Chaucer's Own Incomplete Copy Of The Tales example essay topic

Chaucer's "Retraction" The "Retraction", a fragment that follows the last of the Tales in Chaucer's masterpiece, has attracted much critical attention. Various literary critics of this particular section in The Canterbury Tales have debated about whether it implies a renunciation on the author's part of his work, or is intended ironically. However, despite the piece's satirical tone, it seems most fitting to conclude that Chaucer's "Retraction" is a sincere gesture, offering his moral stance on the issues that arise throughout the Tales. Benson comments that "the authenticity of the Retraction has been challenged" (Benson, 2000), and certainly it is possible that "some scribe added them on to Chaucer's own incomplete copy of the Tales" (Benson, 2000). Establishing authorship of works of that period can be difficult, and there is enough content of a bawdy nature in the Tales that a concerned churchman might have been inspired to round the work off with a cautionary note of piety, however belated, on the author's behalf.

However, Benson, along with most scholars, agree that this is not the case; that Chaucer was the author of both the Parson's Tale and the Retraction which follows and relates to it: "This [denying Chaucer's authorship] is an attractive solution for those who would prefer to ignore the problems the retraction raises, but there is no basis for this argument" (Benson, 2000). Other scholars have seen in the "Retraction" evidence that Chaucer added the closing to provide for the well-being of his soul, in healthy fear of divine retribution after death. Young expands upon the religious beliefs of the time, the literal belief in the peril of the soul from impious acts, the depth of which is difficult for the modern Christian to comprehend. (Young, 2000) Speed quotes the view of hell at Chaucer's time as described by the monk of Evesham's Vision, 1197: "Some [sinners] were roasted before fire; others were fried in pans; red hot nails were driven into some to their bones; others were tortured with a horrid stench in baths of pitch and sulphur mixed with molten lead... immense worms with poisonous teeth gnawed at some" (Speed, 1997). Believing in a literal hell of such dimensions would be a powerful incentive to recant any dubious act. Young describes the Fourth Lateran Council's view of heresy: "We excommunicate and anathematize every heresy that contradicts this holy, orthodox, catholic faith, and condemn all heretics, no matter what they may call themselves" (Young, 2000) - even writers, we can assume.

Certainly, there was enough of a dubious moral nature in the Tales to at least flirt with heresy. Young concludes that an aging Chaucer may have decided "it is better to be safe than sorry, forever". (Young, 2000) Thomas Gascoigne, writing in circa 1457, recounts the story of Chaucer's so-called "Deathbed Repentance" in his Dictionarium Theologicum (available in Wurtele, 1980): "Thus Chaucer before his death often exclaimed 'Woe is me, because now I cannot revoke not destroy those things I evilly wrote concerning the evil and most filthy love of men for women... I wanted to. I could not. ' " Gascoigne goes on to compare the Retraction to the repentance of Judas, as an example of "too little, too late".

The damage had been done, and "he could not revoke the act nor remedy its evil consequences". (Wurtele, 1980) Chaucer himself does put similar words in the mouth of the Manciple, who laments, "Thyng that is seyd is seyd, and forth it go oth, /Though hym repent e, or be hym never so loot" (Chaucer, Manciple's Tale IX, lines 354-355). It should be noted, however, that the "retraction" or in modern terms, something of a Notice to Reader, was a fairly common literary convention of the time. Haines compares it to the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight postscript, "Hony soyt qui mal pense". (Haines, 1983) Thus the intention of the writing is a responsibility shared by both the writer and the reader. This fits with Chaucer's Retraction, as he not only prays for forgiveness from God, "that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giles" (Chaucer, Retraccioun), but also for forgiveness from the reader (Ibid).

He stresses that it is up to the reader to either take "any thyng that like th hem" as such things proceed from God, or "any thyng that displease hem", as such things are created by the writer's own ignorance (Ibid). Sayce identifies numerous examples of analogous rhetorical endings in Latin, French and German writings, in which the convention of apologizing or distancing the writer from the possible negative effects of the writing may be traced, along with some sentiments crediting God for any positive results (Sayce, 1971). For example, we could look at Augustine, writing to Darius, as he says: "If anything in [my writings] please you, join me in praising Him to whom and not to myself, I desired praise to be given... pray for me that I may not fail, but be perfected". (Augustine, 429, Pilkington translation) St. Thomas Aquinas also used this convention, which goes back to Plato's Apology. Throughout the Tales, Chaucer introduces similar phrases to distance himself from the opinions and actions of his characters, for example, as Haines points out, when Chaucer writes of the Monk", 'And I seyd his opinion was good', Chaucer's intention is to pull the reader back, to retract, from a straight reading that the Monk's opinion is in fact good". (Haines, 2000) Haines postulates that the purpose of the Retraction is not only to "protect [Chaucer] from vicious censors" (Ibid], but also to suggest "a more subtle and moral meaning".

