UC Berkeley

The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s Corrective Form

by

Chad Gregory Crosson

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Steven Justice, Chair

The long and sharp debate over Geoffrey Chaucer’s moral aims for the Canterbury Tales has been shelved in recent years, not resolved. The question of his moral aims is unavoidable by design, but it is also irresolvable by design. At least that is my claim: I show that Chaucer’s fictional narrative devises a corrective process based on grammatical emendation that was tied, by a long-standing analogy, to moral reform. Through his narrative, Chaucer pushes his reader to retrace the corrective structure in the Tales, yet the sort of corrective process he recreates is so closely akin to moral practice as to make any distinction between the two difficult. The resulting form is a defining characteristic of the Tales and answers why his moral aims have been irresolvable: in this literary form, the literary and moral are inseparable; they become versions of each other.

Medieval grammatical and textual practice inherited this analogy of correction from traditions of classical grammar. Grammatical theory, pedagogy, and practice all developed around the correction of error in several related areas – grammar, pronunciation, style, and (eventually) scribal reproduction. Grammarians and scribes understood correction as a task requiring chronic vigilance and recursive reform, and they treated these various arenas of fault and correction as analogous to each other. But they further used language that suggested an analogy with moral reform, so that evocations of textual emendation could allude to moral correction; in turn, moral error could as easily allude to textual and scribal error. Medieval grammarians and thinkers recognized that errors persist not only despite emendation, but even as a result of emendation. Roger Bacon insisted that correction perpetuated error, and handbooks like the correctoria, which listed textual variants to help correct copies of the Bible, themselves fostered errors; they perpetuated what they were designed to eliminate. And just as grammarians and scribes recognized error as inevitable, they understood emendation as recursive: since authors and scribes need chronically to re-correct their work, they could never consider emendation complete. The dissertation’s first chapter traces this history of correction: its theory in antique and medieval grammatical arts, its practice in scribal emendation, and the development of the analogy between these unending processes of verbal correction and the process, also unending, of moral correction.

The remaining three chapters treat the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer, more than his predecessors, explicitly notes the recursive logic of error, as famous passages in the Troilus and his “Adam Scriveyn” show. At the same time, he bases his narrative poetics on this recursive logic, developing from it a structure and theme for his Tales.

The discussion of Chaucer begins in chapter two, perhaps unpromisingly, with the notoriously unsatisfactory Tale of Melibee, where Chaucer recreates the recursive process of correction to suggest both the ambitions and the dangers of his artistic and moral project. The Melibee’s narrative – like the rigorous training of the grammar student, like the tireless work of scribal correctors, like a monk’s continual attempts at self-reform – outlines paths of correction while perpetually creating new material for emendation. The tale portrays a slow, incremental repetition that only gradually brings about change. In that way, the tale displays the ambitions of the project. Its dangers are clear enough, because it is notoriously unsatisfactory. Chaucer however deliberately stages those dangers in the Melibee and contrasts the dangers with a solution.

Chapter three shows this solution at work in the structure of the Tales as a whole. The work revolves around topics discussed by the pilgrims, but these topics will either dissolve or change through shifts in the storytelling or by the pilgrims’ interruptions. Indeed, the series of tales soon abandon the very ideas and vocabularies that set them in motion and frame their narratives. The pilgrims not only adopt each other’s terms and ideas, but modify and sometimes distort them, creating the incremental repetition of the Tales. But while in the Melibee that incremental repetition illustrates literary pitfalls, in the Tales it becomes a means for literary innovation: the certainty of error and the corruption of discourse provide an artistic method. What looks on the small scale like accident and entropy proves on the large scale to be recursion, and by this Chaucer shapes the narrative of the Tales to the analogy he inherited from classical grammar traditions. Thus the work’s pilgrimage is not strictly anagogical, as Chaucer’s Parson and D.W. Robertson suggested it was, but also literal, errant, and discursive. Through Chaucer’s narrative design we understand that pilgrimage involves going astray, that a moral path must always be redirected. And while the Tales’ conclusion indicates an end is near, as the pilgrims approach Canterbury, such a conclusion still leaves the pilgrims in a wandering state; their physical and moral journey remains incomplete.

Still, although he depicts the certainty of error, Chaucer emphasizes that persistent correction leads to renewed possibilities. I make this point clear in chapter four, as I read the Melibee in the context of Fragment VII, vis-à-vis both the tale of Sir Thopas and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale presents a singular literary opposition to the Melibee, that the recursive process of correction, more than just an analogy for Chaucer’s idea of pilgrimage, is a tool for literary creation. Similarly, rather than just indicating humankind’s perpetual state of sin, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale points out humankind’s enduring re-creative potential. We can witness how repetition produces the interminable narrative of the Melibee, where the protagonist needs constant re-correction. However, synthesizing the surrounding tales, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale reveals repetition with a difference, an incremental repetition whereby the Tales as a whole will revisit topics, but never in the same way. What this recursive process lends to Chaucer’s moral outlook is not doomed repetition or the failure of humankind, but the idea of human renewal, of a society replete with possibilities.

Through this argument, my dissertation resolves a conundrum in critical history: why the question of Chaucer’s moral aims has been widely contested but more recently shelved. The exegetical method of the 1950s and early 1960s in Chaucer studies presented an approach that relied on Augustinian doctrine and allegorical exegesis to convey a determinate moral message. Those who rejected this allegorical method tended to point instead to Chaucer’s artistic complexity. However, an inability either to dispose of or to defend the exegetical method seemed to exhaust that debate, since the question of his moral aims is now largely ignored. Yet the very fact of this debate should make us ask: what is it about his poetry that invites disagreement on a topic so fundamental and leaves it unamenable to resolution? This debate betrays a unique quality of his art: something about it that generates the question of a moral agenda but makes that question irresolvable. I argue that Chaucer develops a method by which he can consider moral concerns without subordinating his art to those concerns. The Tales’ corrective process and its resulting structure have made his moral aims elusive because the elusiveness of moral clarity is precisely the lesson he learned from this tradition. However, while the Tales may evade moral clarity, the recursive nature of correction allows Chaucer to present both texts and humans as ever-malleable subjects, and provides the literary occasion for ongoing intellectual, artistic, and moral exercise.