In the opening passage of the Canterbury Tales, then, Chaucer has offered several generic
signals, each overlain, though not obliterated, by the next. The springtime opening raises the possibility
of lyric, though it soon becomes apparent that this is not a lyric. The springtime opening also establishes
resemblances to the dream vision, though no dream, but instead a waking
journey, is initiated. The turn to
pilgrimage (at the “Then—“juncture) begins to move the narrative into this new
direction, though another deflection, this time into an extended series of
portraits, occurs. The swift, fluid
orchestration of generic options makes it clear both that genre is central to
Chaucer’s poetics, and that no single genre can long suffice to contain the
energies of the next.
Caroline
D. Eckhardt, “Genre,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed.
Chaucer also avoids conforming in any simple sense
with the “satire” model. Estates satires
tended to take the form of invective; Chaucer is the master of irony by way of
the superlative. All the pilgrims are the best of their kind; sometimes it is
true, but there is no critical unanimity as to just when.
Helen
Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The
Canterbury Tales (1996), p. 29
The proposition ought to
be expressed in reverse: the reporter is, usually, acutely unaware of the
significance of what he sees, no matter how sharply he sees it. He is, to be
sure, permitted his lucid intervals, but in general he is the victim of the
poet's pervasive--not merely sporadic-irony.. . . .
To have got on so well in
so changeable a world Chaucer must have got on well with the people in it, and
it is doubtful that one may get on with people merely by pretending to like
them: one's heart has to be in it. But the third entity, Chaucer the poet,
operates in a realm which is above and subsumes those in which Chaucer the man
and Chaucer the pilgrim have their being. In this realm prioresses may be
simultaneously evaluated as marvelously amiable ladies and as prioresses.. . . The two points of view, in strict moral logic
diametrically opposed, are somehow made harmonious in Chaucer's wonderfully
comic attitude, that double vision that is his ironical essence. The mere
critic performs his etymological function by taking the Prioress apart and
clumsily separating her good parts from her bad; but the poet's function is to
build her incongruous and inharmonious parts into an inseparable whole which is
infinitely greater than its parts. In this complex structure both the latent
moralist and the naive reporter have important positions, but I am not
persuaded that in every case it is possible to determine which of them has the
last word.
E.T. Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim” (PMLA 1954)
One important demonstration of this has emerged from
a comparison with other estates material--the fact that the persons who suffer
from behavior attributed to some of the pilgrims are left out of account--what
I have called "omission of the victim." I have already stressed the
importance of not letting our awareness
of these victims, an
awareness for which other satiric works are responsible, lead us into supplying them in the
Prologue for the purposes of making a moral judgment, whether on Prioress,
Merchant, Lawyer, or Doctor. Chaucer deliberately omits them in order to
encourage us to see the behavior of the pilgrims from their own viewpoints and
to ignore what they necessarily ignore in following their courses of action. Of
course, our blindness differs from theirs in being to some extent
voluntary--for the pilgrims' viewpoint is not maintained everywhere in the
Prologue--while their blindness is
unconscious and a condition of their existence. The manipulation of
viewpoint, and ignorance (willful or unconscious), are traditionally taken as
features of irony, and the omission of the victim is a functional part of the
ironic tone of the Prologue. The tone becomes more forthright and moves away from irony precisely at moments
when we are made conscious of the victim, and in particular of the
victim's attitude to the pilgrim.
Jill
Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire
(1973)
To an extraordinary degree, Chaucer allows the
members of the various estates to define themselves, a procedure that in effect
undermines their definition as estates.
Rather than being representatives of social functions, in other words,
the pilgrims become individuals who have been assigned those functions, men and
women enacting externally imposed roles toward which each has his or her own
kind of relationship. They become, in
short, subjects.
Patterson,
Chaucer and the Subject of History
(1991), p. 27
…it’s worth bearing in mind that while the Prologue
suggests that the tales exist for the sake of the pilgrimage—they’re allegedly
meant to relieve the tedium of the long ride to Canterbury—in fact the
pilgrimage exists for the sake of the tales, as a structuring frame that helps
Chaucer to organize his poem and to experiment with different literary styles
and modes.
Grady,
“Preface” the the Signet Classics
What was clear to many, from the closing years of
Edward’s reign through the fraught years of Richard’s, was that division
stalked the land, both among the lords and between the commons and the
lords. Chaucer’s General Prologue begs to be seen in that context as a projection of
the restoration of social and political amity or felaweshipe. The passages examined here require to be read
as a projection, not of any “threat” by the Host to a corporate commonality,
but of a proper working relationship between ruler and
ruled. The problem of kingship is
renegotiated through the fiction of a
Alcuin
Blamires, “Crisis and Dissent,” in Brown, p. 145