The Tale the Monk Doesn't Tell

First of all, I must apologize for being so far behind the curve on this one - I'm still playing catchup from several weeks of studying for the comps. (Apologies too if any or all of this has already been brought up in class.)

The Monk, alone among the Canterbury narrators that we've seen, second-guesses his initial choice of tale. (Chaucer and the Man of Law both apologize for having only one tale to tell, but all others seem pretty certain of their stories when they begin.) Before he decides to recite his litany of tragedies, the Monk broaches the possibility of telling "the lyf of Seint Edward" (1970). I found this change of narrative, together with some of the implications and associations of the original choice, very striking - doubly so because of the poor quality and unfavorable reception of the tale the Monk does end up telling. His original option is a suggestive road not taken; would it have made for a better and more congenial story?

The Monk's proposed "lyf of Seint Edward" is particularly interesting in historical and narrative context. The saint in question is probably Edward the Confessor, last king but one before the Norman Conquest and legendary for his piety. Edward's insular English associations, particularly with the insular English monarchy, made him a resonant political symbol. The critic Lynn Staley has written about the Confessor's appropriation by later English kings eager to consolidate their power and give it a religious luster (one already possessed, to their great political advantage, by the kings of France): "Henry III had perceived the need for a royal cult and had attempted to create in Westminster Abbey [originally built by Edward the Confessor and rebuilt by Henry] an embodiment of English royal identity. His efforts to use the figure of St. Edward as a model for English kingship did not outlive his own reign" (264). "Seint Edward" had a renewed symbolic presence and force at Chaucer's time, however, thanks to the efforts of Richard II to redeploy him in a similar effort to give the English monarchy a divine role and justification. By pointing to this precedent of an English saint-king, Richard can claim that his office is innately holy and that its authority derives not upward from the people (who, in the 1380s and 90s, are being unruly at just about every level) but downward from God. Hence the presence of Edward the Confessor in such (admittedly gorgeous) pieces of Ricardian propaganda as the Wilton Diptych, wherein he is the second of three saints (including another English monarch, Edmund the Martyr) presenting Richard to the Virgin Mary as her representative on earth.

With all this in mind, it is surely significant that the Monk eschews the tale of an English national saint and emblem of what amounts to an early bid for the divine right of kings in favor of a generalized and universal history. A saint's life, which by definition ends in sanctification and heavenly glory, seems the generic opposite of the Monk's tragedies; by telling the tragedies "first" (1971), does the Monk want to heighten the contrast with Edward's redemptive life, to which the contemporary English monarch has laid claim? Or, conversely, does he want to cast the shadow of various other once-proud "kynges" (1986) and their inevitable downfalls over this current emblem of divinely-sanctioned royal power?

It's also worth thinking about the Monk's change of mind in the context of the wider narrative pattern of Fragment VII (although I freely concede I'm probably over-reading here no matter how you look at it). Immediately previously is the Tale of Melibee, which, among other things, is a treatise on the art of government with advice to spare on how rulers should act, whom they should consult for advice and when, how they should treat subjects and defeated foes, and so forth. The Melibee, it seems, reaches a kind of middle ground between (to use terms we have been periodically returning to) absolutist and associational politics: Melibeus wields authority alone, of himself, with an obligation to "[b]iwrey nat youre conseil to no persone" (1140) and a responsibility not to be swayed by "the moore part and the gretter nombre" (1256), but he also emerges from the tale with various responsibilities to consult the right people, act patiently and with forgiveness instead of arbitrarily, and to "have moore love of the peple than drede" (1191). This enunciation of a political theory with direct relevance to contemporary England may be not least among the factors that give the Melibee such appealing "sentence."

Similarly, following the Monk's Tale we have the Nun's Priest's, which, in Lynn Staley's interpretation, advances another politically relevant point. Staley reads the Nun's Priest's Tale as a humorously disguised allegory of Ricardian claims to sacral kingship and their political cost: "Chauntecleer is the very image of a royal rooster," but his "fascination with his own magnificence almost brings his realm into utter ruin" (293) - an uproar that Chaucer describes in part through a reference to that real violent upsurge of associational politics, the 1381 Rising.

Bracketed by these two relevant and politically charged stories, the Monk's Tale seems conspicuously apolitical, concerned to demonstrate the way in which impersonal and inevitable forces brought about the downfall of various luminaries either long ago or far away (or both). The Monk's narrative inconsistency and incoherence mute any political moral one might take away from his examples; sometimes Fortune is a force of providential and even divine justice, punishing the hubris and tyranny of people like Antiochus and Nero, and at other times she is "False Fortune" (2669), piteously reducing great and honorable men to shameful deaths. The Monk flattens the difference between these two outlooks into a monotonous and fatalistic picture of inevitable mutability without coherent political content. In marked contrast to the echo of a real political crisis in the Nun's Priest's Tale, when the Monk describes a popular revolt - "The peple roos upon [Nero] on a nyght" (2527) - it is due to the will (whim?) of Fortune, who "lough, and hadde a game" (2550). There is no lesson here that might be at all relevant or interesting to the Canterbury pilgrims and the real world they inhabit, just lachrymose and abstract speculations that deprive them of agency.

The point, I guess, is that by foregoing a tale about a highly charged political symbol and choosing instead to drone on and on about tragedies, the Monk sacrifices the political relevance and applicability to contemporary England that the tales around him demonstrate and that, judging by the positive reception accorded to those tales and others like them (the Knight's or Clerk's, for example, with their similar political subtexts), the audience of pilgrims looks for. He opts out of the conversation and debate - out, that is, of associational politics itself.

Works Cited: Staley, Lynn. "Translating 'Communitas.'" In Kathy Lavezzo, ed. Imagining a Medieval English Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 261-303.