Estates Satire

One of the most valuable features of Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire is the attention Mann pays to Chaucer's unique treatment of the estates form itself. The General Prologue is not, she argues, merely an example of estates satire but also an alteration and revision of estates techniques that produces a different, we might say a more "modern," image of society. As she shows, Chaucer consistently displaces or complicates the relatively straightforward moral judgments of traditional estates literature in favor of the more ambiguous details of the immediate social impression his pilgrims make. Whereas we are never in doubt about what we are to think of the monks, friars, or townsmen in other estates satires, we are almost always unsure of exactly how good or bad their counterparts in the General Prologue are. This uncertainty produces what Mann describes as the effect of an estates satire from which the purpose of moral classification has been removed and at least suggests a view of society as constituted more by the behavior and performances of individuals and groups than by an a priori scheme. Chaucer "ironically substitut[es] for the traditional moral view of social structure a vision of a world where morality becomes as specialized to the individual as his work-life" (Medieval Estates Satire, xi).^[10]

Though I agree, Mann's way of formulating and presenting her case seems to me to go at once too far and not far enough: too far in that she applies her unquestionably valid insights too broadly and generally to all the portraits and the prologue as a whole; and not far enough in that in practice she, like Donaldson, neglects the ways the poem actively challenges not only the traditional assumptions of moral classification in general but also those of estates satire in particular. Both of these difficulties stem from a neglect of the poem's voicing and especially the temporal inflections of voice that are registered in, and as, its sequence. Thus in the first instance Mann's discussions of individual portraits take them out of sequence and relocate them in new groupings according to the various methods of characterization she analyzes in separate chapters: in chapter 4, the omission of the victim (the Man of Law, the Doctor, the Merchant, the Five Guildsmen); in chapter 7, portraits organized around scientific classifications (the Par-

[10] See also the last chapter of Medieval Estates Satire, "Conclusions," 187–202.

doner, the Franklin, the Miller, the Reeve); and so on. As a result, in her treatment all the portraits make essentially the same point about the displacement from moral classification to social impression without registering differences of emphasis and degree. Mann frequently makes observations that cry out for further explanation. She notes, for instance, that one of Chaucer's techniques of complication involves the application of attractive images to characters who are also critically presented—the Friar's eyes twinkling like stars, for example. She goes on to note that sometimes "the imagery works with the moral comments. . . . The animal imagery in the portraits of the Miller, Pardoner, and Summoner persuades us that we are dealing with crude or unpleasant personalities" (Medieval Estates Satire, 193–94). What she does not notice is that all three of these pilgrims are closely bunched together in the cluster of five rogues that ends the portrait gallery in the prologue. That is, there is a conjunction of moral and social unpleasantness at this point in the poem, a locally consistent use of imagery to create negative moral comment at a structurally significant juncture in a way that works against the more global tendency in the poem to render such judgments problematic.

Similarly, Mann notes the undoing of determinate signification, "Chaucer's constant exploitation of the different semantic values of words," in the poem:

The adjective "worthy" is used as the keyword of the Knight's portrait, where it has a profound and serious significance, indicating not only the Knight's social status, but also the ethical qualities appropriate to it. In the Friar's portrait, the word is ironically used to indicate the Friar's lack of these ethical qualities—but it can also be read non-ironically as a reference to social status.^[11]  . . . The reference to social status seems to be the only one in the portrait of the Merchant, who "was a worthy man with alle" (283). By the time we reach the Franklin's portrait, the word is used with a vague heartiness which seems to indicate little beside the narrator's approval: "Was nowher swich a worthy vavasour" (360).
          (Medieval Estates Satire, 195–96)

As this passage shows, Mann is not unaware of the sequential character of the process, and she sees that it has something to do with the narrator, whom she earlier calls "a representative for the rest of society

[11] See Mann's discussion of the Friar's portrait, Medieval Estates Satire, 53.

in its relation to each estate" (Medieval Estates Satire, 194). The fact of sequence has no real significance for her argument, however, as it might if it were correlated with the parallel sequence through the estates—from Knight to Friar to Merchant and Franklin—that the poem also displays. That is, "worthy" becomes progressively less informative and more indeterminate as the narrator moves through the traditional estates classifications; the undoing of determinate meaning is connected to the categories of social classification and their progression in the text.

