Critical Perspectives on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale

There is allusion to serious matters here, and indeed the tale is shot through with such allusion, which has provided a temptation that modern interpreters, unwilling to regard laughter as an adequate reward for the effort expended in reading the tale, have found it difficult to resist, despite the wise warnings issued by Muscatine:

The tale will betray with laughter any too-solemn scrutiny of its naked argument; if it is true that Chauntecleer and Pertelote are rounded characters,

it is also true that they are chickens…Unlike fable, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale does not so much make true and solemn assertions about life as it tests truths

and tries out solemnities. If you are not careful, it will try out your solemnity too. (1957, p. 242)

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The manner in which the Nun’s Priest’s Tale recoils upon all systematic attempts at interpretation is not a sign that more efforts should be made to find one that works. Its machinery is designed to defy such attempts: that is the point of the tale. Language and rhetoric and learning are noble arts, but they are constantly shown in the tale being used, by expert practitioners, to conceal the world from themselves, and themselves from themselves. They become, not means to understanding, but a series of reflecting mirrors in which we can be satisfied we shall see only those things that preserve our high opinion of ourselves….The laughter has an edge, but it is salutary, not satirical: it implicates the reader, and the critic.

· Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (1985), 235, 238

It should be obvious by now that recognizing the allegorical aspirations of Chaucer's tale in no way requires one to take it as a simple affirmation of Church doctrine. What is perhaps less obvious, but no less important, is that the very same exegetical logic which enables Chaucer to be allegorical without being completely doctrinal, also enables him to be ironic without being completely subversive.

The tale's many ironic strategies--the hyperbolic descriptions of Chauntecleer and Perrelote, the continual importation of philosophical argument and epic diction, the succession of contradictory narratorial stances assumed by the Nun's Priest--complement rather than negate its allegorical appropriation. To treat the two tendencies as unalterably opposed is to assign them an historically invariant thematic value. It is to assume that allegory is always exclusively affirmative, and irony is exclusively renunciatory. By contrast, if we consider the specific position the tale takes up with relation to the exegetical tradition it appropriates, we can see its allegorical and ironic impulses not as opposed but as complementary. The final, open-ended invocation of Paul is allegorical and ironic at once. To the extent that it reiterates the doctrinal it authorizes Chaucer's text. To the extent that it subverts the doctrinal, it maintains the text's secularity. But both impulses have the same goal: to establish the adequacy of a secular text. To this end, the tale hovers between affirmation and subversion, drawing its force from both, relinquishing neither.

· Larry Scanlon, “The Authority of Fable: Allegory and Irony in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 43-68

Both its closeness to Chaucer and its constant textual reference are entirely fitting for a tale that can claim to be the Canterbury Tales in miniature. Its layering of stories within stories makes it a story-collection in itself, structured to contrast with the linear sequence of the Tales. Its rhetorical pyrotechnics and its inclusion of almost all the significant themes found in the rest of the tales, both discussed below, make it an epitome of the larger work. The sharp juxtapositions of different styles and different themes within a single tale compress the relativism of the whole Canterbury Tales into downright, and delightful, incongruity. The other priest on the pilgrimage, the Parson, gives the ethical summary of man's life on earth; the Nun's Priest summarizes the potential of language, of style, words, and text. The Parson insists on unadorned meaning; the Nun's Priest insists that what a thing means depends on how it is said. That too makes the Nun's Priest seem a closer alias for Chaucer than the pilgrim-persona he assigns himself.

· Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 340

For Chaucer’s literate audience, each of these characteristics—beast fable, debate, Catonian assertion, Latin translation, and a string of variously told narrative proofs—would have been poignantly evocative, triggering a collage of bittersweet personal memories from their early years of grammar school linguistic and literary training.

…I want to emphasize that Chaucer’s parodic evocations of the classroom are not designed to satirize the foundations of the medieval liberal arts curriculum for any perceived imperfections in its pedagogical principles or literary precepts. Rather, Chaucer takes his readers back to basics in order that they might reexperience, now at a more sophisticated level, both the profundities and baffling complexities of literature.

Thus, by casting his ars poetica as an Aesopian beast fable, Chaucer is reopening that interlinear space—invoking his readers’ memories of a time when they were most intimately engaged in the craft of literary analysis, imitation, and production. In the very same gesture, Chaucer zeroes in on the fundamentals of literature itself.

· Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 52-53, 55.