Narrative Voice: The Case of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale

Chaucer's own heightenings of Trivet's wooden chronicle suggest that he was interested in adapting the narrative rhetorically to some individual voice (not his own) . . . ¹

Chaucer permits the narrative voice to assume the narrower, more philistine, point of view, and in doing so he invites us to see such crudity as unsatisfactory. ²

. . . the exclamatory narrative voice we are hearing in The Man of Law's Tale is simultaneously creating the persona of the speaker and exposing his emptiness. ³

I

Richly varied though the interpretation of the Canterbury Tales has been, it has been largely dominated for more than a century by a single idea, that of narrative voice. In one sense this idea can be traced as far back as Dryden, who wrote in 1700 of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims that "The matter and manner of their tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their different educations, humours, and callings, that each of them would be improper in any other mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are distinguished by their several sorts of gravity: their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only." ⁴ But this notion that each tale is not only "proper" and "becoming" in every way to its teller but is told in a voice unmistakably issuing from that teller's "mouth," stated by Dryden in the general terms of a neoclassical aesthetic, was first given more specific application in the late nineteenth century by the great American Chaucer scholar George Lyman Kittredge.

In an article published in 1893 Kittredge began from what he saw as the then-current view, that Chaucer, for all his skill as a storyteller, sometimes "grossly violated dramatic propriety." The two examples he gives from the Tales are Nature's "self-satisfied" soliloquy in the Physician's Tale, in which she boasts of the tale's heroine as "her artistic masterpiece," and the Pardoner's self-exposing "harangue." ⁵ But such apparent incongruities, Kittredge argues, must be considered in the light of a principle which he states as follows: "It was Chaucer's artistic duty, in the Canterbury Tales,--as it has clearly been his purpose,--not only to select stories appropriate to the several pilgrims, but to make the method of delivery correspond to the character of the teller." (The basis for that "artistic duty" Kittredge never expounds, presumably because he regards it as obvious.) In the case of the Physician's Tale, we have to take account of "the character of the doctor" who tells it: he is "a very formal person, from whom a degree of prosiness is to be expected" (117). Kittredge's main subject is the Pardoner, and here he starts from another somewhat similar principle, again evidently assumed to be obvious. Chaucer must intend dramatic consistency, because "His aim is not to reconstruct the Church or to ameliorate humanity, but to depict certain characters, and to let them tell stories. He has no right to resort to conventions which, permissible to one who depicts a character ad hoc, are unjustifiable in one who depicts a character for its own sake" (118-19). Kittredge then proceeds, with great ingenuity, to explain the apparent incongruities in the Pardoner's performance in terms of a "conflict of feelings" (123-24) within the Pardoner. He can risk revealing his own sinfulness because "he need fear no disagreeable consequences" (120); he is himself unexpectedly moved by the story he tells, "though he has told it a thousand times before in the course of his profession" (122); and this leads him to "an ejaculation profoundly affecting in its reminiscence of the Pardoner's better nature, which he had himself thought long dead" (123), namely his assertion that Christ's pardon is best and his prayer that the pilgrims may receive...