One thing that keeps these features of the text from pulling their weight in Mann's reading is her generally distant and unfocused treatment of the speaker: her inattention to sequence is an effect of her relative disinterest in the poem as a performance. Though she is aware of the Donaldsonian tradition and pays it lip service at points, she is more interested in the poem as a record of the poet's original use of estates conventions. As she sees it, this transaction takes place as it were behind the scenes of the poem. She is willing to accord the poet as maker a considerable range of independent authorial activity, including the deliberate deployment of intertextualities with both the Decameron and Langland,^[12] but she sees the poem itself as the trace or product, rather than the depiction, of authorship. Auctoritas itself is not a problematic notion for her except at the level of large-scale historical process, the gradual drift of medieval society toward modernity that she seems to feel the poem registers. For Mann, the poet uses the institution of estates classification richly and often critically, and she has brought that institution into the center of the poem in a way Donaldson does not. What is missing from her reading that Donaldson supplies is an attention to how the text represents the act of description and classification itself in the person of its narrator.

In what follows I will combine the Donaldsonian emphasis on voice-oriented reading with Mann's institutional perspective to explore how the text itself represents and revises—at once uses and questions—both. I will begin by sketching a prospective reading of the

[12] This is an interesting and suggestive feature of Mann's treatment of the poem, which appears to have gone unremarked, perhaps because she simply assumes the poet's knowledge of these works that an older generation of Chaucerians was inclined to deny. Her evidence is generally convincing because it is firmly textual and detailed. See Medieval Estates Satire, 46–47, 198, 208–12.

General Prologue that follows the sequence of the performance the poem depicts—the unfolding deployment of available conventions of social and moral classification by a speaker who attempts to use them to organize the practical task of making sense of his experience. Such a prospective reading is appropriate as a way of acknowledging the specificity of the prologue, its representation of a particular intentional agent, or self, under concrete institutional and social conditions of performance. I will end by considering the prologue as a disenchanted text that retrospectively identifies its own agency and its own textuality as central facts about itself, thereby undoing its own prospective ambitions to objectivity, completeness, and closure and opening itself to indefinite rereadings. This redefinition of the text necessarily entails a reevaluation of the "self " it has generated as only an effect of its prospective (or prologal) character, and this revision provides a model, I will suggest, for the representation of subjectivity in the Canterbury Tales.

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.

Voice and Text, Pilgrims and Poet

A definitive version of the retrospective rereading that the prospective "failure" of the General Prologue opens up is in principle impossible and in practice impracticable—this book is only one version of a part of it. Nonetheless, a sketch of its implications will bring my own reading here to a close. I begin by observing that a prospective reading of the prologue, and the kind of reading of the poem as a whole that it encourages, is both overly traditional—perhaps even "establishment"—and overdominated by institutional perspectives at the expense of those of individuals. One index is the way the prospective unfolding of the prologue tries to control textuality by enforcing the importance of certain details in the portraits at the expense of others. The placing of the last five portraits over against the Parson-Plowman dyad and the stress given to patterns of imagery that run across portraits, like the weaponry pattern analyzed above, make such things as the Reeves rusty blade, his top "dokked lyk a preest biforn" (590), or his governance of "His lordes sheep" (597) to his own advantage stand out as emblems of an estate and its responsibilities misused to the detriment of society. In doing so, they make other details, like the Reeve's actual trade of carpenter or his "wonyng . . . ful faire upon an heeth;/With grene trees yshadwed" (606–7), recede in importance or take on an anomalous feel, as in Mann's analysis of the Friar's twinkling eyes. Such details come into their own in a retrospective rereading, where the perspective of the tale can play back on the prologue to open up new lines of interpretation. The Reeve's assessment of the dignity owed his trade, as it combines with the generalized paranoia the portrait sketches and the tale confirms, motivates his attack on the Miller, for example, and the Friar's eyes twinkling "As doon the sterres

in the frosty nyght" (268) are given point by the cold, distant, calculated way the Friar in his tale tries to watch and control his own performance before others, a kind of role-playing that brings out the element of technique and false heartiness in "rage he koude [that is, knew how], as it were right a whelp" (257).^[24]

