“What Man Artow?”: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee

"What Man Artow?": Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale ofSir Thopas and The Tale ofMelibee Lee Patterson Duke University THE CHAUC>.RIAN PHRASE io 1 my cit!, d«ivcs, of comse, from ch, moment in the Canterbury pilgrimage when Harry Bailly first notices the unobtrusive traveling companion whom we know to be the narrator (ThP 695). 1 While this is not the only time that Harry interrogates a pilgrim, what is striking about thisoccasionis the comprehensiveness of his opening question, its utter lack of specificity: "What man artow?" By contrast, for example, Harry asks the Monk and the Parson not to identify themselves but simply to explain their specific ecclesiastical offices (see MkP 1929-36 and ParsP 22-23); that the Monk is a monk and the Parson a priest are facts not in question. Similarly, th� other two pilgrims whom Harry asks to account for themselves, the Canon and the Yeoman, are also easily recog­ nizable: the Canon's hooded black gown and white surplice proclaim his identity as a canon (CYP 573), while his companion is unproblematically classified as his servant or "yemen" (CYP 587), the English word typically used to translate the Latin valettus. 2 Hence Harry seeks immediately to absorb the Canon into the tale-telling game, and only when alerted by the Yeoman's ambiguous assurances does he more pointedly ask him to "telle what [the Canon] is" (CYP 616). With the narrator, however, the opening question implies unrecog­ nizability. Harry can see that his companion is withdrawn and perhaps shy, that he is short and fat (a "popet"), and that he is "elvyssh" (whatever that 1 Citations are from Larry Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). I should like to thank Alan Gaylord and Judith Ferster for their helpful comments on this article, although neither will want to be held responsible for its conclusions. 2 Kate Mertes, TheEnglish NobleHousehold, 1250-1600(Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 26-29. 117 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER means). But this identification in terms of manner and body shape is a substitute for the identification in terms of vocation applied to the other pilgrims. Recognizable as a knight, a miller, a reeve, and so forth, the pilgrims are identified by their social functions. As Jill Mann has said, Chaucer's cast of characters is not "a collection of individuals or types with an eternal or universal significance, but...a society in which work as a social experience conditions personality and the standpoint from which an individual views the world."3 But what work does the narrator perform? What is his social function? "What man artow?"4 The question of authorial identity that Chaucer has Harry Bailly here raise explicitly preoccupied him throughout his career. Initially the ques­ tion was posed in terms of an opposition between courtly "makyng" and humanist "poesye," an opposition that structures the writing that extends from The Book ofthe Duchess through The Legend ofGood Women. As the famous "Go, litel book" stanza of Trot/us and Criseyde makes clear, Chaucer saw himself in this poem, and throughout the pre-Canterbury Tatesphase ofhiscareer,asa "maker"aspiring to, but unabletoachieve, the status ofthe classical "poetes"- "Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace" (TC 5 .1792).5 What motivated this opposition was Chaucer's sense of the limitations of courtly "makyng." While "makyng" did provide a space devoted to the aesthetic and the recreative, and thus freed writing from the coercions of a moralizing didacticism, it was itself subject to a similarly 3 JillMann, ChaucerandMedievalEstatesSatire(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1973), p. 202. 1 Ifthereisacontemporaryprecedentforthismomentofvocationalinterrogation,itoccurs in passus 5 of the C text of Piers Plowman. There the dreamer is "aratede" by Reason for his useless way of life but defends himself, irresolutely, in terms not of his "makyng" butrather of his vocation as an itinerant beadsman. Langland returns to this problem throughout the poem, his failure to resolve the issue paralleling Chaucer's own difficulties with authorial self. definition. For a detailed account of this moment in Piers Plowman, see Anne Middleton, "William Langland'sKynde Name," in Lee Patterson,ed.,Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1350-1530 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University...