Retraction and Re-Collection: Chaucer’s Apocalyptic Self-Examination

At the end of the Canterbury Tales stands Chaucer’s “Retraction,” wherein he seems, at first glance, to be taking back and apologizing for the book we have just read. However, this troubling appendage is not what it might seem; not only is Chaucer not “taking back” the Canterbury Tales, he is actually revealing something about the Tales not evident until this moment in the narrative. What we see in the Retraction is Chaucer reconsidering his works, evaluating his role as author, and anticipating future judgment (God’s judgment of Chaucer, and future readers’ judgment of Chaucer’s works). Chaucer is not seeking expiation, as the metaphor of pilgrimage would immediately suggest; instead, he is seeking—and has just attained—self-knowledge. The Tales represent the process of Chaucer-poet’s¹ mapping the terrain of his own consciousness. Aranye Fradenburg states that “Of all medieval narrative poets, Chaucer is by far the most preoccupied with affective and cognitive states—with the state and nature of sentience as such.”² Indeed, knowing (konnynge) proves to be the ultimate goal of the Tales as well as the culmination of Chaucer-poet’s journey of introspection. Even though the achievement of self-knowledge may not be the explicit focus of each individual tale, it is nonetheless the unifying trajectory that shapes and drives the Canterbury Tales as a whole.

Chaucer-poet’s journey toward self-knowledge is a process that can be seen, retrospectively, as beginning with the Knight’s Tale, and having its climax between the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of Melibee. The idea of Retraction must consequently be extended and applied not only to the section titled “Retraction,” but also to the Canterbury Tales as a whole. The entire collection is Chaucer’s re-handling and re-consideration of his literary legacy, even though we, as readers, do not know until we reach the end of the text that we have been witnessing and participating in such an enterprise. Indeed, we have not just read about the pilgrimage of the Canterbury pilgrims as much as we have just been on pilgrimage ourselves, walking in the footsteps of Chaucer-poet, reliving his journey toward self-knowledge, and re-collecting his Tales anew.³ As simultaneous subject and creator, Chaucer constructs his own pilgrimage—his journey through his own work—and we as readers are conducted to reenact this pilgrimage alongside the characters in the Tales.

Pilgrimage is a form of penance, and the Canterbury Tales closes with a double insistence on the theme of penance: the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction. Penance requires self-mapping—it is an examination of one’s deeds, conscience, and desires. But it is also a self-excavation: a tedious, slow, and often solitary examination of oneself that entails a scraping and sorting, trying to discern value among rubble. Chaucer’s pilgrimage is not a journey of redemption or salvation but rather a sober and discerning evaluation of his entire literary corpus beyond the Tales, his relationship to the various works that corpus comprises, and the effect his work has had on readers, but more importantly the possible effects it may have on readers to come. The Parson’s Tale and the Retraction are simultaneously means and end: together, they effect Chaucer’s self-awareness, but they are also the effect of that process.⁴ In this way, time becomes reflexive—only by reaching the end can the beginning be considered, and only from the vantage point of finality (all the eschatological layers—end of the book, death of the body, judgment of the soul, and end of the world) can the penitential journey be appreciated. The end becomes, by definition, the place to begin.

This journey of self-mapping is evident only when the Tales as a whole are read as leading up to the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction—when the Parson’s Tale is the indisputably last tale, and when the Retraction closes the collection.⁵ However, any argument based upon a certain placement of the individual Tales is precarious because we cannot...