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

Style, Fall, 1997 by Scott Vaszily

For Pearcy, the most important feature of the old French fabliaux is that they are stories whose central events are misinterpretations of ambiguous signs by "dupes" who are unaware of their ambiguity. These misinterpretations are often, but not always, encouraged by "dupers" who are at least aware of the signs' ambiguity, and who may also be responsible for presenting the ambiguous signs to the dupes.

These misinterpretations always lead to reversals of fortune ("peripeties"),(2) with an improvement in the fortunes of any dupers, and a decline in the fortunes of the dupes. The dupes also come to realize the ambiguity of the signs (there is an "anagnorisis"). Finally, according to Pearcy, "audience sympathy in the fabliaux is always solicited for the duper figure . . . so that all fabliaux end 'happily,' and impart something of the comic enjoyment of witnessing the triumph over adversity of a favored, sympathetic figure" (362). Pearcy uses "sympathy" as a literary critical term of art here, to refer to the fabliau reader's tendency to evaluate events according to whether or not they favor the duper; however, "sympathy" in common usage also includes the idea of understanding of and pity for a person's positive misfortune, a response that the reader of a fabliau need not have toward the duper, although it may figure in the reader's readiness to assume the duper's interests as the main criteria for evaluating events. For example, the reader of the Miller's Tale is unlikely to feel "sympathy" in its ordinary sense for Nicholas, the duper figure in the tale's most developed fabliau episode. Nicholas becomes the dupe in the episode of the hot coulter, of course; "sympathy" in the ordinary sense would interfere with our enjoyment of this episode. And by this point a number of circumstances have made us less sympathetic - in both senses - to Nicholas and more sympathetic to Absolon: the success of Nicholas's duping of John; Absolon's misfortune as Alison's dupe; Absolon's new sober purposefulness in pursuing his revenge; and Nicholas's fall into foolish excess when he again attempts to prove his cleverness by topping Alison. We can avoid the unwanted affective connotations of "sympathy" by substituting a term coined by Chatman (190): the fabliau reader must be induced to evaluate events from the duper's "interest point of view." Thus, a number of the tale's features induce the reader of the Miller's Tale to adopt Nicholas's interest point of view: the positive aspects of Nicholas's characterization (his youth, learning, cleverness, and healthy, direct sexuality); his attractiveness in comparison to other characters (John is a senex amans, and Absolon is an exhibitionistic, narcissistic fool); his adherence to the values of cleverness and "hedonistic materialism;" which are normative in the tale and the genre; and Chaucer's narrative strategies (for example, the simple fact that Nicholas is the first character described at any length helps to establish his as the normative interest point of view).