In a more general way, the institutional overdetermination of the prologue as performance and the repression of textual indeterminacy that rereading reveals are present in the portraits that go with the tales analyzed in this book. Prospectively the Knight's portrait is tied to an idealized image not only of the man but also of his estate and the place it occupies in a larger image of social hierarchy. The portrait has to do duty for so much in the way of symbolic support of estates hierarchies and the like that it makes less than it might of questions about the historical state of the institution of chivalry. The concreteness of the details of the description—all those named battles, for instance—has led disenchanted readers like Terry Jones to give them a weight of historical reference that many other critics have felt the portrait itself does not use or pushes to one side. Though I have yet to see a convincing argument that the portrait is ironic about the Knight, the more we know about the places he has been, the less confidence the institution of knighthood he seems so ideally to uphold inspires. This impression is in line with my reading of the prologue as a text that gradually reveals its own disenchantment. By its end the poem has become—or shown itself as—an analysis of the social and ideological commitments that are entailed in estates satire itself, in particular analysis of the form's "establishment" commitments to tradition, authority, and hierarchy such as might lead us—or the narrator—to try to make a "good" knight into an image of the health of knighthood. The tensions that make such commitments problematic are only present in the portrait as suppressed or latent textual possibilities that are not directly used in the prologue. Where they turn up, of course, is in the tale, as problems about his estate that the Knight himself must engage , and I have argued at length for the disenchanted realism of his portrayal of the temple of Mars as it bears on Theseus's chivalry, a portrayal that matches anything Froissart—or Jones—has to say about Peter of Cy-

[24] See Leicester, "'No Vileyns Word,'" and the discussion of the Physician's portrait above, Introduction, pp. 11–12.

prus at Atalia ("Satalye") or the siege of Alexandria. Thus it is probably accurate to think of the fundamental institutional grounding of character in the Canterbury Tales as the estate, and that this grounding holds for the pilgrims themselves as well as for the poet and the reader. Estates classification looks like a set of fundamentals about character in the sense of a foundation or a place to start, which is to say that such classifications represent not the essences of the pilgrims but pre-texts , ways of naming what they have to draw on, what they are confronted with about themselves socially, and what they have to enact, sustain, alter, and above all negotiate in their lives and their tales.

A rereading of this sort thus returns to both the prologue and the tales the historical and social, as well as personal, specificity of that negotiation, which the relatively abstract and idealizing thrust of the prospective reading initially denies them. To come back to the Knight's portrait after reading the tale is to see more readily how its details might support a reading of the Knight that is less idealized in the sense of less faded, unreal, and outmoded or late medieval than the criticism, or indeed the prospective thrust of the prologue itself, often allows.^[25] For instance, the prospective encouragement the portrait unquestionably gives to a reading of "Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre" (47) as a shorthand representation of the Knight's crusading defense of God's Christendom in his numerous campaigns (as if he were himself a Peter of Cyprus) recedes in the light of the tale because of the tale's consistent and principled refusal of a providential interpretation ofhistory. Despite the perennial temptation, reenunciated by A. J. Minnis, in Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity , to read the Knight's (and Chaucer's) awareness of historical difference as finally loaded in favor of modern Christianity over pagan antiquity, it will be clear by now that I see the tale and the Knight as deeply protohumanist in the credit they extend to the ancient world, a credit that is no doubt critical but far more in the emulative mode of the Renaissance than in some "medieval" theological one. Our own historical hindsight can locate the tale's undoing of such pieties precisely in historically conditioned disenchantment: the Knight's approval of olden times can be read as an index of his disenchanted failure to be convinced by a style of providential reading of historical process in relation to the kind of history

[25] See, for example, Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales , 94–97.

making he knows best that had become increasingly ideologized and conspicuously political since at least the time of the investiture controversy. It is a style whose continuing use by the propagandists of two rival popes and a Holy Roman Emperor in the Knight's own time cannot have made it more convincing. The Knight thus joins Boccaccio and Chaucer as a progenitor of a project to restore and renew the epic that has, like a certain version of knighthood, a future; and if the English were not as quick as the Italians to make effective political and ideological use of this humanism, the fact that Chaucer thought a knight an appropriate voice for it suggests that he understood the social valence of the kind of change it represented.

