Beckett's Pilgrims
Renowned Chaucer scholar, Paul Strohm summarises the famous Tales for us and shows just how, like them, we are on pilgrimage.
Modern conceptions of the Middle Ages go in either of two directions. On the one hand, the medieval centuries are viewed as a devout "age of faith," of cathedral-building, monastic self-denial, and Marian devotion. On the other, as a time of mayhem, bad sanitation, and swat-on-the-rump sex play. But people of the Middle Ages disdained this kind of thinking. For them, it was not one or the other, but both at once.
And that’s Chaucer—all the way. His Canterbury Tales, jump-started by his celebrated “Whan that April . . .” or coming of springtime opening, gives us a colorful cast of characters impelled to pilgrimage by a mixture of natural (including sexual) stirrings on the one hand, and genuine spiritual stirrings on the other. The soft wind blows, the rains fall, plants spring forth, and little birds pursue their amours . . . but more devout yearnings awaken as well, including a summons to pilgrimage.
Religious reformers mainly disapproved of pilgrimages, complaining about things like chatter and tale-telling and music along the way. On Chaucer’s imagined pilgrimage the Miller brings his bagpipes along, and the ethically questionable Pardoner and Summoner break into a raucous duet entitled "Come hither love, to me . . ." Pilgrimage could be a form of permissible travel, an escape from marital obligations, and a general flight from obligation. But pilgrimages weren't just road trips. They were, or at least could be, expressions of genuine sentiment, and Chaucer captures that side of it as well. We have no reason to doubt the religious sincerity of most of those heading for the Canterbury cathedral shrine of the martyred Thomas a Becket, "the holy blissful martyr for to seek.” There's devotion here, a sincere or even fervent desire for the holy martyr's past and future spiritual intervention. Canterbury isn't just some amusement park; it is a holy destination, a place of longing and longing's fulfilment.
This mixture of motives, this deliberate confusion of worldly and religious goals, is borne out in many ways, including the sheer social and vocational and temperamental variety of his 29 pilgrims. For Chaucer’s book includes an audience of its own, a hurly-burly group of tellers and hearers of tales who argue, curse, praise, understand, and misunderstand. And this audience is as varied as the collection of tales he wants them to tell. At the one extreme are the Miller and his cohort: the thieving Reeve, the ingratiating Friar, the sex-pest Summoner, con artist Canon. At the other, the wholly virtuous Second Nun, the charitable Plowman, the abstemious Clerk, and the devout Parson--who devotes himself to good parish works, has his doubts about tale-telling at all, and delivers a sermon on penitence when his time comes.
But most of the Pilgrims occupy what may be thought more mixed positions on the scale. Take the Prioress, for example. This lady of religion and head of a nunnery wears a stylishly pinched wimple or headdress, keeps lapdogs, and speaks affected French. She also wears a gold broach around her neck with the motto, "Love conquers all"--but what kind of love, we wonder? Or the Pardoner, a totally manipulative and sexually ambiguous scam artist, who breaks down at the end of his boastful rant about selling false pardons to tell the devotional truth for once, that Jesus Christ is the only real healer of souls.
These complexities persist into the tale-telling competition. We have comic fables, moral instructions, literary parodies, romances, sermons, true and false confessions … “God’s plenty,” as the poet Dryden once described Chaucer’s poetic latitude. But most of the tales are in one way or another mixed: blend "high" and "low" styles, as well as religious and irreligious points of view. Even Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” the most joyously bawdy of all the tales, contains trace-elements of religiosity and religious culture. Nicholas and Alisoun's hot night of illicit sex lasts:
Until the bell of Lauds began to ring
And friars in the chancel began to sing.
Others are solemn and religious, but contain surprising outbursts. The Prioress's devout miracle of the Virgin goes over the top with an anti-Semitic screed that Chaucer surely meant as a criticism of the teller rather than a sentiment of his own. The hushed and holy "Second Nun's Tale," in which Cecilia tells her husband on their wedding night that a guardian angel will slay him if he violates her virginity, dangerously skirts outright mirth. "Let me that angel see," her husband reasonably demands.
There's a see-saw effect, between the secular and the religious, and often a mixture of both registers within a single tale, as the three-day pilgrimage wends along. But there is a discernible tendency toward a religious closure. One of the last tales, the "Manciple's Tale" of Apollo's crow, expresses scepticism about tale-telling at all (the crow gets in trouble for telling the truth to his patron). And the final tale is told by the Parson, who doesn't like fable or fiction or even meter or rhyme. He says with grim humour that he will tell a "merry tale in prose," but it is "merry" only in the technical sense of providing gaudium or celestial joy. It is a long, long semon-like prose treatise on penance and the last things, and it is frankly meant to close things down.