(Ibid) This meaning may be nothing less than that suggested by Knapp, "the semiotic affinity among retraction, irony and penance" (Knapp, 1983). Seen in this light, the Retraction points the way for the reader to the realization of the dichotomy between the word of man and the Word of God. The word of man arises from man's sinful state following original sin, and although it portrays the workings of the natural world, that world along with man is itself fallen. Therefore, as Gascoigne has Chaucer say, the "love of men for women" is, although natural, "most filthy", as opposed to the pre-Fall love of Adam for Eve. (Wurtele, 1980) Thus, Chaucer's recounting of the Wife of Bath's Tale is the word of fallen man for the fallen act of sexual love. By repenting of it, Chaucer subtly calls our attention to the Word of God, that is, the only means of redemption of fallen man by a merciful God (Knapp, 1983).

Boenig mentions that tales such as the story of Melibee showed up anonymously in various "compend ia of devotional treatises " of the time (Boenig, 1995). He also brings up an interesting point about language and content, that is, the necessity of man to express his ideas, even his most sublime ones, in secular language. He discusses the Syrian monk known only to us as Pseudo-Dionysius, whose treatises taught "medieval mystics a complex view of language. Pseudo-Dionysius theorizes that language when applied to God, simultaneously signifies and fails to signify... in [Chaucer] there was a similar distrust of language".

(Boenig, 1995) If this is the case, it is apparent why most writers of the time would see the importance of some type of retraction after their works. It is important to recognize the three voices of Chaucer as identified by Portnoy. "The Retraction has been read as a real confession by Chaucer the poet in the face of imminent death; as a realistic confession by Chaucer the pilgrim in response to the Parson's sermon; and as an ironic parody of both confession and retraction in keeping with the Manciple's cynical counsel to silence". (Portnoy, 1994) Therefore, all the foregoing experts to some extent support the sincerity of the first Chaucer, the genuinely devout Christian, praying that his book of Tales might be accepted as "writen for our doctrine". (Chaucer, Retraccioun) Schwarz points out the device of the pilgrimage as one which allowed Chaucer to insert himself in the character of a fellow pilgrim who narrates the story of the journey to Canterbury and recounts the tales told by the sojourners.

By using this device, Chaucer the poet is separated from the character of the pilgrim narrator and exonerated from some of his statements and perceptions. The tales of the other pilgrims, as well, are now at an even further remove from the poet himself. Similarly, the Romance of the Rose is about "a young man who attends a garden party", and Piers Plowman about "a peasant who guides a group of people looking for a nobleman". (Schwartz, 2002) Thus, the Retraction can be seen as a reaction on the part of the pilgrim-narrator to the Parson's Tale, which converts the pilgrimage from "a literal journey from London to Canterbury to a metaphorical one, from birth to death and beyond" (Schwartz, 2002). Seen in that context, the narrator is cowed by the sin that "he" has witnessed and recounted, and his retraction is out into the mouth of the poet, in a reversal of what has actually happened throughout the book.

Chaucer's consciousness of himself as poet may be seen may be seen in his elaborate contrition in the Retraction. It reeks of false modesty, as Byron remarked of Augustine's Confessions: "Augustin in his fine Confessions makes the reader envy his transgressions" (quoted by Nou risson). Chaucer refers to the Tales as a "lite treys or rede", and refers slightingly to his own "unkonnynge" (Chaucer, Retraccioun). He lists all his most accomplished works in order to denounce them a "many a lecherous lay", but claims some merit for his rather pedestrian translations, only one of which, the Consolation of Boethius, he bothers to name. (Ibid.) At the end of the Retraction, he slyly returns to the guise of the narrator-pilgrim, who has only "compiled" the Tales, not authored them.

In fact, we have reason to think that Chaucer was rather proud of his erudition, as much of the content of the Tales is designed to show his familiarity with, and mastery of, various literary genres. His treatment, for example, of the courtly love convention, harks to the Romance of the Rose, and demonstrates the same admixture of sacred and secular content. The courtly-love tradition itself, both explores the love for the pure and unattainable (comparable to man's yearning for oneness with God) and explicitly adulterous relationships. In fact, the Romance of the Rose contains both the original tale, written by Guillaume de L orris, imbued with the most sanctified emotions, and the later addition by de Men, which is as bawdy as any of Chaucer's Tales. Chaucer had not only translated the Romance of the Rose, but he referred obliquely to this accomplishment when he echoes its opening lines at the beginning of the Prologue. As Schwartz says of this, "His playful manipulation of conventions drawn from both classical and vernacular poetry... allows him to strut his stuff".

(Schwartz, 2002) She goes on to explicate the Tales as a satire of the Three Estates. The First Estate is that of the aristocracy, and is represented by the Knight and Squire. The Third Estate is that of the peasant, and is represented by the Plowman. The Second Estate, and the one to whom Chaucer himself belonged, was that of the Church and the Merchants. The Church could be represented by those drawn from either the First or Third Estate, and their roles within the Church would continue to mirror the prestige or lack thereof to which they were born.

