Roc and the Flying Chaucers, Part Two

Geoffrey Chaucer may be approaching his 670^th birthday, but I think at this point in the semester the dude’s anything but ancient history to the students of English 195.

It’s a fact I don’t take lightly.

While studying The Canterbury Tales in February, I had them use Chaucer’s poetic devices in order to create a character study of someone at the college.  After 35 minutes of letting them develop their sketches, I asked them to put their pens down.  

“Let’s read some of them out loud,” I encouraged. 

Spencer volunteered to read his. 

“With brown curled hair to music and capture art

And old food stains on one third of his shirt

He, the unwashed single dwelling freshman

Frequented Commons, the College’s Chaplain —

The church under the wing of Mother Duck,

X-box, Starcraft, and not giving a fuck.

Lacking the life skills to see that he must

Brush his teeth . . . and throw out that pizza box.

Wearing pajama pants in class each day,

And a shirt showing Silent Bob and Jay.

His beard hair like the backside of a yak

Eating fried food until his heart attack,

And yet when confronted, he gave a hymn,

How he was the only one who wasn’t dim.”

Everybody began to laugh, knowing who this Everyman was in their own circle of influence.  “Who else wants to read theirs?” I encouraged.

Lily raised her hand.

“His specialty was the Great Orient

and he had been to China many times been sent

He paced vigorously in lecture, wiping his brow

Repeating the right way to pronounce kow-tow —

Not to mention the differences between

The Boxers, Taipings, and the Dowager Queen

His hands shook with fervour and his words were stuttered —

It's just that China made his heart a-flutter

He was crazy about primary sources

About the Tang court with their dancing horses.

To him, the mail room box numbers were historic dates,

And Ming dynasty feminisms were nothing but great.”

One by one, each of the students volunteered to read their characters.  Their sketches of professors and fellow students (including themselves) were at turns funny and poignant, angry, wry and ironic.  I collected them at the end of the hour, and the following weekend I compiled them in an extended narrative poem, which I then sent back to each one of them.

Through the course of the subsequent weeks, we revisited the poem a number of times with thoughts of other issues it raised, such as the relationship between social order and the order in which characters were introduced.  The students could readily identify their characters by ‘estates’. 

“There are definitely ‘estates’ on campus,” Katie replied.  “Some of whom you never see away from their Wii. The LARPs, BSFFA, Sigma Chi, TKE, The Residents of Peet . . . not to mention all the professors, who probably don’t hang together all that much . . . ”

“What about the narrative situation?” I added. “ . . . Chaucer’s ‘pilgrims’ would never have been on a pilgrimage together.  Many of the so called estates on campus will never be together either.  What sort of occasion could realistically bring them together?  A convocation?” 

“Drinking.” Someone said wryly. “Drinking brings everyone together on the weekends.”

“How about Spring Day?” someone else said thoughtfully, “after all, the Canterbury Tales begin in April.  . .”

This is how “The Beloit Tales” came into being.  It’s also the way that I hope the students my survey literature course made the leap from an academic knowledge of a poet and his poetic method to an embodied knowledge of them. 

When the parody edition of the college’s weekly newspaper comes out tomorrow, in it will be an extraordinarily funny poem authored by Roc and the Flying Chaucers that starts something like this . . .

When that April with his showers soote

The frozen tundra of March, pierced to the root,

And bathed was every vein in such liquor

As could be found at a major discounter,

Then longed Beloiters of all sorts and kinds

To be reacquainted with the weak sunshine,

And thus they poured from every office and hall

Through the doors of 840, and Morse Ingersoll

From Godfrey, Middle College, and 815,

Sigma Chi and every place in-between.

North across campus, they each made their way,

To partake in the ritual known as Spring Day. . .

As within Chaucer’s opus, the poem provides a delightful cross-section of the cast of characters making up the little civilization of a 21st century midwestern college campus, revealing them in all their humanity, replite with follies and idiosyncrasies.  And like Chaucer, each poet proved to possess the eye of the seasoned traveler, for whom nothing human was ever strange, but ever a consummate delight.

It's been famously said that no one should ever teach a new class for the first time, and at this point in the semester, I am increasingly aware of how the course has failed to serve the students as fully as it could.  Too much time spent on some texts and historical periods, too little time spent on others. . . not enough prose, and drama . . . too much levity.  But as my 'notes to self' on how I will and won't be teaching the course in the future aggrandize in their neat little piles, I feel in some way, just through the course of traveling together toward Canterbury we have achieved something that looks, feels like a teaching outcome every literature professor should be aiming for. 

(Part One)

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)