The Canterbury Tales: Memory and Form
Author(s): Donald R. Howard
Reviewed work(s):
Source: ELH, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1971), pp. 319-328
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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e th
THE CANTERBURY
BY DONALD
VOL.
38,
SEPTEMBER,
TALES:
MEMORY
NO.
13971
AND FORM*
R. HOWARD
I
Memory is a major problem, possibly the central problem, in
reading The Canterbury Tales. As we come to each new tale we
must call to mind from the General Prologue the description of
the pilgrim telling it; if we do not, a whole level of meaning drops
away. If it is true that Chaucer read the work aloud at court,
his audience could not have kept their left index fingerstuck in
the General Prologue, as we do, at the beginning of each tale.
They would have had to remember each pilgrim. And maybe
they did; they had more practiced memories than we, and might
well have been able to keep in mind twenty-odd characters after
a single reading of a serial description.
Hence it is pertinent to ask how the narrator, who spent the
better part of a week in their company, remembers the pilgrims.
He seems to visualize them as he firstsaw them at the inn; but
as he proceeds he includes details about their appearance on the
road and even details about their private lives at home-all the
matter of hearsay and surmise which a returned traveller might
have amassed or imagined. He even knows the secret thoughts
of the Pardoner and the Monk. If we ask " where we are " in the
General Prologue, the answer must be not in the inn, and not
on the road, but in the realm of memory, of story, of empathy,
* This paper,in a different
form,was presentedbeforethe Chaucermeetingat the
Modem Language Associationin Decemberof 1970.
Donald R. Howard
319
even of fantasy. We pass throughthe looking-glassof the
worldof the pilgrimage;
narrator'smindinto the remembered
and
worldsof the variouspilgrims;
fromit intothe remembered
worldsof their
even intothe remembered
fromthesesometimes
world
characters.This controlledlapse fromone remembered
successive
by
regression
this
into anotherremembered
world,
stepsinto the past and the unreal,is the essentialprincipleof
formin The Canterbury
Tales.
himselfas
Chaucerintroducesthis principleby representing
he could
that
well
so
a naive pilgrimwho listenedto the tales
writethem down verbatimand not "feyne thyng,or fynde
a modelofatteilwordesnewe."1 In thisguisehe makeshimself
tion, empathy,the suspensionof disbelief,and the abilityto
rememberwhat one hears. The storieshe retellsexist in his
memory.Simpleand naturalas thisseemsto us,whoreadnovels,
it was not at all theusual thingfora medievalworkto takethe
formof an imaginedfeatof memoryand to have as the subject
of that memoryan imaginedexperienceof the author'sown.
and
Wheredo we findthisin medievalliterature?St. Augustine
Gower
way.
in a factual,autobiographical
Boethiususedmemory
" I " of medievalcomplaint;Boccaccioand
used the impersonal
in the thirdperson.We do get
to themselves
Sercambireferred
experiencein
accountof a remembered
a fictionalfirst-person
Dante, and a rathermoremundaneone in Mandeville'sTravels,
The otherpossiand thesemayhave beenChaucer'sinspiration.
bility-andthiswillnotbe newsto anyone-is thedream-vision.
in Chaucer'stime,but
It was the fashionable
premiseof fictions
it downwereusuallytaken
the dreamand writing
remembering
for granted.When Chaucerended The Book of the Duchess
the dreamin verse,
to the act of writing
reference
witha specific
unusual,and evenherehe madenothing
he was doingsomething
of memoryas the step betweendreamingand writing: the
dreamerhears a clock striketwelve,wakes,findsthe book he
had beenreadingwhenhe droppedoff,and says,
1 I. 736. Quotations from The Worksof Geoffrey
Chaucer,ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd
ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1957). That the narrator serves as a kind of opinionleader or model to the reader is implied by E. Talbot Donaldson, " Chaucer the
Pilgrim," PMLA, 69 (1954), rpt. in Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970),
especially pp. 9-12, and by Morton W. Bloomfield, " Distance and Predestination in
Troilus and Criseyde," rpt. in Essays and Exploratioms (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1970), pp. 201-216. I have applied the notion to the Troilus in
The Three Temptations:Medieval Man in Search of the World (Princeton,N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 113-114.
