The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (52 page)

Yet Chaucer’s pilgrims are not merely “representative.” Each has a distinctive face and figure, stature and gesture, with his very own variety of impatience and enthusiasm. We hear the Prioress “intoning through her nose the words divine,” the Friar “a gay dog and a merry.” We see the
Merchant’s “forked beard and beaver hat,” the Franklin’s beard “as white as daisy petals” and his ruddy face, the Reeve “slender and choleric,” the pockmarked Summoner so pimpled that he scared away children.

While most of Chaucer’s pilgrims are men, some of the most effective storytellers, like the oft-married Wife of Bath, are women. She says with relish that her fifth husband finally complied:

Perhaps the predominantly male character of Chaucer’s audience left him freer in his choice of tales. Themes borrowed or stolen from antiquity, from Petrarch, Dante, or Boccaccio, are intermixed with elaborated folk-tales, animal fables, embroidered superstitions, and familiar tragedies to express the hopes and fears in the imaginations of his contemporaries. There are many theories of the proper order of the tales. Only twenty-four tales were told on the way to Canterbury. The return journey was never chronicled, so we do not know who would have won the prize dinner. The short dramatic interludes that link the stories entertain us with the reactions of the pilgrims to one another. Chaucer himself is always there, with self-disparaging comments, a slightly obtuse and puzzled witness to the human condition. We readers are invited to form our own conclusions.

Chaucer bears witness to the unconventional, and perhaps disreputable, character of his work. For he finally adds his own “Retraction,” which recalls the apology that ended Boccaccio’s
Decameron
. “As they stand,” wrote Boccaccio, “these tales, like all other things, may be harmful or useful depending on who the listener is.” Chaucer straightforwardly asks Christ’s forgiveness for all his listed writings that “concern worldly vanities, which I renounce in my retractions.” He excludes only his translation of Boethius. But he still strangely insists, “All that is written is written for our doctrine.” Was this retraction an epitaph, a deathbed confession—or a plea for immortality?

While
The Canterbury Tales
create a new version of the human comedy, though incomplete and unfinished, they sample the forms of medieval narrative. They offer us a one-man renaissance, a medieval anthology translated
by the modern spirit. We hear a romance retold in “The Squire’s Tale of the Tartar King” and his daughter who is given a ring that lets her understand the language of birds. Then, the bawdy “Miller’s Tale” gives us a taste of the fabliau, coarse and comic. An Oxford student, Nicholas, and a parish priest’s assistant, Absolon, are both in love with Alison, the handsome young wife of an aged uxorious carpenter. They scheme to sleep with Alison by convincing the husband that a second Great Flood is about to destroy the world. Nicholas manages to win her for a night for himself. That night his jealous rival, begging a kiss, climbs up to the bedroom window. She offers him her rump, which Absolon kisses. When he comes back for another, Nicholas offers his rump, which the clever Absolon kisses with a hot iron. Nicholas’s screams alarm the unsuspecting carpenter who has prepared for the flood by suspending himself in a makeshift boat from the ceiling. Thinking the flood has come, the carpenter cuts the rope of his boat and crashes to the floor in a dead swoon.

Arthurian themes appear in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” First she catalogs the evils of celibacy while giving an account of her five marriages. She then tells of a knight who will escape the death penalty for rape if within a year he can discover what it is that women most desire. He meets an old witch who promises him the answer if he will marry her, which he does. She gives him the answer, which saves his life. Chaucer’s flavor survives in Theodore Morrison’s modernized English.

The witch then poses him another difficult question.

Since the knight has learned his lesson well, he yields her the sovereignty in answering this question too. She rewards him by becoming exquisitely beautiful and also promising to be faithful.

Then there are short narratives each pointing a moral. The Canon Yeoman cautions against alchemy and other rogueries. The Clerk extols virtues, embroidering the tale of Griselda that Petrarch had translated into Latin from the
Decameron
. When the poor peasant girl Griselda becomes the wife of the Marquis Walter she vows perfect obedience to her husband. He tests her first by taking away their infant children and pretending that he has had them killed. She responds only with the docile request that they be decently buried where animals will not dig up their little bodies. When he says he will dismiss her so he can take a noble wife, she obediently cleans the house for her successor. Still uncomplaining, she returns to her parents’ humble cottage. Finally the marquis reveals that she has passed the test. He brings her back as his wife revealing that he was only testing her steadfastness.

One of Chaucer’s more picturesque creations is the unctuous swindler, the Pardoner, who makes his living by selling pardons for all sorts of sins. His tale begins with a ringing sermon against gluttony, drunkenness, and other evils that he illustrates by his tale of three drunken gamblers. In a time of plague they go out together to kill Death, who has killed their friend. Told that they will find Death under a tree, they go there and find a hoard of gold. But they also find Death when each plots to secure more than his share of the find. Two of them kill the third whom they have sent to get food and drink. Then they drink the wine which had been brought by their slain comrade, but which he had poisoned to secure the treasure for himself. And the Pardoner concludes:

Despite his Retraction, Chaucer never returned to less worldly writing. In 1391 he wrote a
Treatise on the Astrolabe
for “my little son Lewis … of the tender age of ten year.” Based on a Latin translation of a work in Arabic, it survives as the oldest known work in English on a complex scientific instrument, witness to Chaucer the enthusiastic and versatile amateur.

