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A Christmas Carol Syllabus


CHRISTMAS CAROL WEBQUEST DUE 12/13!!!

Canterbury Tales =Syllabus=

The Old Man in the Tale
 1989 On "The Pardoner's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer  Helen Cooper
 * Date: **
 * Author: **
 * From: **

//Geoffrey Chaucer // , Bloom's Major Poets. What is the old man? His equivalent in the analogues is a wise man or philosopher, even Christ: here he keeps the wisdom, now associ ated also with old age, and the virtue—a reading of him as evil has to ignore the way Chaucer presents him. He cannot be Death, since death is his greatest desire, and part of the point of the tale, paradoxically, is that death is not a material thing that can be found—the gold is death to the rioters, but only [through] the self-destruction they bring with them. He is not the Wandering Jew, though he has something of the same compelling mythic power. Nor is he //vetus homo//, unredeemed or sinful man, since he knows all about the Redemption, quotes Holy Writ, and sees himself as following 'Goddes wille.' He is what the text says he is: an old man seeking death. The implications of that, however, are extensive. In the first place, his is a familiar medieval type, though more familiar in visual than literary art. Allegorical pictures of the universality of death invariably show Death leading away the young, the beautiful, the rich, the carefree, and leaving behind cripples, beggars, and the aged, who reach towards him with outstretched hands. The theme had gained extra poignancy at the time of the Black Death, when the plague struck most viciously at the young and healthy—and it is 'pestilence' that is Death's weapon in this story. At one level, the tale is giving verbal form to the pictorial allegory of death. The particular power associated with the old man, however, which has prompted so many attempts to explain him, comes in part at least from his most literal meaning. He is the truth of what the rioters are seeking: life without death. He is not immortal, but like the Wandering Jew or Swift's Struldbrugs, he is cursed with that most terrible of human myths, an infinitely prolonged old age. He has learnt that earthly treasure is valueless compared with a pauper's shroud; the rioters chase off after the gold and find in the gift of Fortune the death they had scorned. The rioters are 'exemplary' characters: the point of their appearance in a sermon is to warn the congregation off similar vices. They are accordingly never given individual names, and are often referred to by their degrees of sinfulness—'the proudeste', 'the worste'. The figure outside the Tale who most nearly resembles them is however the Pardoner himself. He too is on a quest for treasure, and the quest becomes explicit at the end of the tale, in his double appeal to his congregation and to his pilgrim audience. The Pardoner makes it quite clear why he has come on the pilgrimage: he has only one //entente//, of acquisition, and when he turns to the pilgrims he is aiming to put it into practice. Just as his spurious pardons are a corruption and perversion of penance, so the penitential aim of pilgrimage is corrupted to pecuniary ends. The morality of his tale is similarly perverted for his own unethical purposes. The rioters find Death at the end of their quest; the Pardoner finds a threat of castration—'Lat kutte hem of!' It is at this point, if anywhere, that the image of the Pardoner as spiritual eunuch is suggested: his Prologue and Tale have insistently deprived things of their potential spiritual meanings, and the Host's threat would show in physical form his lack of spiritual expression. All that happens is that the Pardoner's quest for income is guaranteed unfruitful, and he has to perform his one act of charity and reconciliation in the entire work, in exchanging a kiss with Harry Bailly. The two elder rioters had killed the third 'as in game'; the Knight turns aside the violence that threatens their own 'pleye'. That the Pardoner is so angry, however, adds the final sin of wrath to complete the list: pride, in his contempt for God and his fellow-men; gluttony, in his fondness for wine, and which he himself has associated with the Fall; lechery, in his boasting about wenches, and his other more doubtful sexual practices; envy, in backbiting and defamation; sloth, in his spiritual deadness; and above all, avarice—the sin that was seen as the most threatening of the later Middle Ages by many moralists, including the Parson, who repeats the Pardoner's own text: 'The roote of alle harmes is Coveitise'. There is one last irony in the tale, in Harry Bailly's outburst, > 'Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,

> And swere it were a relyk of a seint,

> Though it were with thy fundament depeint!' It is the last, and potentially most damaging, reduction of the spiritual to the earthly, for one of the most prized relics of the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury, to which the pilgrims are making their way, was the saint's filthy breeches, unchanged over the years as part of the process of his mortification of the flesh. A little over a century later another Catholic pilgrim, Erasmus, was appalled by both the unspirituality of the relics and the avarice of their custodians. Chaucer almost certainly knew Langland's valuing of spiritual pilgrimage, the search for truth in the heart, over geographical pilgrimage, and the thought was by no means original with England. Chaucer's Pardoner is a forerunner of the Reformation, not only as an instance of corruption within the Church and as a peddler of false pardons, but because he opens the way to questioning the connections between outward forms and spiritual meaning. He threatens the harmony of this pilgrimage: what he stands for will destroy the whole basis of pilgrimage, and any possibility of the harmony of a universal church.

