RESPONSES: Responding to the Monk

RESPONSES Responding to the Monk Helen Cooper University College, Oxford IP THE MONK'S TALE has bttn thought to be devoid of nitirnl interest, the five papers collected here should show the error of that as­ sumption. Between them they offer a remarkable range of lines of access to the Tale: the social or socialist, in Stephen Knight's analysis of false class consciousness; the reflection of history, in Terry Jones's calling on the Monk as evidence for his attack on the mercenary Knight; the politi­ cal, as Ann Astell extends the Tale's concern with history from the sources of its narratives to its possible target, whom she identifies as Richard II himself; the generic, as H. A. Kelly reminds us of the revolu­ tionary significance of Chaucer's calling the narratives "tragedies"; the postmodern, as Richard Neuse connects the methods of narration with a decentering of an apparently dominant patriarchal structure. What is refreshing about all of them is the extent to which the old agendas have been rethought or replaced. Inward-looking questions about Chaucerian irony or the psychology of the teller are superseded by considerations of larger contexts; and the possibility of its being a deliberately bad tale is decisively scotched by Terry Jones in his first paragraph. As he says, authors don't do that sort of thing. When Chaucer wants to write bad verse, he writes Sir Thopas, a virtuoso performance in the truly awful, assigned to himself, that is matched by little beside Shakespeare's "Pyramus and Thisbe." So what is Chaucer doing? Five different answers are offered here, and they can't all be right: which is to say that although each of them shows how its own approach can be valid, some of them contradict each other in ways that cannot be reconciled. If the aptly named Stephen Knight 425 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER is right that the Knight is a "true lord" who puts down the Monk's false claims, Terry Jones cannot also be right that the Knight is an upstart parvenu whose tenuous social and moral position the Monk is out to reveal. (One can imagine a work in which both characters would be ar­ guing against the other; but since such issues never get any explicit mention whatsoever in the text as it stands, that work is not The Canter­ bury Tates as Chaucer wrote it.) Uncertainties about the evolution of the text (early or late composition? the "modern instances" in the middle or at the end?) allow critics to select the hypothesis that suits their own argument, and use their argument to bolster the hypothesis. The refer­ ence to Palamon and Arcite in the Prologue to The Legend ofGood Women indicates that The Knight's Tate had an existence before the Knight was ever invented (so inviting a complication of Jones's indictment of its teller); by contrast, there is no direct evidence for what H. A. Kelly de­ scribes the "generally accepted working hypothesis" that the series of tragedies preexisted the Monk. Arguments to that effect were based on the inclusion of the falls of men who died in 1385-86, and who seem, in view of the way their stories float around the manuscripts, to have been added as an afterthought, so pushing the bulk of the Tate back earlier. The further reasoning behind the hypothesis lay in the belief that The Monk's Tate was bad poetry; it therefore had to be excused as an immature work that Chaucer outgrew, and which, rather than discard­ ing, he gave to an inadequate pilgrim. This forum challenges such as­ sessments at their root by taking The Monk's Tate seriously. The contributors differ, however, in the degree of dependence they assume for the Tate on the larger framework of The Canterbury Tates. For Jones and Knight, the Monk and the Knight are inseparable. For Neuse, the discontinuity of the tragedies epitomizes the resistance offered by the whole Canterbury Tates to the grand narrative of Christian history. For Astell, they belong to the storytelling series only contingently: their primary context is in contemporary politics, and their placing in the Tates links them in...