The Canterbury Tales: Week 11 (Final Week)

The Miller's Tale and Chaucer's Retraction: From Flatulence to Forgiveness

[Miniature illustration of Robin, the Miller, with a 16th century note: "Robin with the Bagpype" from folio 34v of the Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.]

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil¹

Poor Harry Bailly. As a skilled and gracious host, he’s trying to keep everyone in line and be as gracious as possible even, or especially, toward the drunkards on the journey. The Miller, so drunk he can barely keep astride his horse, insists on following up the Knight’s noble, learned, and eloquent tale with a story as vulgar as the Knight’s is genteel. Our sweet narrator apologizes in advance, advises the easily offended reader to skip to the next tale, but explains that he must repeat the story just as it was told in order to tell things as they really happened.

Again, Chaucer is artful in arranging (at least some of) the tales in ways that interact with one another, and in this case, serve as foils to one another. There are many differences (obviously) but one that strikes me is what each tale chooses to focus on in its details. In The Knight’s Tale, the most detailed descriptions occur in part three where the Knight paints lush, vivid accounts of the temples of the gods and goddesses—the statues, the tapestries, the pillars and doors, and the paintings on the walls—in exact detail. In The Miller’s Tale, the most minute descriptions are of the habits, activities, appearances, and peccadilloes of Nicholas and Absolon, right down to the latter’s neat part in his gold, curly hairs and his leather shoes with delicate latticework like a church window (lines 3314-18). One tale has eyes for the heavenly and transcendent, the other for the earthly and human. Oh, dear reader, to have our eyes always delighting in both—the here and now and the yet-to-come!

Interestingly, some critics have observed a number of parallels between The Knight’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale, the latter being in many ways a parody of the former. There is the rivalry between the two clerks (rather than knights) for the fair non-maiden, for example. Absolon plays (or at least pretends to play) by the same rules of courtly love followed by Palamon and Arcita in The Knight’s Tale. There is the intervention of the gods in The Knight’s Tale that is parodied by the rascally Nicholas pretending to prophesy the coming judgment of God. The Knight is so very serious, to the point of tediousness, about his tale and himself; The Miller doesn’t take himself or his story seriously at all. Perhaps we need both attitudes in life, just as the ancient twin masks of drama—the mask of tragedy and the mask of comedy—remind us.

The Miller’s Tale follows the literary tradition of the fabliaux, a genre popular in thirteenth-century France, consisting of a brief comic tale, often obscene (as this one is) and filled with ribaldry and scatological jokes. Ah, scatology. It has a proud literary history, surprisingly enough.

Scatology—which concerns itself with, well, scat (as we might call the traces one finds left by animals in the woods), but more generally, all forms of bodily excretions (and I do mean all!)—is a favorite topic for sixth grade boys, to be sure. But it is a more profound topic than they probably realize. My own interest in scatology (the literary kind) is based largely in my study of the eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift. (We may get to the 18^th century in this series eventually!) Many of Swift’s works are scatological, but are so theologically. Yes, you read that right: theologically. You see, Swift’s main object of satire is human pride. And there is little more humbling to the human condition than the fact that we all must excrete from our bodies what would lead to death if we did not. And the means by which God designed that we should do so are closely connected to the parts of our bodies with which we create life—more image bearers of God. Excretion is humiliating, private, inducing shyness or even shame (as we see with poor, poor Absolon)—sixth grade boys and Chaucer excepted. And so we snicker and joke about it.

Or, if you are the twelfth-century church father, Bernard of Clairvaux, you observe the perplexing truth of the human condition: inter faeces et urinam nascimur  (“We are born between feces and urine”). Sometimes we marvel in awe at the complexity and weirdness of the design.  And sometimes we tell (or write or read) bawdy stories so we can distance ourselves through laughter at the awkwardness of it all.

So with the Miller we go from noble knights, a beautiful maiden, Lady Fortune, and lofty philosophy to rural peasant folks, cuckoldry, elaborate jokes that prey on both religion and superstition, and, of course, bare butts and flatulence. We even have Nicholas going all Trump (as heard on the Access Hollywood tape)—with success—on Alisoun. Yikes.