//Source//: //Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales//. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): pp. 269–71.

 ==== Citation Information MLA Chicago Manual of Style ==== Cooper, Helen. "The Old Man in the Tale." //Bloom's Literature//. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 3 Dec. 2013 . [|How to Cite] http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&WID=17730&SID=5&iPin=BMPGC33&SingleRecord=True.
 * Record URL: **

The Philosophical Question of //The Canterbury Tales//
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: medium; text-align: left;"><span style="display: block; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">On //The Canterbury Tales// by Geoffrey Chaucer <span style="display: block; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Central to the //Canterbury Tales// is a larger aesthetic and philosophical question: Does human artistry impose an order on the world of experience, or does it expose a divinely created order already present within it? Tellers and tales, characters and claimants, often try to make sense of a seemingly disordered world. Forms of description, of narration, of analysis seek some way of controlling such a world—whether it be in the crazy logic of the scholars of the //Reeve's Tale//, the authoritarian despotism of the //Clerk's Tale's//Walter, the magic of the //Franklin's Tale//, or the alchemy of the //Canon's Yeoman's//. The //General Prologue//approaches the problem of organization—//ordinatio//, in the terms of late medieval bookmen—by ranging the order of the pilgrim portraits by estate: by the social class, moral condition, or profession.19 We move from the nobility and clergy through the various professions, down through the isolates (the Wife of Bath, a widow traveling alone), the figures of agricultural exchange, to the grotesques. The portrait of the Pardoner closes the string of personal descriptions: exiled to its ending, he remains the enigma that generations of readers have seen in him. But if the Pardoner is the last of the pilgrims to be described, it is the Reeve who is the last on the journey. "And evere he rood the hyndreste of oure route" (1.622). David Wallace explains: "It seems fitting, then, that a rural watchdog should ride with everyone before him as the pilgrimage moves away from the city and into the countryside."20 But no watchdog, rural or otherwise, can control the //Canterbury Tales//. The narrator and the Host, both of whom seek order in this welter of the classes, will be outmaneuvered by the Miller, who with his loud bagpipes, animalistic body, and wrestling skills can only barely be contained by social or by literary hierarchy. In keeping with the orderings of power, the Knight is the one who picks the short straw and tells the first tale. "Were it by aventure, or sort, or cas, / The sothe is this: the cut fil to the Knight" (1.844–45). Was it chance, or luck, or destiny? It was of course all three, combined with the literary control of Chaucer himself. The //Canterbury Tales// begins auspiciously, but we should not take its opening at face value. No sooner has it started, than its plan is interrupted, and the fabliau confusions of the Miller quickly displace the epic assurances of the Knight. In that move lies no mere comic relief but the overarching comic purpose of the //Canterbury Tales// as a whole: a set of literary responses, challenges to social orthodoxy that reveal the fundamental inability of anyone to impose order on the world. The Host had warned the pilgrims not to be "rebel to my juggement," (1.833) but that is precisely what ensues. Words lose their meanings or take unexpected resonances; sex rears its many heads; and money emerges as the marker of both social class and literary accomplishment. What is the price we pay for literature? The first string of tales asks and answers that question in ways that define not just the Canterbury project but an idea of literary history itself.
 * Author:** Seth Lerer
 * From:** //The Canterbury Tales//, Bloom's Guides.

[[image:http://www.fofweb.com/Lit/images/icon_citation.gif caption="Citation Information"]] Citation Information
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: medium; text-align: left;"><span style="display: block; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**Text Citation:** Lerer, Seth. "The Canterbury Tales." In //The Yale Companion to Chaucer//, 249–250, 290. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Quoted as "The Philosophical Question of //The Canterbury Tales//" in Bloom, Harold, ed. //The Canterbury Tales//, Bloom's Guides. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2008. //Bloom's Literature//. Facts On File, Inc. [] (accessed November 18, 2013).

<span style="color: #660000; display: block; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;"> How to Cite <span style="display: block; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;"> **Record URL:** <span style="color: #660000; display: block; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-decoration: none;"> http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=1&iPin=BGTCT040&SingleRecord=True.

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