Moreover, we're given a sense of time running down on the whole pilgrimage. The Parson begins his tale on the late afternoon of the third day; Chaucer judges by his shadow that it is four o'clock, and even the easy-going host Harry Bailly embraces a "hurry up, it's time" state of mind: "hasten . . .," he says, "the sun will soon be down."
The Parson's tale, with its theme of repentance, is the last of the sequence; the tale-telling competition has come to an end. Chaucer appears to have been stirred by the solemnity of his own tale. He affixes a prose Retraction, in which he expresses regret for having written some of his tales, "those that promote sin." Earlier scholars used to suppose that a "monkish scribe" had snuck in and added this discordant note to Chaucer's masterpiece. But to anyone with an appreciation of the mixed character of medieval understanding, it's not discordant at all. It is, to borrow a medieval phrase, a part of the "discordia concors," the harmony of discord, ever present in the medieval outlook. Chaucer could write the merry and bawdy, and invite us to enjoy them, but also, when viewing them from the devotional perspective, experience personal unease about having done so.
The last of the tales is the "Parson's Tale," since the Parson is by common consent the spiritual leader of the pilgrimage. The Parson accepts his mandate and offers his tale as a kind of summing-up, a last word on the pilgrimage. His offering, the longest of the tales and the most solemn, isn't actually even a "tale" at all, except that it is told out loud. It is a treatise, a kind of sermon, on the end of life and last days and need for penitence. It is meant to be a closer: in the Parson's words, "to knit up this festivity and make an end."
The Parson concludes his tale with his vision of death and redemption with interpretation of the Canterbury pilgrimage, of what it means. He explains to his fellow pilgrims that they have not just been on a journey to Canterbury and its shrine, but also on a metaphorical and spiritual journey toward salvation itself, a journey to the celestial Jerusalem. As he puts it,
Jesus, for his grace, wit me send
To show you the journey’s path
Of this perfect glorious pilgrimage
That is called celestial Jerusalem.
So the pilgrimage possesses a kind of provisional and metaphorical ending . . . but, interestingly, no actual arrival in Canterbury. It ends on the outskirts of the city, but the Pilgrims never actually enter the gates. Arrival would have been fine, but there’s an alternative: To wait, in a state of anticipation and desire.
First Canterbury and then, in the Parson's refiguration, Jerusalem, await as figures of desire. Here I might mention Walter Hilton, the most reasonable of medieval mystics, who uses pilgrimage, and the quest for Jerusalem, as a convenient emblem for spiritual yearning: We can't all be pilgrims—he, a cloistered monk, never was--but we must think like pilgrims to Jerusalem. And above all we must not relinquish the object of our desire: "Whatever you hear or see or feel that might hinder you in your way, do not abide with it willingly or tarry with it restfully, behold it not, like it not, dread it not . . . but every go forth in your way and think you would be nowhere else but at Jerusalem."
For the medieval Christian, life is always one or another sort of pilgrimage toward a glimpsed but unachieved destination. As one of Chaucer's own characters puts it, "This world is but a thoroughfare of woe,/ And we are pilgrims, passing to and fro." And, another character adds, striking the note of unappeased desire, "We know not what we pray for here/ . . . A drunk man knows he has a house,/ But he knows not how to find his way." You're a pilgrim, a seeker, always on the threshold of something you desire, but don't know how to achieve.
So Chaucer’s book ends with the pilgrims outside the Canterbury walls, a petitionary condition, one of devout waiting, not in certainty but in hope. A modern philosopher, Jacques Lacan, once observed that the art of happiness, or at least relative contentment, is to station oneself at a “proper distance” from the object of one's desire. Some of you may know Chaucer's "Knight's Tale." There two young men, Palamon and Arcite, are imprisoned and glimpse an ideal young woman through the barred window of their tower. Both fall in love with her, and they maintain themselves so happily in that condition of love that neither is sure he wants to leave. There in the tower, in a condition of deferred longing, each had discovered a kind of contentment he would never reclaim. Perhaps too for those stranded Pilgrims, full of expectation and hope, there outside the Canterbury walls.
By Paul Strohm
Professor Emeritus of the Humanties at Columbia University and previously the J.R.R Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of many books and scholarly articles on the man himself and his works.
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