From this retrospective angle the Pardoner too escapes the twin misrepresentations as contemptible body and apocalyptic symbol of social decay that the prologue's prospect foists on him. Out of place like the Parson in the estates structure of the prologue, the Pardoner is an "ecclesiaste" whose relation to both orders and degree is genuinely problematic and felt as such in the poet's voicing. But to read this problematic quality back to the prologue portrait from the Pardoner's assault in his tale on the church he represents is to see how these moments of strain in the classification project of the poem register more than the confusions of an inept performing speaker, as if such difficulties only beset comic unreliable narrators. What are from one point of view psychological tensions are from another registrations of a culture that is genuinely in tension with itself about its own structure and the adequacy of its own principles of classification—orders and estates—to its developing historical actuality. The Pardoner is an extension and complication of a relatively familiar type in the period, a radical-conservative social critic of the abuses of the church, the commodification of the sacramental system, and the secularization of the clergy, all of which are pan of his own subjectivity since he is a site of them all. As such, he joins a chorus of disenchanted voices, from spiritual Franciscans to Lollards to satirical poets, chroniclers, and the Sultan of Turkey,^[26] who condemn the debasement of what ought to be a divine institution by human manipulation and urge a revolutionary return to primitive gospel standards. From a longer perspective he participates as well in the Reformation project,

[26] See above, chapter 9, note 2.

carried on by Luther, Calvin, and Kierkegaard, of reconceiving Christian subjectivity on neo-Donatist, individualistic, and psychological grounds whose radical conservatism might be summed up in the phrase neo-Augustinian —which is no doubt why modern exegetical neo-Augustinianism is so helpful in reading him.

In the case of the Wife of Bath there is a similar moment of social tension evident in the transition from her portrait to that of the Parson, reflected in the "feminine" questioning of various economic, social, and gender boundaries and categories that she and her description embody and in the "masculine" retrenchment of authority, orthodoxy, and male dominance that comes with the Parson. If the wider sociocultural sources and repercussions of this central moment are harder to evoke in the mode of glancing allusion I have adopted with the Knight and the Pardoner, I suspect that is due less to the absolute modernity of feminist gender theory than to the fact that the historical work needed to ground an understanding of the social and economic meaning of gender difference in the period, which needs to be directed by that theory as well as inform it, is only beginning to get done—and that I have only begun to read it. Certainly it is clear enough that the Wife's own prologue and tale are, among other things, an engagement with precisely the kind of authority the Parson is made to carry in the General Prologue , and it seems likely that read retrospectively, her portrait announces, and her prologue and tale carry out, her participation in a late medieval gynesis, or contribution to the discourse on woman, that such figures as Margery Kempe, Juliana of Norwich, and Christine de Pisan also have something to do with and that we are just beginning to learn to read.^[27] For my purposes here, however, I want to use the issues the Wife raises about gender to return to the question of the subject, impersonation, and "Chaucer."

The three pilgrims whose tales occupy most of this book are situated at the beginning, middle, and end of the portrait gallery in the General Prologue (though I did not select them for that reason). They

[27] For gynesis, "the putting into discourse of 'woman' as [a] process  . . . neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that toward which the process is tending" (25), see Jardine, Gynesis. For bibliography on the developing study of this field in the Middle Ages, the reader might start with Burns and Krueger, eds., Courtly Ideology , and their "Selective Bibliography of Criticism: Women in Medieval French Literature," 375–90; Erler and Kowaleski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages; Rose, ed., Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; and Medieval Feminist Newsletter.

thus outline the sequence of the poem in a way that is particularly telling with respect to the themes of desire, gender, and the paternal law. The poem begins in an atmosphere of official hierarchy, plenitude, and male power ("vertu," from Latin virtus , "maleness," derived from vir , "man") that are specifically associated in the opening lines with phallic assertion. Those lines give, one might say, a very gendered representation of what April does to March to get the world moving in spring:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
he droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour . . .
         (1–4)^[28]