You know the story. And if you don’t, you will have to go read it for yourself. It’s the literary precursor to slapstick, the sitcom, Monty Python, and George Carlin all at once. (Although classical comedy, especially of Rome, would make even the Miller blush.) We have expressions in English today by which we express metaphorically the literal things that happen in this story. What is merely idiomatic today, Chaucer describes in excruciating and distasteful detail. “Earthy” is one way to describe it. And yet, the correlating phrases used today aren’t even the worst we might hear on the street or in a movie.

But I think the serious note Chaucer is striking here is found in the particular means by which Nicholas contrives to deceive John in order to bed John’s wife Alisoun. It’s not just any trick, but it is a trick that preys on John’s Christian beliefs and his vulnerability in believing the biblical stories while not having (as most didn’t at this time) access to the entire counsel of Scripture (or any education, really—unlike Nicholas).  When Nicholas tells John that God has told him another flood is coming, John has no reliable means to judge the truth or falsity of this. He has only his faith in this “authority,” whom he chooses to trust in this despite his wise skepticism toward Nicholas and his astrological studies. We know that Chaucer was sharp in his critique of the church’s corruptions. We can carry that knowledge into even this raucous, ridiculous tale. Nothing is ever just fun and games with Chaucer.

Significantly, as The Riverside Chaucer points out, Chaucer takes the tradition of the fabliaux and turns it into something more, into “high art.” This tale isn’t just a dirty joke. The fabliaux proper (heh) was generally much shorter, simpler, and unified in plot. The Miller’s Tale, however, is filled with elaborate descriptions, character development, and complexity of plot. Chaucer combines two motifs that already had long traditions: the so-called “misdirected kiss” and the “second flood.” These two motifs “converge at the moment when Nicholas is burned on the ‘toute’ and shouts for water.”²

The only pure victim in this story is John, the cuckolded husband, the Christian believer, the old and ignorant carpenter. Or maybe he’s not entirely innocent. Perhaps by pursuing a May-December marriage (another motif in medieval literature), he got himself a “trophy wife” for less than virtuous motivations.

Within the early comic tradition, there are no heroes, after all. The purpose of comedy is to be faced with (or in this case, perhaps, backed up against—so sorry, I can’t resist) our follies, flaws, and vices—with the ultimate hope of laughing ourselves into correction.

Speaking of correction, we now arrive (as promised) at Chaucer’s Retraction which appears at the end of The Canterbury Tales. It follows the most straightforwardly pious of the tales, The Parson’s Tale, and despite the unfinished state of the entire work, is clearly positioned as the conclusion. There is much to be said about this short “apology.” Chaucer asks forgiveness of all his secular and bawdy works (like The Miller’s Tale). He gives credit to God for anything readers like and accepts the guilt for anything displeasing. He lists all the works he wishes to revoke (and says there may be some he forgot), but thanks Jesus and Mary for his translation of Boethius (who figures prominently, as we saw, in The Knight’s Tale) and his other Christian works.  

Such apologies for one’s life or one’s work were common at the time. Critics disagree on how to understand this retraction. Was it sincere? Was it tongue-in-cheek? Was it a way to “advertise” all his works? I remember in grad school spending a lot of time on this question. My professor was not sure but seemed sad to think that the brilliant Chaucer would regret his work.

But I like the way Larry D. Benson, editor of The Riverside Chaucer, characterizes the retraction:

Many have wished that Chaucer had been more modern than he was, or at least more in accord with their own ideas about literature and the world, and some have even questioned the authenticity of the Retraction. Yet Chaucer had ample precedent; he was neither the first nor the last great writer to conclude that literature is finally less important than salvation.³

Thank you to all who have come this far in this British literature journey. I have received numerous messages and notes from some of you (as well as the many wonderful comments here that are so enriching) that have encouraged me. I especially want to thank those who have been able and willing to support my work financially during this unexpected transition in my life. God is using all the ways you all support me to remind me of his love and care. It is priceless.

****

Up next:

• Christmas break! Enjoy family and friends! (I will send something from my archives from over the years.)

• The Second Shepherd’s Play ←— I’ve linked an online pdf. But I also recommend this cheap Dover edition if you, like me, prefer a book.) It’s a Christmas story—and Christmas runs all the way into January, so we are still in the season.

• Everyman (It’s in the Dover edition linked above and also here.)

• Romeo and Juliet: our guest writer, Jack Heller, recommends the Folger edition (whether print or online).

• We’ll enjoy a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets after that.

1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

2. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 8.

3. Ibid. 22.