The Canterbury Tales as the encyclopedia of medieval genres

The Canterbury Tales is a whole poem, not simply a collection of tales from among which one might pick self-contained masterpieces. Its unity is not altered by the fact that it remained incomplete. Each tale has its own individuality and can be enjoyed in and for itself, but in relation to other stories it has a far richer significance.

None of the tales in the book is original; the pilgrims tell tales, not invent them. That explains their lack of originality. The tales come from every corner of medieval literature, as diverse and uneven as one could wish. They represent all the genres existing.

Examples:

- the Knight’s tale – a traditional verse romance

- the Miller’s tale – a fabliau. (also mind that it follows the Knight’s tale, making a subtle parody of the latter, which adds to the fun)

- the Franklin’s tale is taken from a Breton lay

- the Monk’s tale – element of tragedy of martydom

- the Manciple’s tale – a fable

- the Prioress’s tale. The Prologue begins with the opening line of Psalm 8, recited in nunneries. Thus the Prologue is in effect a hymn to the Blessed Virgin, and her tale is a tale of a miracle performed by the Virgin

- The Tale of Sir Thopas – a witty and elegant parody of the contemporary romance, both in subject and in form. Romance itself had an aristocratic heritage, and in this Chaucer was well-schooled – The Knight’s Tale is a high-minded romance. By the fourteenth century, however, the subject and form of romances had become sadly debased. Stories of heroic knights set in sing-song rhyme scheme were recited by minstrels for audiences of middle-class burgers. Hence the idealism of romance came to be tailored for a middle-class mentality, and the form itself became tedious and cliche. (But it should be understood that there were good metrical romances as well – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight being the greatest

- ‘The Tale of Melibeus’ – a heavy prose homily (sermon), and so on.

But Chaucer never follows the genre conventions rigidly. Rather, he plays with the reader’s expectations, questions the validity of the existing literary forms, and parodies them. Various forms of narration are used as a tool of exploring reality, and themselves become an object of investigation. The author pokes fun at the lifeless and empty forms (The Tale of Sit Thopas, or the Monk’s Tale), brings together the high and the low (The Nuns’ Priest’s Tale). More importantly, he does not deny any forms, but allows them to co-exist and counteract as various relative points of view.

A genre becomes simply a ‘point of view’, a mode of vision; and a sensitive reader feels that certain truths expounded by the tellers are conditioned more by the conventions of the genre, and can on no account be seen as ‘universal’.

The tales are artistically uneven and diverse, genuine masterpieces along with flat and lifeless narrations, heavily didactic or plain boring. Surprisingly, it is probably explained by Chaucer’s ingenuity as a poet. When writing a tale, he goes by the possibilities and the cultural background of the ‘teller’. Besides, if there is a story contest, there are supposed to be losers as well as winners. According to some scholars, his deliberately ‘bad’ tales are literary parodies. The tellers try to imitate art, not life, which makes the stories far-fetched and artificial.[2]

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From the Northon Anthology of English Literature

The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. The Pardoner is the chief actor in the grim comedy which shows how a clever hypocrite exploits Christian principles in order to enrich himself.

While Chaucer’s Pardoner belongs, as he boastfully tells us, to the most dishonest class of fund-gatherers, he is an extremely able one. His text is always the same: Radix malorum est cupiditas, “The love of money is the root of all evil”, and he uses it most effectively in order to frighten his hearers into a generosity that will fulfil his own cupidity. <…> The story of three young men who seek Death only to find him in a treasure that had made them forget him is a masterpiece of irony, and indeed the Pardoner is in all ways a master ironist. So highly developed is his own sense of irony that it enables him to feel superior not only to other men but to God, for he dares to exempt himself from the effects of his Christian text…

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Among the moral writers of the later Middle Ages the pilgrimage was so commonly treated as an allegory of man’s life that Chaucer’s audience must have been surprised to find the Canterbury Tales so little allegorical. At the end of his life, however, and at the end of his work, Chaucer seems to have been caught up in some venerable allegory. <…> In the Parson’s Tale, and in its short introduction and in the Retraction that follows it, Chaucer seems to be making an end for two pilgrimages that had become one, that of his fiction and that of his life. In the introduction to the tale we find the 29 pilgrims moving through a nameless little village as the sun sinks to within 29 degrees of the horizon. The atmosphere contains something of both the chill and the urgency of a late autumn afternoon, and we are surprised to find that the pilgrimage is almost over, that there is no need for haste in order to make that “good end” that every medieval Christian hoped for. This delicately suggestive passage, rich with allegorical overtones, introduces an extremely long sermon on penitence and the deadly sins, probably translated by Chaucer from French or Latin some years earlier, before he had begun the Canterbury Tales. The sermon <…> provides no exception to the statement, that Middle English prose is inferior to Middle English verse. But then the intent of the sermon is didactic, not artistic, and according to the more rigorous theologians of the time, didactic intent is infinitely more important than artistic expression.

It is to this doctrine that Chaucer yielded at the end of his life. The Retraction which follows and concludes the Parson’s Tale offers Chaucer’s apology for having written all the works on which his reputation as a great poet depends <…>. Yet, a readiness to deny his own reality before the reality of his God is implicit in many of Chaucer’s works, and the placement of the Retraction within the artistic structure of the Canterbury Tales suggests that while Chaucer denied his art, he seemed to recognize that he and it were inseparable.

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