Consistent with this opening, the first portrait, the Knight's, supplies the image of a powerful patriarch, worthy and vir-tuous. He is a victorious fighter, a defender of the church, and the legitimate father of a squire who will succeed legitimately to the paternal estate—the very person to justify the speaker's tacit faith in the links between authority, determinate transmissable meaning, and male gender dominance. By the time those assumptions have been put in question by the anomalies of the third estate and the breakdown of hierarchy associated with them, it seems more than fortuitously appropriate that the boundaries of the third estate, and of the project to order the performance hierarchically, should be marked by a woman, and a markedly competitive, combative, and threatening one at that. And just as it seems no accident that the Parson's portrait, which is a strident reaffirmation of male authority as well as ideal Christian order, follows the Wife's and initiates the last phase of the portraits, it seems even less of one that the gallery ends in an atmosphere of divine order undermined by human abuses, of active disenchantment, and with the Pardoner, the one pilgrim who is lacking the phallus, the embodiment of the not-masculine, castrated: "I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare" (691). His song "Com hider, love, to me!" (672) may even remind us, in context, that the opening paragraph itself ends not in stable order and fulfillment but in desire and lack: "The hooly blisful martir for to seke,/That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke" (17–18).

[28] See Fineman, "Structure of Allegorical Desire."

What a rereading of the prologue in terms of these gender themes reveals is the emergence of another kind of plot and a different sort of psychological structure for the poem. As I have been arguing, the disenchanted perspective on its own unfolding that characterizes the end of the prologue stresses retrospectively the extent to which the poem is the representation not of the objective reality of others but of the undeclared (and perhaps unconscious) motives that lie behind a particular attempt to classify them. The particular inflection of this general pattern that a focus on gender produces is the way the speaker associates gender and its vicissitudes (if that is the right word for the Pardoner's portrait) with order or the lack of it. But precisely because this way of reading brings the speaker out from behind the concealment of "objective" description, it also reveals the extent to which these portraits are carriers of the speaker's projections. They are aspects of his own attitudes toward his undertaking, markers of his own "masculine" rage for order and its vicissitudes, apparently unconscious roles that he plays. They are also, of course, clues to his own instability of gender and his own proper (improper) subjectivity.

The reading of the General Prologue I have been calling prospective is also masculine in the terms developed in this book. That reading traces a project of the speaker's to generate a decisive account of the pilgrims that will establish them as stable sources or origins of the tales they tell and which therefore encourages the kind of bad, old-fashioned, dominated-by-the-frame reading I have been continually fighting from the beginning of my own project here. It is important to see that a version of the speaker's project is fundamental to the poem and the poet—that it is what they begin with in one sense, and equally, given the prologue's claim to come after the pilgrimage, what they end with in another. The desire of this project is to find, establish, or make selves for the pilgrims that their tales will embody without alteration, and reflexively that desire makes the project a version of the poet's desire to be and to have a self of his own. The prologue and the links—the entire frame that punctuates the Canterbury Tales, as Lacan might say—testifies to its maker's desire to establish and inhabit stable structures of gender and genre, to record and preserve the social status quo and its workings, to delineate and maintain clear boundaries between the self and others, and to be a transmitter of the phallus, an authority, and what his culture calls a man. The poem represents

this desire, and represents it as the poet's from beginning to end. It is particularly important to recognize this about the poem because the recognition supports the fundamental validity of the dramatic method in reading it. No textually responsible reading of the poem, including a deconstructive one, can ignore or factor out the pilgrim tellers, the issue of agency, and the problem of voice. These are things that must be read through rather than around. If the Canterbury Tales is, as I have maintained, one of the major explorations and analyses of subjectivity and its implications—of the escape of the self from itself—in the Western tradition, it founds that exploration and analysis in an understanding of the human fact of the self as that impossible thing, that insatiable desire, that ceaselessly escapes and returns.

