Fabliau plotting against romance in Chaucer's 'The Knight's Tale.' - Geoffrey Chaucer

Style, Fall, 1997 by Scott Vaszily

I

Critics have often discussed the significance of the elements of courtly romance in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, Miller's Tale, and Merchant's Tale.(1) There has been little interest, however, in the converse relationship, the significance of fabliau elements in Chaucer's writing in other genres. Charles Muscatine, noting that "the bare mechanics of the bringing of Troilus to Criseyde could be constructed from just two fabliaux" (Chaucer 140), asserts that "[r]omance and fabliau must . . . have contributed to details of Pandarus' activity . . ." (141). Donald R. Howard observes that the Pardoner's exemplum "is a fabliau situation in which all three tricksters are tricked by language and Fortune, by each other, and by themselves" (Idea 362). And Nancy H. Owen observes that the Pardoner "becomes the victim of a sexual and scatological jest played on him by . . . the Host" (547), and that, like the victims in Chaucer's fabliaux, the Pardoner is unattractive and is "reduced to a kind of enforced speechlessness" by the jest (548-49); Owen thus refers to the tale's "fabliau framework" (549). Such scattered remarks are typical; as far as I know, nobody has discussed fabliau elements in Chaucer's non-fabliau texts at any length.

Even Peggy Knapp, whose reading of the Canterbury Tales focuses on the "contest" among social and generic "discourses" both among and within the individual tales, does not mention fabliau among the genres - epic, romance, "aristocratic chronicle," and Boethian consolatio - she sees contesting the generic space of the Knight's Tale (28-31). Although the ideologies associated with these genres are not completely consonant with one another - if they were, they could not embody Knapp's "social contest" - they are all mainly conservative, supporting existing power structures; in Knapp's reading, what "revolutionary" implications (31) the Knight's Tale has are made possible by the tale's "instances of local detail and homely colloquialism" (20) - departures from the elevated style appropriate to "authoritative" genres. Knapp ingeniously reads these departures in the traditional "dramatic" mode of criticism of the Tales: the departures are "a rhetorical ploy" on the part of the narrator, the Knight, an "effort to connect his authoritative account of noble life with the ordinary life of his fellow pilgrims . . ." (20). Any "revolutionary" effect the tale has is thus an unintended by-product of the Knight's ploy. I wish here to propose an idea that may be more in keeping with Knapp's own general critical orientation, which she says derives from Bakhtin and Foucault (2-6): that fabliau too participates in the generic contest in the Knight's Tale, contributing to the tale's "revolutionary" implications.

Perhaps one reason that critics have overlooked such a reading has been the difficulty of seeing how non-fabliau texts might "allude" to fabliau, how they might evoke the complex of ideas and expectations usually associated with fabliau. To allude to fabliau in mainly non-fabliau texts would require features that could have functioned as clear generic signals of fabliau. Courtly romance abounds in such distinctive features, from the level of diction up to that of theme. E. Talbot Donaldson's discussion of the word "hende" in the Miller's Tale shows how a single word can serve as a generic signal of courtly romance in a fabliau ("Idiom" 16ff.). And even if the Miller's Tale were not juxtaposed with and dramatically related to the Knight's Tale, a reader with minimal familiarity with courtly love poetry would recognize conventions of that genre when Nicholas protests that he will "spille "of deerne love" if Alison does not grant him her "love" (3277-81). Other easily recognizable generic features of courtly romance that figure in Chaucer's fabliaux include the formal effictio, which is the background against which we must read the descriptions of Malyne in the Reeve's Tale (Rowland 210) and of the main characters in the Miller's Tale, and the aubade, which is parodied in both the Reeve's Tale and the Merchant's Tale.

It is harder to identify equally clear generic signals of fabliau. Joseph Bedier defined fabliaux as "des contes a rire en vers" (39) - funny short tales in verse. While humor, concision, and verse may together distinguish fabliau from other medieval genres, they are insufficiently distinctive features to be used separately to allude to fabliau in non-fabliau contexts: exempla, for example, were also short tales, and, as Knud Togeby points out, almost all twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature was in verse (7). In The Old French Fabliaux, Muscatine at first suggests that, in keeping with Bedier's identification of fabliaux as short tales, concern with "plot" is a regular feature of the fabliau - then shows that a number of fabliaux handle plot clumsily or completely neglect it (47-55). Perhaps Muscatine's evidence does not so much establish that plot was an unimportant feature of fabliau as that it was badly handled in specific cases. But even granting that careful plotting was characteristic of fabliau, that feature does not distinguish fabliau from many other medieval genres; the tight construction of Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, certainly does not function as an allusion to fabliau. If fabliau is to be defined in terms of plot structure, the definition must be more specific.