Monday, September 19, 2011

The Miller's Tale by Chaucer (ca. 1390)

At first it was difficult to find a message in "The Miller's Tale" because it's hidden within a silly, dirty story. The prologue, however, tells us to take it seriously--precisely by telling us not to:
So be on notice, and don't give me the blame.
No one should be too serious, playing a game.
Then the "Steward's Prologue" [Reeve's Prologue], which immediately follows, says everyone laughed at the miller's story, but some people saw it one way and others saw it another way, which is proof of a hidden message--some people got it but others didn't.

Mark Twain put a similar notice in the front of Huckleberry Finn:
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;
persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
I believe disclaimers like these were meant to relieve their authors of responsibility for offenses they might make. That way they could share risky ideas with open-minded readers, but to ones who claimed offense, they would say, "Oh it was just a joke! See? Look at the label!"

On the surface, the "Miller's Tale" is obviously a dirty story meant to contrast with the "Knight's Tale". The miller makes many low class references to sex, animals, and lust in contrast to the knight's noble references to honor, chivalry, and love. So I guess it's an example of how the other (lower) half lives, but maybe the dirtiness was also a tactic to obscure a hidden message.

"The Miller's Tale" presents a good example of how easily ignorant people can be deceived and manipulated, especially through the use of education and religion. The religious and hardworking carpenter believed everything the scholar told him. No matter how farfetched it got, it never occurred to him it might be a trick! This kind of scam was apparently old in Chaucer's day and it continues today. (How many televangelist scandals have we seen? How many people are still willing to go to war for religion--and who ultimately benefits when they do?)

A quick search of the Internet returns tons of analysis on the "Miller's Tale". I'll comment on one item I found: Some critics consider the carpenter's arrangement of the hanging tubs as a symbol of God's genitals! To me this is a bizarre stretch of the imagination. Why would anyone think that? They believe "Godde's privity" means his "private parts", as if the idiom meant the same then as it does nowadays, which is quite possible, but it's out of context anyway. In context it is, "I will not telle Godde's privity", where it clearly means God's secrets.

However, the scholar is not specific when he tells the carpenter to get 3 tubs, but after he does, he has one long one and two round ones, which lends credence to the symbol. It still seems a stretch though, but the argument has its points and Foster does say if something looks like a symbol, it probably is.

If Chaucer did that intentionally, all I can imagine is he needed something really obscene and distracting that common people would snicker over and private parts was the best he could think of.

So what's the real point of the "Miller's Tale"? I think he was satirizing how man abuses religion to exploit the gullible. Given the era, one would think it was almost blasphemy, and not just the private parts. There are plenty of negative references to religion and education, too, but it was all under the cover another story. The problem is not religion per se. The problem is man's abuse of religion for personal gain.

It's remarkable that Chaucer was never prosecuted for heresy, but Galileo was actually convicted of it 200 years later for announcing scientific discoveries! Maybe Chaucer was saved since the printing press wasn't available to widely distribute his work in his time, or maybe Galileo was prosecuted because it never occurred to him to obscure his announcements inside jokes.

By the way, Chaucer needing something really obscene reminds me of a Johnny Cash interview I heard. He needed something really despicable for "Folsom Prison Blues" (1955), and shooting a man "just to watch him die" was the worst thing he could think of.

References:
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. ca. 1390. Trans. Burton Raffel. Modern Library. 2008.
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems [Kindle Edition]. ca. 1390. Ed. D. Lang Purves.
GradeSaver. "The Canterbury Tales Study Guide & Literature Essays". GradeSaver. 1999-2011.

Thomas C. Foster. How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Harper. 2003.


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