistakes can serve as the stalking horses of our more accurate—though no less assured—moral judgments, which we authorize through the equally assured poet who must have "meant" us to see them. Chaucer the pilgrim thus becomes another version of the more general phenomenon of the self-betraying speaker already encountered in the criticism of the Wife's and Pardoner's tales. But I think that it is just this sense of knowing where we are and with whom we are dealing that the General Prologue, like those tales, deliberately and calculatedly denies us.

[3] See Foucault, "What Is an Author?"

[4] Most notable is the valuable and neglected article by John M. Major, "The Personality of Chaucer the Pilgrim," but see also Donald Howard, who makes the parsimonious Aristotelian move of putting the ideal form back into the matter in "Chaucer the Man."

[5] See Donaldson's brilliant and humane critique of stemma editing on similar grounds in "The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts."

Consider, for instance, the following passage from the Monk's portrait, a notorious locus—and one fastened on by Donaldson—for the naiveté of the narrator:

He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen,
That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men,
Ne that a monk, whan he is recchelees,
Is likned til a fissh that is waterlees—
This is to seyn, a monk out of his cloystre.
But thilke text heeld he nat worth an oystre;
And I seyde his opinion was good.
What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood,
Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure,
Or swynken with his handes, and laboure,
As Austyn bit? How shal the world be served?
Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved!
Therfore he was a prikasour aright.
        (I,  177–89)

If we think of these lines as the performance of a speaker who is blind to their "real" significance, as apparent praise of the Monk that actually dispraises him, we immediately run into the following difficulties. First, the Monk's own bluff manner is present in these lines. I agree with most commentators that he is being half-quoted and that we hear his style, for example, in a phrase like "nat worth an oystre."^[6] This semicitation already introduces a measure of uncertainty as to who is speaking, or at least a question about the extent to which the narrator really does agree with what he cites. Second, the standards of the Monk's calling, against which, if we will, he may be measured, are also present. The social and moral worlds indeed display their tension here, but who brought these issues up? Who is responsible for the slightly suspended enjambment that turns the deadly precision of "As Austyn bit?" into a small firecracker? For the wicked specificity with which, at the beginning of the portrait, the Monk's bridle is said to jingle "as dooth the chapel belle" (171, emphasis added)? Who goes to such pains to explain the precise application of the proverb about the fish, "This is to seyn, . . ."? Who if not the speaker? The Monk? Given the quasi-citational character of the passage, it is possible to see not only

[6] See, e.g., Charles A. Owen, Jr., "Development of the Art of Portraiture in Chaucer's General Prologue," LeedsSE 14 (1983): 125–17.

the narrator but also the Monk himself as a man who is aware of the discrepancy between the impression he makes and the ideals of his estate and whose no-nonsense utterances are attempts to face it directly, if not quite squarely. Who is talking here? Third, even if we confine this sort of awareness to the narrator, these observations do not permit us to say that he is only making a moral judgment or only poking fun at the Monk. Donaldson and Mann are surely right to point to the way the portrait registers the positive claims made by the pilgrim's vitality and "manliness."^[7] The speaker's amused enjoyment of the Monk's forthrightness is too patent to let us see him as just a moralist. Fourth, the way the speaker's voice evokes complex possibilities of attitude is neatly caught by "And I seyde his opinion was good." The past tense reminds us that the General Prologue is a retrospective account of a meeting that took place at some unspecified time in the past, "in that seson on a day" (19). The virtual now of the prologue is situated not only after the first night at the Tabard but after the whole of the rest of the pilgrimage as well, including the telling of all the tales. It thus opens up a gap between the past of meeting and the now of telling that has room for any amount of reconsideration and revision of first impressions. "And I seyde his opinion was good": that is what he said when he and the Monk had their conversation, but is he saying the same thing now in this portrait? Did he really mean it at the time? Does he now? In what sense?

