, by Peter Ackroyd. DoubleDay, 188 pp., $19.95Chaucer
He was not a poet who happened to be a diplomat and government official; he was a diplomat and government official who, in his spare time, happened to write poetry.” So declares historian Peter Ackroyd in Chaucer, his easily consumed, though only gradually digested, biography of the man called the father of English poetry. Though this quotation appears as more of a remark than a statement of his thesis, one ultimately realizes that this point is at the heart of what Ackroyd thinks of Chaucer. By a series of related themes that recur in his observations, Ackroyd presents Chaucer as a writer rather at one with his world. Medieval England was an age of dramatic representations overlaid with symbolic ceremony, and Chaucer was a constantly dissimulating performer on the stage of that world. Finding the man behind all that stage play is difficult, and may in fact, Ackroyd seems to suggest, miss the point.
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) has, like many medieval figures, rather flummoxed modern scholars. Much is unclear about his life and activities. There is even a charge of rape (a more elastic term then than today) against him about which biographers can discover precious little. Commentators on his writing, especially The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, have had trouble gleaning a single interpretation of his work. Peter Ackroyd’s biography succeeds by avoiding these pitfalls — his book strives neither to account for the details of Chaucer’s life story nor to explain definitively his poetry. He discusses Chaucer’s work, of course, and he has researched his life thoroughly, but he replaces what cannot be known about the life and what ought not be ventured about the work with a deep, sympathetic knowledge of the period. Ackroyd’s brand of cultural history, which lacks the dry quantitative approach and presumptuous theorizing sometimes associated with that academic subgenre, furnishes the daily details and contemporary concerns that constituted Chaucer’s world. Ackroyd uses the context not to explain why Chaucer acted or wrote as he did, but rather to take the man on his own terms.
This is Ackroyd’s style. He has written biographies of Dickens, Blake, Eliot, Pound and More, as well as numerous works of fiction and poetry. Almost all of his writing revolves around the daily rhythm of London and the meaning of Englishness, obsessions that two recent titles spell out: London: The Biography and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. Like all of his works, Chaucer reflects Ackroyd’s concern with the daily fabric of life (especially London life) — the circulating influence between how people live their lives and how they imagine those lives. Ackroyd understands the interdependence of a time and its geniuses: “to enter the consciousness and personality of a man or woman, of any period, is to see that period from within.” Since Chaucer is the first in a new series called “Ackroyd’s Brief Lives,” the author achieves this unique perspective in only 170 pages. So this is a sketch, but a very good one.
Ackroyd has his work cut out for him, though, since from our modern, rationalist perspective, 14th-century England appears impenetrable. All our objective vision cannot see through medieval culture, with its heavy symbolism and extreme behavior. Huizinga wrote about the “violent tenor” of life, the excesses of passions charitable and malevolent that roiled the medieval mind. Moderns might see this as a case of repressed emotions breaking out — yet more proof against social strictures. But the medieval was a fundamentally theatrical age of social roles and ceremonial behavior, one which frustrates our expectations. Medieval man did not yet live by the mantra that everyone must “to his own self be true.” He did not conceive of his self — if he even had such a conception — in opposition to the social models and dramatic representations of life that surrounded him. Indeed, though he lived as one in-between various roles on a stage, it is unclear that the play was distinguishable from life itself. In this world of “covered qualitee,” Chaucer’s business was to speak on behalf of someone else. He worked in the service of five royals of the English court — Edward III, Lionel Duke of Hampton, John of Gaunt, Richard II and Henry IV. He occupied various administrative positions of the realm and occasionally traveled on behalf of one of his royal employers or benefactors on diplomatic missions, mostly to France and Italy. Often these involved matters of great sensitivity and import, as when he negotiated a marriage offer from the Visconti family of Milan for Richard. That Chaucer was frequently called to execute such delicate missions suggests his diplomatic skill. Indeed, though his associates in the well-to-do court circle of 14th-century London frequently came under Parliamentary attack for behaving corruptly and aggrandizing too much power, Chaucer himself always managed to avoid such political controversy. He spoke for the king and was involved in his affairs at the highest levels, yet he was not clearly a partisan. A professional diplomat, he kept his distance.
“there lives the dearest freshness deep down things no. 2”
(oil on canvas) by Kay Darling
Ackroyd observes something similar in Chaucer’s writing. Chaucer portrays himself in his works as a quiet, bookish sort, who merely relates what he has heard from others, or what he has dreamed. We are not to blame him, he protests, if we feel offended, nor are we to think he has any personal knowledge of what he’s talking about. Those who cannot do, after all, write. The Canterbury Tales famously ends with “The Parson’s Tale,” which “disavows all of those poems ‘that sownen into synne.’” A lesser known work called The Parliament of Fowls begins when the narrator, absorbed with reading scrolls “write with letters olde,” dozes off and dreams he is led to the temple of Venus. His guide tells him, “For thow of love hast lost thy taste, I gesse / As sek man hath of swete and bytternesse.” Some of this is part of medieval convention, perhaps, but the self-deprecating, ironic narrator constantly appears in Chaucer’s writing as a way to distance the author from his work. Parody, ever Chaucer’s medium, is a way for the author to abrogate responsibility for what he mocks. Like the work of the diplomat who must act in a play someone else has written, Chaucer’s writing carries the pretense of being a kind of reportage, by dreams, hearsay and pilgrimage tales, of the mad action going on in the world. “And peynest the to preyse hys art / Although thou haddest never part.”
