Chaucer’s Canterbury Poetics: Irony, Allegory, and the Prologue to The Manciple’s Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Poetics: Irony, Allegory, and the Prologue to The Manciple's Tale Warren Ginsberg SUNY, Albany Ea long ,;me, ;rony and allegory have occup;.,J prom;nent, but opposing, places in the lexicon of criticism on The Canterbury Tales; re­ cently, however, readers of Chaucer have grown suspicious about granting either one the status of a first principle that governs the organization and reception of the Tales and the pilgrims who tell them. New Critical and exegetical interpretations virtually defined themselves according to the ways in which they deployed these tropes; commentators such as Lee Pat­ terson have demonstrated how adherents of one or the other approach, by burying their political commitments in what they assumed were unchang­ ing operations of language or belief, presented a Chaucer strangely de­ tached from the social and material conditions of lace medieval England.1 From a different quarter, textual critics have interrogated the use of these or any concepts to promote ideas of order and unity the manuscripts will not sustain. To see in the disposition oftales indications ofChaucer's global intentions becomes highly problematic: whether The Parson's Tale, for in­ stance, was meant to be the last tale told, or whether Chaucer even in­ tended it should be part of the Tales, much less provide a retrospective gloss for chem, are questions scribal evidence warrants asking.2 'Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 3-39; see also Derek Pearsall's comments, The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 318-19. 2 A number of critics have relied on the uncertainty of textual evidence to call into question the assumption chat the Parson's rejection offiction in his Prologue and emphasis on penance in his tale coincides with Chaucer's final vision of the scope and purpose of The Canterbury Tales. See Charles Owen, Pilgrimage and Storytelling in the Canterbury Tales (Norman: University ofOklahomaPress,1977); A. J.Minnis,MedievalTheoryofAuthorship (London: Scalar Press, 1984); and especially David Lawton, "Chaucer's Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of The Canterbury Tales," SAC 9 (1987): 3-40. More generally, Norman Blake especially has argued against basing critical assumptions on the Ellesmere order; The 55 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER It is an irony ofhistory that allegory and irony should have become iden­ tifying characteristics of antagonistic approaches to Chaucer, since in medieval rhetorical theory both figures were closely related. Because it simultaneously negates what it asserts, irony in fact was considered a kind of allegory, which was the name for any language that said more than one thing at once. It is equally ironic that these figures should have been disso­ ciated from history, since, as I hope to demonstrate, irony and allegory vir­ tually constitute the style of the social and the historical in the Tales. And though tales and blocks of tales are fragmentary, the prologues and end­ links to them show that Chaucer did conceive of them as parts of a whole. While we cannot in many cases say a particular order is his, The Canterbury Tales do subscribe to the idea oforder, an idea that irony and allegory-the tropes that join negation and plenitude together-help to determine. I want to argue these propositions by examining the Prologue to The Manciple's Tale. Many feel the performance ofthe thieving steward Chaucer describes in The General Prologue hastens what James Dean has called the dismantling of the Canterbury book.3 In the Manciple's tale, not only irony but speech itself yields to a cynicism so desolating, words clot and sour on the tongue; with its closing injunctions to silence, Chaucer seems to disengage from his fiction and confront "the limits ofpoetic utterance."4 Chaucer's renunciation of his craft then becomes unequivocal in the affect­ less prose of the Parson's tale ofpenance and the repudiations ofthe Retrac­ tion that follow: all poetry that is not part of the discourse of the spirit is explicitly revoked. Although the Manciple's tale does indeed move toward "alienation and silence,"5 the portrait ofthe man and the Prologue to his tale do not. In The General Prologue, Chaucer explicitly links the Manciple to irony...