The point of this exercise is not merely to show that the speaker's attitude is complex and sophisticated but also to stress how obliquely expressed it is, all in ironic juxtapositions whose precise heft is hard to weigh, in part because we have no clear markers for tone as we might if we heard the prologue spoken. What we have, in fact, is a speaker who is not giving too much of himself away and who is not telling us, any more than he told the Monk, his whole mind in plain terms. The tensions among social, moral, and existential worlds are embodied in a single voice here, and they are embodied as tensions, not as a resolution or a synthesis. We cannot tell exactly what the speaker thinks of the Monk or of conventional morality, and it is not fully clear that he can tell either. One of the things that turning the speaker into Chaucer

[7] See Donaldson, "Chaucer the Pilgrim," 5, and Mann, Medieval Estates Satire, 17–37, esp. 20. See also Sklute, "Catalogue Form and Catalogue Style," 43.

the pilgrim may deny him is his own ambivalence about the complexity of his own responses to the pilgrims. I will have more to say about this point later, but we can tell here that we are dealing with a speaker who withholds himself from us, with the textual traces of a presence that asserts its simultaneous absence. The speaker, even as a performer, a self, is present as uncomprehended and not to be seized all at once in his totality. He displays his difference (or, textually, his différance ) from his externalizations, his speaking, in the act of externalizing himself.

Thus even at the level of self-presentation, before the issue of subjectivity is broached, the reification involved in making the speaker of the General Prologue into Chaucer the pilgrim seems unsatisfactory. At this level textuality manifests itself as the sort of humanist richness Donaldson locates only in Chaucer the poet as a quasi—hors-texte but which is in fact operating as the unspoken of the narrator's textual utterances to generate a kind of effet du réel. In literature (as in life, come to think of it), the "reality effect" of characters is a function of their mystery, the extent to which we are made to feel that there is more going on in regard to them than we know or can predict. Criseyde is a well-known and well-analyzed example elsewhere in Chaucer's poetry of this effect,^[8] and the general narrator of the Canterbury Tales is another. His lack of definition may in fact explain why he can be taken for Chaucer the pilgrim. Because his "identity" is a function of what he leaves unspoken—that is, because it is derived from implication, irony, innuendo, and the potentialities of meaning and intention that occur in the gaps between observations drawn from radically different realms of discourse^[9] —there is room for the temptation to reduce his uncomfortable indeterminacy by forcing the gaps shut and spelling out the connections. But suppressing the indeterminacy in this way involves reducing complex meanings to simpler ones

[8] See Mizener, "Character and Action in the Case of Criseyde," and apRoberts, "Central Episode in Chaucer's Troilus. "

[9] This observation suggests that a paratactic style is 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 Auerbach, Mimesis, 83–107. Parataxis is one of the the main descriptive techniques of the General Prologue, particularly noticeable in the three central portraits of the Shipman, the Physician, and the Wife of Bath but widely employed throughout. Further, the structure of the prologue is itself paratactic (composed of juxtaposed, relatively independent portraits), and so is the poem as a whole (composed of juxtaposed tales).

that may not be "meant" (may not function in the discourse of the text) in the first place. One infers Chaucer the pilgrim by displacing the things the speaker does not say (since, after all, he does not say them but only suggests them) and by insisting that he "means" his statements in only the plainest, most literal sense. Such an interpretation does not fail to recognize that the displaced complexities are there; it simply relocates them in "the poem" or "Chaucer the poet," thus choosing to constitute from the manifold of the text a social (or moral, or intellectual) dope, a speaker who is unaware of the import of his own language, which is being fed to and through him by a "higher" entity.

"Chaucer the pilgrim" thus does function as a hedge against textuality and the play of semiosis: the construct both contains them and sets them free under controlled conditions. The pilgrim himself is the representative of determinate, communicative meaning, which is both preserved and criticized in him. At the same time textual, disseminated, ironic signification is displaced to the poet, who functions as a place where such literary effects can be acknowledged yet still treated as meant or authorized. But my first objection to this procedure is that once again it denies the speaker—who in this case seems clearly to be the maker as well—his agency in the production of the performance. It is not that there is no such thing as Chaucer the pilgrim, first of all in the sense that the text does represent a human agent who undertakes the project of describing a set of events that he represents as having actually happened to him. These events are in some important sense fictional, and that makes their protagonist some kind of a fiction as well. Nor would I want to deny that there is an issue in the poem about whether or not the speaker is always in complete command of the project. The trouble is that the notion of Chaucer the pilgrim as it has been used displaces what is complex or problematic about this activity to the author or the work, even before we bring our Foucaultian guns to bear on those notions. It has thus made it too easy to miss the ways in which the poem is itself a representation of the speaker's active encounter with the difficulties of judging and classifying others and the extent to which the question of his control of the description (including the play of semiosis) is an issue first and foremost for him. My problem with Chaucer the pilgrim, even before the question of the subject enters into the matter, is that he has not yet been sufficiently recognized as a self.