Chaucer's First Three Tales: Unity in Trinity

CHAUCER'S FIRST THREE TALES: UNITY IN TRINITY Garth A. McCann A critical truism for our time has been the conviction that "there are and have been many valid critical methods, each of which exhibits the literary object in a different light, and each of which has its characteristic powers and limitations."1 And as Chaucer's own characters—say, the Wife of Bathabundantly demonstrate, any text is open to any analysis. Chaucer's own works have been approached and interpreted, it seems to me, from two opposite but overly simplistic directions. The older and more traditional view approaches the first three of the Canterbury Tales as examples of established categorical types: the romance and the fabliau. The uncomfortable effect of this approach is that it makes the Miller's and the Reeve's tales seem far more alike than they, in terms of the thematic development of physical and psychological love, seem to warrant; also, it makes these tales seem almost completely unrelated to the tale of the Knight, except as unreconcilable and discordant opposites. A more recent and perhaps more scholarly view applies a single measure to all three tales and concludes that in terms of the love theme, the three are all alike: there is "no real difference between the love expressed by Palamon and Arcite on the one hand and that expressed by Nicolas and Absolon on the other." This approach reduces the amorous motif to mere "delight" and dismisses the tales as illustrations of the "effects of cupidinous love."2 Both of these approaches, though in some senses meritorious, exhibit the limitations of critical reductionism. And both leave unanswered the question: if Chaucer knew what he was doing, why did he use three tales? Had he intended only to establish a contrast to the romance, one fabliau would have been enough; had he sought only to illustrate cupiditas, a single tale would have s^ifficed. Why then, one wonders, should critics feel compelled to reduce the tales to a simplistic set of opposites or to throw them all together into the den of cupidity? If we leave these two critical alternatives behind and go on to consider the tales thematically, we discover among them a relationship of careful symmetry : they reveal a clear pattern in the way they handle the theme of love. This pattern can best be observed in the shifting dimensions of psychological and physical love: in the Knight's Tale we see love in terms of feeling, but not of fulfillment; in the Miller's Tale we see it in both emotion and action; and in the Reeve's Tale we see love devoid of mental attraction, but replete with physical satisfaction. Moving from a strongly psychological, through a 1R-S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism (Abridged Edition, Chicago, 1957), iv. 2D-W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, N. J., 1962), p. 469. 10 Chaucer's First Three Tales: Unity in TtorriY11 mixed, to a distinctíy physical emphasis, the three tales function as a trilogy on the theme of love. As Charles Muscatine argues, the stylistic pattern in the three tales passes from the elevated through the mixed to the naturalistic.3 As we have sketched out, the love theme follows a strikingly similar movement; thus the style and the theme articulate aclrnirably. Taken together in the three tales, they develop what we might call Chaucer's love sonata, played in three distinct yet related movements. The artistic unity which we find centers not so much on "character" as on motive, and the thematic relationship among the tales is not a polarity, but a trilogy.4 In the lengthy and leisurely movement of the Knight's Tale, the theme of love is never far from the center of interest. Although order may well be the central concern of Theseus,6 it is by no means the primary motive for the lovers' action and attitudes. Order is the form into which the action is cast by the intervention of Theseus, but love provides the motivation for the behavior of the two knights and, one might even say, for the plot of the tale. Palamon and Arcite, had they not been...