Thus if we desire the author, as Barthes suggests, there is evidence in the poem that Chaucer did too. But that desire is of course only part of the story. There is further evidence that "Chaucer," the voice of that text, desires the other as well, and that desire speaks in the most characteristic act of the Canterbury Tales , impersonation. "Thereof nedeth nat to speke as nowthe" (462) in the Wife's portrait in effect allies the feminine with supplementarity, with what is left out of the "masculine" prospect, what has to come "after." The edge of masculine locker-room innuendo that dominates the portrait combines with this admission/promise of more to come to suggest just how inadequate a "masculine" (indeed a male) perspective is for understanding the Wife and the virtual necessity of finding a way to let her own point of view speak out even if it means dressing in drag to do it. Moments like this, or like the apology at the end of the portrait gallery, call attention to the fact that the General Prologue does not do justice to the pilgrims and therefore, by the same token and for the same reasons, does not do justice to the poet-speaker and his understanding of his world. From this point of view it can be said that the voice of the textual working we call "Chaucer" shares the Derridian desire to escape knowledge and certainty, to reach a point of not knowing any longer where he is going because of the constraints such "knowledge" imposes. Out of the dramatized insufficiency of traditional social, moral, and gender classifications, and the dramatized insufficiency of the kind of self that goes with them to deal with the complexity of individuals and their relations, the poet turns to the pilgrims, and turns to them as texts.

After all, one of the first things that is obvious about the voice-of-the-text of the Canterbury Tales , the agency or self we are led to construct for it, is that "he" is an impersonator in the conventional sense: he puts fictional others between himself and us. Each of the tales is, we know, Chaucer impersonating a pilgrim, the narrator speaking in the voice of the Knight or the Reeve or the Second Nun. They are his creatures; he gives them his life. One of the motives of this enterprise— certainly one of its effects—is to slow us down, to keep us from grasping the central consciousness, the author's self, too quickly and easily by directing our attention to the variety and complexity of the roles he plays and the voices he assumes. Though he is—he must be—each of the pilgrims and all of them, he seems to insist that we can only discover him by discovering who the Knight is, the Parson, the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath. But this self-protective motive is again only half the story. We might as easily say that the poet takes his own life from the pilgrims he impersonates, and the amount of time and effort spent on making the pilgrims independent, the sheer labor of consistent, unbroken impersonation to which the poem testifies, suggests that this perspective is at least as compelling for Chaucer as for us. The enterprise of the poem involves the continual attempt, continually repeated, to see from another's point of view, to stretch and extend the self by learning—and practicing—to speak in the voices of others.

This perspective seems not only opposed to the "masculine" reading of the prologue and the tales but also allied to the kind of impulses I have been calling feminine. It is associated with a fluidity of identity and identification: the desire and ability to appreciate and enact a variety of positions, including gender positions. It is allied with the desire and ability to see the "feminine" in men and the "masculine" in women and imagine how subjects who occupy those bodies within those social constructions might feel, act, desire, and "go on" practically in the circumstances. It seems allied as well with a preference for individuals over society, with private life as opposed to public life, and with the escape from self and the phallus called jouissance. It indeed has something to do with bisexuality, and it allows us to locate that feature of all the pilgrims/texts analyzed here in their putative maker as well. In fact Chaucerian impersonation itself has this consistently double or bisexual quality. It oscillates continually and simultaneously between, on the one hand, the desire and practice of dominating others

and turning them into versions and extensions of the self that I have analyzed in the Pardoner and, on the other hand, the desire and practice of exploring new roles, possibilities, and personalities that I have examined in the Wife of Bath. Though one mode is dominant in those two pilgrims, each is constantly engaged in both modes, and how should the poet who makes, and is made by, them both escape the same fate and the same desire?

As the foregoing list may suggest, however, the pair "masculine"/"feminine" begins to take on an allegorical reach at this point that is both a genuine and important fact about the symbolic ramifications of gender and a difficult opposition to work with in finishing up here. I have been playing with a number of (to me) dauntingly complex oppositions, most centrally perhaps "masculine"/"feminine" and self/subject. Like Chaucer, I do not think I can control all their relations in my text (to say nothing of elsewhere), and I want now to veer again to the latter pair, remarking only that though the two sets of terms are intimately related, they are neither reducible to one another nor even always consistently parallel.

