Roc and the Flying Chaucers, Part One

When I was asked to teach British Literary Traditions — a survey course designed to cover major periods between 1400 and the present in 15 weeks — I honestly had a fair amount of anxiety about how to best teach materials from the Middle Ages and the Anglo-Saxon period to young post-moderns for whom tradition is not a litmus test of education.  How do we make works such as The Canterbury Tales relevant in the 21^st century other than as a subject of historically situated literary inquiry? 

Some professors of literature would say it is enough to make Chaucer’s masterpiece the subject of a historically situated literary inquiry . . . indeed, that’s the point of teaching in our discipline.  To teach students how to use the analytical lenses that they need to employ to trade of literary study so to speak — close reading, poetic and historical explication, exegesis. 

Without a doubt, these skill outcomes are integral to any successful undergraduate lit course, but teaching literature for me will always begin with the enterprise of modeling the joy I feel at reading great works, the enterprise of inviting delight and passion in fellow readers.   

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour [. . . ];
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages [. . .]

By the time Chaucer began his Canterbury saga he was an old man, well traveled and wise to the varieties of human existence.  His temperament conditioned by his consummate cosmopolitanism, he must have embraced Terence’s maxim, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (I am human, therefore nothing human is strange to me), given the diverse social and ideological scopes of the characters he depicted within works such as the Tales and A Parliament of Birds.

He was a man looking at a civilization facing extraordinary transitions — transitions in the class structure on his small island, the development of a vernacular language, the emergence of a new sociopolitical identity called ‘Britishness.’  What was there to do with all that transitory energy but to map it onto the lives and bodies of characters who are bound together on a journey to Canterbury. 

There’s the nun with the prideful habits and less than demure passions of a great lady.  The noble knight whose relevance is as rusty as his armor.  The bellicose miller with a will to power that is honored despite his lack of stature in the traditional societal structure. . . and of course the loose lipped, loose hipped Wife of Bath.

“Have you ever just sat on a bus, or on the steps of a fountain while travelling and simply read people — developed a story about who they were simply from the what of their manner and dress?”

Several people nodded.

“Chaucer’s narrator is the consummate traveler in medieval London,” I continued.  “He's one heck of a travelling companion today.  Even after 700 years, he is still teaching us how to read ourselves and those other ‘planetary bodies’ whose orbits we cross, clash with, and intersect.  His characterization technique in the Prologue is extraordinary for the way in which it invites us to really read people, to investigate the ways in which class, identity, and desire is mapped on each and every body.”

Through the course of our discussion, I asked my students to put themselves to task in writing a Chaucerian character sketch.  “Use Chaucer’s poetic devices to develop a caricature of someone here on campus . . . someone who may be highly individualized, but also represents a type.” I said. “Use iambic pentameter, verbal irony, and details of dress and manner as vehicles of characterization.”

After emitting few mild groans they put themselves to task.

What they produced convinced me that my early concerns with making Chaucer relevant were overblown.  He’s alive and well.

(Part Two)