Merry Olde England

In class today we touched on the gradual narrowing in geographic and temporal extent that we see over the course of the first fragment of the Canterbury Tales. The tales become steadily closer to their tellers in space and in time: from "once upon a time in Greece," to "once upon a time in Oxford," to Trumpington near Cambridge now ("Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, / Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle" [3922-3923]: the present-tense verbs say it all), to "our city," London, again "once upon a time" but a time that is, by all indications, really the present. Building on this observation, I wonder if this steady narrative constriction or withdrawal within the borders of Chaucer's England also represents a way in which the three third-estate narrators in this fragment successively "quite" the Knight and his tale.

After all, we noted, in regard to the Knight's portrait, that his busy and illustrious chivalric career has little or nothing to do with England. His wars are all on the far margins of Europe, and in the past to boot. We hear nothing about the war England was waging right across the Channel in France, and less than nothing about whatever role the Knight might play within English society: the lands he owns, the political or juridical duties he executes, and the members of his own or other social orders that he deals with. England and its affairs are a void at the center of his portrait. The Knight's Tale reaffirms this sense of distance and diffusion, as the Knight not only narrates events that are remote in time and space but also locates himself in this remote sphere, in the strange sequence (1995-2039) wherein he claims to have seen firsthand the temple of Mars and all the horrors adorning it.

The contrast of all this to the Miller's, Reeve's, the Cook's tales, with their quintessentially English locations, characters, names, details, and language, could not be more striking. We can note, in this connection, the way in which the list of nice rustic natural things associated with Miller's Alison includes the staple of the medieval English economy: she is "softer than the wolle is of a wether" (3249). Where the Miller thus slips a reference to the foundation of the national wealth into his tale, the Reeve makes his tale into a microcosm of the nation itself, containing and combining representatives from different regions and dialects into a common English space. And the Cook caps this trajectory by taking us to the capital and metropolis of the kingdom. Coming from Chaucer, the poet who definitively established what the English vernacular was capable of, this steady nationalization, if we may venture to call it that, seems especially resonant.

On the other hand, it would be tough to argue that the Miller's, Reeve's, and Cook's tales bespeak a progressive sense of English patriotism. The narrative space of these tales may become more and more that of contemporary England, but an England in which the national pastimes are vengeance, trickery, and "swiving," in ever cruder and more debased forms, seems to be a creation of, to say the least, decidedly ambiguous value. Chaucer gives with one hand and takes away with the other, granting his audience their own language, their own time, and their own country at the price of a poor image of themselves. I wonder if the baseness of the literary England we have entered by the time the Cook's Tale breaks off is due to its being too insular, too constricted and narrow in its horizons. Is there some kind of median to be found between the wide-ranging life of the Knight and the solidly grounded identities of the three commoners who "quite" him? Will the rest of the tales prove more successful in integrating, or at least mapping routes between there and here, England and the distance and difference of the wider world?