I have argued that the end of the General Prologue enacts a shift from the poem as performance to the poem as text. In doing so, it focuses attention on the speaker as performer in the act—prospectively—of giving way to what I have called the voice of the text. It thus identifies itself—retrospectively—as another instance of what the tales also are (and were first), a representation of the agency of an individual subject in its dealings with language, if language is considered as the most general instance of an institutional construct. That last formulation might do as a definition of the key term I have not defined in this book, voice. If so, however, the definition will have to be glossed so as to encompass the dynamics of self and subject, the undecidable play between the coalescence of the subject site into a shapely, self-mastering humanist agent, and the undoing of that position into the place of a fluid, multifarious polyvocality. Voice ought to be a term for that process, a way of referring to the tug toward undoing the self and letting loose the dance of the signifiers, and the complementary drive to contain the plurivocal unruliness of what goes on where subjectivity happens. This is the dynamic Chaucer's poem represents between "masculine" and "feminine," speaker and pilgrims, prologue and tales, self and subject. It is the dynamic as well of reading in general—

the movement between the "decoding" of meaning and the pleasure of the text—and of the kind of reading this particular text represents and invites.

The version of the opposition that seems most apposite for understanding voice, however, remains that between performance and text. This is so first of all because of the fairly obvious ways performance as a notion evokes location, the willed agency of the performer and the dominance of "his" voice in what is performed, the humanist self, embodiment, and the like, whereas text , as now understood, suggests dissemination, the deconstruction of the self in favor of larger, structural forms of agency, the ironing out of relations of dominance and recession among voices, loss of location or disembodiment, and so on. To make voice the swing term of this opposition, more or less in the way estate is the hinge between personal and social in the poem, is to make it the field within which those doings and undoings go on, that is, to make it the site of its own other and, as I have maintained, the central concern, along with estate, of the Canterbury Tales. Second, the appropriateness of thinking of voice as the site of the play between performance and text is enhanced if we recall again that the Canterbury Tales proposes and presents itself patently, right on the surface, as the textual representation of oral performance, that is, as something that represents the location of language in the agency of individuals but does so in a form that is also bound to undo that location and agency and put them in question.

Such a definition, or collocation of definitions, of voice allows us to respond to the rhythms of performing and textualizing, the doing and undoing of voice in the poem, as part of its larger structure and of what it represents—allows us to attend to them not simply as what the poem evinces or enacts because all uses of language do but also as a large part of what the poem is about. This response in turn helps draw attention to what I have been focusing on throughout this reading: those moments in the poem when its performing subjects encounter their own living-out of the condition I have tried to describe. These are the moments, and they come in every tale, when the subject represents and experiences itself as unselfed, textualized, and escaping itself at the same time that it continues to produce performance effects from its location in body and book. As one of the readers of an earlier version of this book, Paul Strohm, remarked, "I still believe that some uncer-

tainty in the attribution of narrative perspective is a property of Chaucer's texts, and that at least some multiplication of narrative voices and perspectives loose within individual tales is inevitable." Exactly. This is a very Chaucerian predicament, one that is represented over and over in his poetry as the situation that poetry both represents and confronts, struggles with and exploits, and it is, not surprisingly, a predicament of his readers as well. The end of the General Prologue multiplies a performing self into a textual subjectivity, and the crucial feature of that subjectivity is impersonation. To appear as a disenchanted self in one sense—as one who is aware of the human construction of society and self—is to appear as a disenchanted self in another: as a self-constructing activity that continues into the rest of the poem in the form of an impersonation, a practice of voicing, that is always its own undoing and therefore demands continual rereading. The advent of the poem as text identifies the speaker of the General Prologue , like the pilgrim tellers of the tales, as simply one of the poet's many self-representations, a multiplicity he is no more (though no less) in control of than any of those other tellers or than any other human subject. That textualization sets the terms of both his writing and our reading and serves notice that we—all of us—will have to read his "real nature" differently, and keep reading.