Thus, the Prioress is still an aristocrat. The Merchant class is represented by the Wife of Bath, who demonstrates that in addition to those generic three estates, there were three more estates for women: virgin, wife and widow. By playing on these distinctions, Chaucer is able to satirize a variety of conventions while demonstrating his knowledge of a wide spectrum of story-telling and drama techniques particular to each of them (Schwartz, 2002). Godfrey sees the Tales as a "series of failed performances ending more or less disastrously... [standing] for nothing less than a poetics of failure" (Godfrey, 1997). If this is the case, then the humor with which Chaucer recounts the Tales shows a gentle satirizing of man's bumbling attempts to extract higher meaning from his existence, attempts which are doomed to failure by his "unkonnynge" (Chaucer, Retraccioun). Read in that light, the Retraction is nothing more or less than Chaucer's inclusion of himself as poet in the same category - the well-meaning but bungling wordsmith who while attempting to create an inspiring tale instead creates a pornographic assemblage of smut.

Throughout the Tales, Chaucer weaves a complex and balanced lattice of analogy and contrast, not only in the juxtaposition of the characters' tales (for example, the Tale of the Prioress with that of the Wife of Bath), but also in the relationship between the Prologue to each Tale and the Tale itself (the Wife of Bath's Prologue and her Tale). Therefore, it can be seen that by the time the group is almost at the end of their journey, tales have been told (one way or another) that exemplify each of the seven deadly sins. The Parson, of whom Chaucer provides nothing in the way of physical description and who therefore serves almost as a disembodied voice of conscience, rejects poetry and delivers a good old-fashioned sermon. He works his way through a definition of penance (presumably the purpose of the pilgrimage in the first place), distinguishes between pardonable and deadly sins, and fixes upon repentance as the cure for man's fallen nature ("This blissful rene may men purchase by poverty espiritu eel, and the gloria by lowenesse, the plentee of joe by hunger and t hurst, and the reste by travail le, and the lys by death and mortification of syne". (Chaucer, Parson's Tale, X, 1080) Tupper argues that through this device, the Parson's Tale "provides the organizing principle to the preceding tales, which are exemplary of the sins and their remedies". (Tupper, 1914) If this is true, then clearly the Retraction is Chaucer's capitulation to his own character's prescription for salvation.

His tone through the Tales is lightly satirical, or at least ironic, and there is no reason to suppose that the ending of the work should be any different. Above all, Chaucer was an acute student of human nature, both in the day-to-day actions of all classes of people in his society, and also in how they had been portrayed by the writers who preceded him. His experiences as a scholar and as a diplomat would have exposed him to a wide spectrum of the cruelties, mercies, conceits and foibles of universal man (Persall, 1992). He uses his wit and his erudition to point out the foolishness of much of human nature, then includes himself in his own parody. In conclusion, there seems to be no reason to see the Retraction as anything other than an integral part of the Tales. It is irrelevant in some ways to wonder if Chaucer is sincerely invoking divine pardon for any sins that he as a writer about the human condition may have committed.

As a man, he is already guilty of original sin. Therefore, he, along with his all-too-human characters, can only make the human journey and hope to find mercy at the end.

Bibliography

Allen, Judson. "The Old Way and the Parson's Way: An Ironic Reading of the Parson's Tale". Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3 (1973).
Benson, L.D. "Chaucer's Retraction". 2000.
On Line]. Retrieved May 4, 2003 from web Boenig, Robert.
Chaucer and the Mystics: The Canterbury Tales and the Genre of Devotional Prose. New York: Associated University Presses, 1995.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. "Retraccioun". [On Line]. Retrieved May 4, 2003 from web Godfrey, Mary.
Only Words: Cursing and the Authority of Language in Chaucer's Friar's Tale", Exemplar ia, 1997.
On Line]. Retrieved May 4, 2003 from web Haines, Victor Yelverton.
Hony Soyt Qui Male Pense: Can the Reader Sin?" , Revue de l'Universite d'Ottawa, 53, (1983), pages 181-188.
Persall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1992.
Pilkington, J.G. (translator). Augustin: Epistles to Darius, Ep. CC, c. 6,429 AD., also Byron quote. [On-Line]. Retrieved May 4, 2003 from web Portnoy, Phyllis.
The Best-Text / Best-Book of Canterbury: The Dialogic of the Fragments". 1994.
On Line]. Retrieved May 4, 2003 from web Sayce, Olive.
Chaucer's Retractions: The Conclusion of the Canterbury Tales and Its Place in Literary Tradition". Medium Aevum 40 (1971).
Schwartz, Dr. Debora. "Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales". 1999-2002.
On-Line]. Retrieved May 4, 2003 from web Speed, Peter, ed.
Those Who Prayed, An Anthology of Medieval Sources. New York: Italica Press, 1997.
Tupper, Frederick. PML A, 1914, 93-128, and Types of Society, 1926.
Young, Mark. "Better Safe than Sorry: Chaucer's Retraction". 2000.
On Line]. Retrieved May 4, 2003 from web Wurtele, Douglas.
The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer". Viator II (1980).