Ackroyd emphasizes repeatedly the ceremonial dissimulation involved in Chaucer’s diplomatic post. The reign of Richard II (1377-1399) occupied the period of Chaucer’s maturity, and it was also the flowering of medieval culture in England. Ackroyd describes Richard’s court as one of “ceremony and formal ritual. … This in turn encouraged what might be called the self-consciousness of the nation, so that all aspects of the body politic came to be represented in dramatic or rhetorical terms.” This was a period of the first great mystery plays, religious works like those of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, and a literary resplendence bested only by that of Elizabeth I’s reign. In short, Chaucer was surrounded, in his work as in his leisure, by the full phantasmagoria of the medieval imagination. We are accustomed to think of art as something that reveals the truth to us by stripping away pretensions and social conventions. But in the medieval world the representation of life, whether for political or artistic purposes, was always just that: a re-presentation, an additional artifice that used the established social conceits to illuminate a higher truth.
Chaucer’s ability to balance expectations and their contradictions to achieve his art is evident in Troilus and Criseyde. The story is of course one of Europe’s great legendary romances. In Chaucer’s hands, however, it becomes something more than romance. Indicating the deceitful potential of speech, the characters’ many lofty orations “speak less than the truth.” The betrayal of Troilus by Criseyde could be passionate despair or selfish manipulation. “It is impossible not to be reminded,” Ackroyd reminds us, “of Chaucer’s own career in royal service, where he would have been expected to use his skills as a rhetorician in order to fabricate a courtly or civilised [sic] reality beyond the imperatives of power and commerce.” Between the conventional roles of star-crossed lovers and a cynical under-tale of cold-hearted calculation, Chaucer unfolds the drama. Finally, Ackroyd remarks that this work is one of those so full of “irony and ambiguity” that it is impossible to glean one meaning from it. As a court poem, Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde to be performed. Thus the work is, indeed, only fully realized as a dramatic performance — completing the union of Chaucer’s art with the courtly world in which he moved.
The medieval world, and in particular the diplomatic and court circle in which Chaucer moved, was one to which the metaphor of the stage was uniquely appropriate. Chaucer conjured characters true to life on that stage, but we are remiss if look for individuals after our fashion. Chaucer was no proto-modern; his genius, as his charm, is medieval. His greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, parades a wonderful cast of medieval characters before us, with the pilgrimage as their stage. And yet Chaucer’s particular (and, as Ackroyd would have it, particularly English) ironic distance intimates that more than mere types bubble beneath the surface of the Miller and Wife of Bath. Ackroyd reminds us that Chaucer always displayed a stoic indifference to mortal fate in his philosophical poetry, and the deeply human (however typological) pilgrims to Canterbury “emphasize the frailty of humankind.” It should not surprise us that Chaucer never definitively condemns them their foibles — the Parson’s tale is after all just one of many; such is his detachment.
Quoting Blake, Ackroyd suggests a sort of realist (that is, referring to the medieval philosophy realism) interpretation of Chaucer’s writing, in which “‘Chaucer’s pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations: as one age falls, another rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same characters repeated … Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay.’” The follies and ridiculed loftiness of the pilgrimage — a basic Christian image of mortal life — constitute the accidents of this passing life. Perhaps Ackroyd realizes his imposition on Chaucer and so merely suggests this idea. But, at the risk of pushing it too far, one wonders whether the substance behind the accident appears in Chaucer’s attitude, in his ironic distance. For Chaucer was engaged in the play without being totally invested in it, which one might consider a distinctively Christian attitude. Medieval Christians emphasized more than we the apocalypse, anticipating the day the curtain falls on this world. High eschatological expectations often encourage violence, as they did during the Reformation, but for Chaucer they relieved man of an excessive anxiety over worldly affairs. That is, because the Christian’s salvation does not come from this world, he can smile at its foibles. In this way Chaucer laughs with the pilgrims as they pass us by, for all hear the splintering of the worldly stage that carries them. Chaucer’s is a uniquely Christian mirth.
One should not misconstrue this ironic attitude as amoral detachment. Doubtless Chaucer cared about the state of the world, and Ackroyd’s discussion of his straightforward piety suggests that he would have made moral judgments about it. Man sins, and Christians struggle against sin. This is given; but as such, it also cautions against an individual’s pretensions to overcome the sin of the world himself and reminds him of his company with sinners — even some unrepentant and willful ones. Our role in the play, so to speak, is limited, and certainly we cannot rewrite the script. Chaucer avoided fatalism by engaging in the world while recognizing that it is all play, ultimately. His was an art that did not conceive of itself in opposition to its times and its culture, but rather observed them with a sympathetic eye. Thus Chaucer refreshes us moderns, accustomed as we are to the pretensions of modern artists to enlighten us. He seems to have understood that art is not a blunt instrument of salvation, but rather a way for mankind to convey to itself its situation. Being in the world, Chaucer described it truthfully to itself. Being not of the world, he did it smiling.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.2.