It remains a mystery how Chaucer’s works circulated, to whom, and in how many copies. He allowed parts of the unfinished work to circulate among friends. Fifty-five complete manuscripts have survived. We must wonder, too, that when monasteries were the scriptoria, Chaucer’s novel and entertaining, worldly but unedifying work had the power to make itself known. Before printing there was no way of making a reliable estimate of the number of copies of a work that circulated.

Chaucer’s works enjoyed a rich and varied afterlife. He had become a byword and a popular English author long before he appeared in print. He was widely imitated, and by the fifteenth century a whole school of Scottish writers came to be known as the Chaucerians. He was a good believing Catholic, but because of his gibes at monks and pardoners English Protestants treated him as their forerunner. Though he was long praised for his naiveté, his defenders say that a naive collector of customs would have been “a paradoxical monster.”
The Canterbury Tales
attracted illustrators and became a favorite text for pioneering printers, from William Caxton (c.1422–1491) to William Morris and beyond.

Centuries passed before Chaucer’s stature as a poet was rediscovered. He was condescended to as “rough Chaucer,” for his verses seemed not to scan. Then another literary amateur, a versatile Clerk of the House of Commons, Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730–1786) discovered that the final
e
’s in words had actually been pronounced in Chaucer’s day. So he made Chaucer’s verses scan. Since then English writers have acclaimed his poetry for its sweetness and charming flow as much as for its broad humanity.

Writers most unlike Chaucer have claimed his lineage. Edmund Spenser (according to Dryden) declared “that the soul of Chaucer was transfused
into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease.” The mystic William Blake noted a wider reincarnation. “Chaucer’s characters,” he wrote, “live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining one of these characters; nor can a child be born who is not one of these characters of Chaucer.”

“M
OST
illustrious Drinkers and you, most precious Syphilitics,” Rabelais greeted his readers in 1534, “for it is to you, not to others, that my writings are dedicated.” So he introduced the first great comic epic of Western literature, a long digressive adventure in dipsomania. Just then it was not surprising that his paean to the absurd should be a tale of drink, for in the summer of 1532 France had suffered the worst drought in living memory. As Rabelais recalled, men were seen “lolling out their tongues like greyhounds that have run for six hours; many threw themselves into wells; others crept into a cow’s belly to be in the shade.… It was hard work to keep the holy water in the churches from being exhausted. But they so organized it, by the advice of My Lords the Cardinals and the Holy Father, that no one dared to take more than one dip.”

Like many a best-selling author, Rabelais followed closely in the path marked by another recent best-seller. That summer of 1532 had seen the publication of the sensationally successful book
Les Grandes et inestimables cronicques du grant et énorme géant Gargantua
, a fanciful tale of a family of giants whom Merlin had created for King Arthur. Rabelais noted that “the printers have sold more copies of that work in two months than they have Bibles in nine years.” He may have had something to do with writing or revising the
Cronicques de Gargantua
, but this did not prevent him from writing his very own tale of giants. His pretended sequel is the book that many call the first modern novel. Speedily written, as the work of Alcofribas Nasier (anagram for François Rabelais), it was printed in October and sold briskly that November at the Lyons fair.

Pantagruel, the All-Thirsty One, was already familiar in the French mystery plays as the demon of thirst who went around sprinkling salt into
people’s throats. Learned physicians like Rabelais had made it a name for the irritation of the throat that induced thirst. But Rabelais would depart shamelessly and exuberantly from the proprieties of medicine and the Arthurian legend. He felt justified because Aristotle, still the highest authority on almost everything, had observed that of all living creatures only man was endowed with laughter. And at the outset of Book One of
Gargantua
he announced his theme:

But there is no straight road to the absurd or the comic.

The surprising path that François Rabelais (c.1490–1553) created for himself was through medicine and the thickets of pedantry. Born to the family of a prosperous French lawyer in Touraine in central France, by 1521 he was a Franciscan monk, writing Greek verses to Guillaume Budé (1468–1540), a friend of Erasmus, founder of the Collège de France, inspirer of revived interest in Greek literature. In 1523, when the Sorbonne banned the study of that “heretical language,” Rabelais’s Franciscan superiors seized his Greek books. When these were finally returned he transferred to a more hospitable Benedictine monastery. By 1528 Rabelais—without permission from his superiors—had taken off his monk’s robes and gone to Paris to study medicine. There he fathered two of his illegitimate children by an unidentified widow. Studying at the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier he received his doctor’s degree in medicine (1537), and though it was forbidden by the Sorbonne, he actually dissected the corpse of a hanged criminal. Modern admirers have credited him with such medical “discoveries” as the uterine origin of hysteria in women and novel treatments for syphilis.

Medicine was still a humanistic science, based on the ancient Greek texts of Hippocrates and Galen, which students read only in translation. At Montpellier, Rabelais had impressed his fellows and alarmed his professors by his own translations of the sacred Greek medical texts because a student who could read these texts—and the New Testament—in the original might be tempted to draw his own conclusions. He never ceased to champion the “humanistic” approach to medicine, seeking progress through the better reading of ancient texts.