Philosophical sleaze? The 'strok of thought' in the Miller's Tale and Chaucerian fabliau

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2007 by Alcuin Blamires

Did Chaucer drop his philosophical interests in writing fabliaux? Critics often deny them serious implication, yet these tales share with Troilus and the Knight's Tale a core structuring concept expressing Boethian ideas on chance and providence. The Miller's Tale draws on the representation of flood in the Roman de la Rose as a providentially ordained event which human astrological science vainly seeks to forecast. Chaucer's fabliaux give readers the sensation of embracing intricate configurations of events in one climactic 'strok of thought', like Providence in the Consolation of Philosophy. But the sensation is paradoxical: it reveals comical human short-sightedness.

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It will be the contention of this essay that contrary to general opinion, the fabliau narratives in The Canterbury Tales on which Chaucer lavished so much attention do not constitute a detour from the philosophical interests visible in the rest of his poetry. They do not necessitate, as the title of one well-known article on the Miller's Tale self-consciously proposes, an 'UnBoethian Interpretation' (1). Rather, there is a strong case for saying that the appeal of fabliau for Chaucer lay substantially in a philosophical dimension which he discovered in the structural logic of the genre. We may need to revise the common view that he cultivated fabliau in order to freewheel in a fictional world of 'harlotrie' and 'game', innocent of any philosophical concern whatever.

The ethos of Chaucer's fabliaux has never seemed easy to square with the fact that in his own time, and among his early successors, Chaucer had a reputation as a 'philosophical' poet. The most obvious sense in which that reputation would strike us as accurate derives from his translation of the early sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. (2) Nothing gets a text into the bloodstream as thickly as translating it. Chaucer returned again and again during his writing life (though not uncritically) to the formulations through which the Consolation sought to prove that the concept of an eternal all-seeing providence did not negate the freedom of human will and action; and that a putatively benign providence was not incompatible with the apparently perverse misfortunes of daily life. (3)

This was not, of course, an anachronistic or eccentric interest. As Jim Rhodes has reminded us, the 'fierce theological debates of the fourteenth century waged over the omnipotence of God and the contingency of the world' raised questions 'at all levels of society' concerning 'the freedom of human beings and their historical purpose in the scheme of salvation'. (4) A glimpse of a personal link with the professional hub of such debate is Chaucer's naming of Ralph Strode, Oxford philosopher and subsequently a London lawyer, as the joint dedicatee (alongside 'moral Gower') of Troilus and Criseyde (TC, v. 1856-7). (5) True, to be called a 'philosopher' at that time you did not need to be a Wittgenstein--it was enough to have a scholarly interest in knowledge, ideas, and moral questions. Moreover, we may suspect the effusion of rhetorical encomium in Thomas Hoccleve's tribute to Chaucer as' heir to Aristotle', or in Eustache Deschamps's balade hailing Chaucer 'O Socrates, full of philosophy'. (6) Chaucer certainly was not by our standards a systematic philosopher, in the sense of a dedicated logician. (7) His forte, as P. M. Kean observed, was generally 'to make structural use [...] of the ideas he takes from the philosophers, not to explore and develop their meaning for its own sake'. (8) As for the technical terms of philosophy, their chief function in his poetry was to be invoked self-consciously in non-scholastic contexts, with a wittiness designed to tickle the knowledgeable reader. (9) And yet, the large philosophical legacy of Boethius's Consolation did keep cropping up in his writing, as a repertoire of emotive questions uttered by confused humanity at moments of acute distress in the face of an often implacable world. (10)

That legacy is certainly articulated in the Knight's Tale, whose 'philosophical generality'--as Kolve puts it--permits the very largest questions to be posed: is humanity at all free, and is any purpose served by humanity's attempts to create order, in a universe governed by the planet-gods and Fortune? (11) But this stretching and decidedly philosophical romance is notoriously followed by the Miller's Tale, a piece of comic wizardry focused on the capacity of heedless youth, armed with cunning imagination, to inflict ingenious sexual and intellectual humiliation on the sentimentally incompetent, the middle-aged, the patriarchal. Illicit sex in the marital bed while the husband sleeps in the roof in a makeshift lifeboat readied for a new World Flood; an incompetent rival made to kiss the heroine's behind in the dark; an explosive fart in the pitch darkness that guides the rival's aim in a revengeful and quasi-sodomitic retaliatory attack; a flood of the imagination brought on by screams for 'water!'; and all this only in the first fabliau of several--small wonder that in modern Western culture, with its considerable relish for irreverence and its relaxation of sexual inhibitions, the stock of Chaucer's fabliaux has risen and the 'philosophical' identity of the poet has been eroded.