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Penance and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Rodney Delasanta
Rodney Delasanta*
Affiliation:
Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island
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Abstract

Despite the efforts of recent scholars who have argued for an ironic reading of Fragment x of the Canterbury Tales (the Parson’s Tale and Retraction), dramatic and symbolic propriety both dictate that at this penultimate moment in the pilgrimage “earnest” should emerge from “game.” Dramatically, the imminence of the approach to the Holy City urges—as with all pilgrimages—certain penitential expectations, the sacramental obligations of which require the ministrations of the Parson. Thus, his tale—a confessional manual appropriate to the penitential occasion in both length and oral device—serves the pilgrims with an examination of conscience indispensable to the aural rubric of the sacrament. Symbolically, the earnestness of the ending is prepared by the promise of the supper (with its manifold biblical implications), by the eschatological haste of Harry Bailly in urging completion of the tales, and by his unwitting use of Pauline imagery relating to doomsday drunkenness and nocturnal thieves in the Prologue to the Manciple’s Tale (Fragment ix).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , March 1978 , pp. 240 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 For a review of early scholarship relating to both the Parson's Tale and the Retraction, see F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1957), pp. 765–66, and James D. Gordon, “Chaucer's Retraction: A Review of Opinion,” in Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor A Ibert Croll Baugh, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), pp. 81–96. See also Robert K. Root's complaint “that in the sadness of his latter days the poet's conscience was seized upon by the tenets of a narrow creed, which in the days of his strength he had known how to transmute into something better and truer,” in The Poetry of Chaucer (Boston: Houghton, 1906), p. 238; and J. M. Manly's wish, as late as 1940, that he be “allowed to doubt whether Chaucer himself was responsible for the choice of the two prose treatises which are put together to form PsT and for the melancholy Retraction ...,” in The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. J. M. Manly and Edith Rickert, 8 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1940), iv, 527.

2 The most influential example of the scholarship of approbation is Ralph Baldwin's monograph, The Unity of the Canterbury Tales, Anglistica, 5 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1955), pp. 83–110. Equally approving is Paul G. Ruggiers, The Art of the Canterbury Tales (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 23–30. See also D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 335–36; and Bernard F. Huppé, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1964), pp. 19–20. While distancing himself from the methodology of the aforementioned critics, Donald Howard clearly accepts the penitential theme as appropriate to the ending: The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), esp. pp. 68–74.

3 Judson Boyce Allen, “The Old Way and the Parson's Way: An Ironic Reading of the Parson's Tale,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 3 (1973), 255–71. Olive Sayce, “Chaucer's ‘Retractions’: The Conclusion of the Canterbury Tales and Its Place in Literary Tradition,” Medium Aevum, 40 (1971), 230–48.

4 Of all the ironist critics, John Finlayson is the most believable because his arguments stay closest to the text (“The Satiric Mode and the Parson's Tale” Chaucer Review, 6 [1971], 94–116). But, curiously for an ironist, his denial “that the spiritual significance of the pilgrimage is the dominating preoccupation of the work” (p. 104) is predicated on the unironic fact that Chaucer, unlike Dante and others, does not overtly announce his symbolic intention. Allegorists of the time, he observes, “manifest this concern most directly, as if they had little faith in their audience's ability to discern the sentence beneath the matter” (p. 104). But Chaucer is not Dante. His symbolic mode, parodically tilted as it often is, uses a decoying realism to put the “sentence seekers” off the scent. The work of scholars like Kaske, Reiss, Levy, Levitan, Wimsatt, and others has certainly documented this tactic. My own work has attempted to demonstrate that “game” in Chaucer is often “earnest,” and by a parodie method that makes the word both “cousin” and “cozen” to the deed.

5 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1957), p. 228. All subsequent references to Chaucer's poetry are to this volume.

6 On the contrary, the text of the Parson's Tale reveals that the Parson's penitential counsels do not exclude “faith, love, Christ,” particularly when he urges their reception as remédia contra peccatum. There would be little point in responding to Allen's misreading of the Parson's Tale by countering with some of the numerous passages about “faith, love, Christ” that belie his claim. One could point out, for example, that Jesus is not exactly absent from the Parson's ruminations; rather, he is addressed with reverence at least eighty-six times. But perhaps quoting just one passage will suffice to correct Allen's allegation that the negative penitential tone of the Parson's Tale is “a likely target of Chaucerian irony” (p. 260): “But war thee wel that swiche manere penaunces on thy flessh ne make nat thyn herte bitter or angry or anoyed of thyself: for bettre is to caste awey thyn heyre [hairshirt], than for to caste awey the swetenesse of Jhesu Crist” (x.1052).

7 Olive Sayce's reading of the Retraction suffers, it seems to me, by failing to connect alleged ironies in the Retraction to the Parson's Tale itself, which she largely ignores. To convince us that Chaucer is indulging in ironies in the Retraction, it would be necessary to identify a consonant tone in the Parson's Tale. But, despite the extraordinary documentation of placing the Retraction within a literary tradition, her thesis—that the very conventionality of the language can reveal only an ironic intention—simply does not convince. Conventional language need not militate against sincerity. The “spring-song” opening of the General Prologue is also conventional in its rhetorical and imagistic patterns. No one to my knowledge has ever seen irony lurking there.

8 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), xi, 370.

9 Chaucer alludes to the practice in the Parson's Tale: “And certes, oones a yeere atte leeste wey it is laweful for to been housled; for certes, oones a yeere allé thynges renovellen” (x.1027).

10 “Some Medieval Manuals of Religious Instruction in England and Observations on Chaucer's Parson's Tale,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 35 (1936), 243–58.

11 “Now after that I have declared yow, as I kan, the sevene deedly synnes, and somme of hire braunches and hire remedies, soothly, if I koude, I wolde telle yow the ten commandemantz. But so high a doctrine I lete to divines. Nathelees, I hope to God, they been touched in this tretice, everich of hem aile” (x.955–56).

12 Root's stricture is typical: “the digression hopelessly destroys the unity and proportion of the whole.... So inartistic is this combination, that many critics ... have been unwilling to believe that the tale as preserved to us is Chaucer's authentic work” (pp. 286–87). And as recent a commentator as John Norton-Smith continues to use the word: “The ‘tract’ falls into three main divisions, with the summa peccatorum as a central digression in the midst of the two continuous sections dealing with penance.” Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 154, n. 107.

13 Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 187.

14 With Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Octagon, 1965), p. 3. For the practice of reading treatises aloud to the laity, see also Pfander, p. 247, and W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1955), pp, 193–94.

15 Rodney Delasanta, 'The Theme of Judgment in the Canterbury Tales,“ Modern Language Quarterly, 31 (1970), 298–307.

16 Chaucer's Poetry (New York: Ronald, 1958), p. 948.

17 Lawrence V. Ryan, “The Canon's Yeoman's Desperate Confession,” Chaucer Review, 8 (1974), 297–310. Also, with reference to Fragment ix, see Roy J. Pearcy, “Does the Manciple's Prologue Contain a Reference to Hell's Mouth?” English Language Notes, 11 (1974), 167–75.

18 The insight is Bruce A. Rosenberg's in “Swindling Alchemist, Antichrist,” Centennial Review, 6 (1962), 566–80.