3920
Tales": Memoryand Form
" The Canterbury
Thoughte I, " Thys ys so queynt a sweven
That I wol be processeof tyme,
Fonde to put this sweven in ryme
As I kan best, and that anoon."
This was my sweven; now hit ys doon.
Like the narrator of The Book of the Duchess, the narrator of
The Canterbury Tales remembers a past experience- from the
real world rather than fromdreams-and tells it as it comes into
mind.
II
If the form of The Canterbury Tales is based on this primary
fiction of a remembered personal experience, we shall have to
ask how things do come to mind. The physiology of memory is
no doubt basically the same in each individual, but the character
of memory varies with our notions of what memory is and does.
Because Freud or Wordsworth placed more importance on childhood memories, they likely had more of them-though Wordsworth seems to have selected rather differentaspects of the
childhood state than Freud. Our preconceptions about history,
or causality, or human nature affectthe selection, association, and
structuringof memory; what we expect the memory to do influences what it really does. So if The Canterbury Tales is a fictional
feat of memory, we have to ask whether memory itself did not
have a differentcharacter in the fourteenth century from what
it has now.
As with most other things,the medievals had two contradictory
notions of memory and believed in both. In medieval " faculty
psychology," memory played a minor role. It was one of the five
"inner senses," higher than the vegetative powers but lower
than the locomotive and the intellectual. It was made up of
phantasms, images bound to the particularities of the sensible
world. That memory contained all experience, a fact St. Augustine marvelled at, did not raise its status much, for Augustine
was arguing, after all, that we must seek God beyond memory or
through the total experience of memory, but not in particular
memories.2 When Chaucer the pilgrim claims, to remember the
2
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica,Pt. I, q. 78, especially art. 4; St. Augustine,
Confessions, Bk. X, secs. 8-26. On Augustine's rejection of platonic innatism and
his transformationof Plato's idea that the mind remembers truth and thereforeGod,
see Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch
(New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 64-65, 74-76, 82, 100-105, 5!19-V23.
Donald R. Howard
321
boasting
he is not therefore
of a past experience
particularities
of mentalpowerswhichwereadmiredor thoughtreliable.He is
of the temporalor secular
limitinghis scope to the experience
world.
But whilethe medievalsput a low value on memorywhen
theysaw it as a facultyof the soul,theyvalued it highlyas a
necessityof everydaylife. St. Augustine,with his customary
calledit the " stomachof the mind." Fromthis
verbalfelicity,
whichhad
as a storehouse
practicalview,theyimaginedmemory
to be suppliedwithshelves,so to speak,and keptin order.One
always supposedmen had bettermemoriesbeforecheap paper
and printedbooksmade such a clutterin our heads,but until
Frances Yates publishedher remarkablestudy The Art of
Memory3 most of us did not fullyrealizehow medievalmen
trainedtheirmemories.The memorysystemsof the ancient
world,Miss Yates shows,survivedintothe Middle Ages; there
is even a short treatiseDe arte memorativaattributedto
And it is reasonChaucer'scontemporary
BishopBradwardine.4
able that Chaucerin his careeras a public servant,would,as
the Man of Law did, have cultivateda good memory.This
" or cultivated
of order
memoryworkedon principles
" artificial
and association.It was by naturespatialand visual. It required,
mental
of "places "-a remembered
first,a mentalframework
pictureofsomeactualbuildingor interior.To thismentalpicture
one associatedmnemonicimagesor sometimeswords,mentally
" placing" one upon a column,anotheron an altar,anotherin
an alcove,and so on. This habit of mindis a startlingdifferencebetweenourmedievalancestors
and ourselves:we memorize
a fewthings(likeutor,fruor,
fungor,potior,and vescor) almost
in
lists
and
with
words-otherwise
thememory
ofmodern
always
rabbit'swarrenmade fromslipsof paper.
man is an intellectual
storehouses
of visual
But themedievalsmade of theirmemories
"
and conimages,disposeduponstructuredplaces,"symmetrical
crete.And thiswas one way theygave formto theirexperience
oftheworld.
The GeneralPrologueis structuredon such principlesof
memory.The charactersare arrangedin associationseasiestto
ofclass,alliance,and dependency
endemic
associations
remember,
to medievalsociety.First,theyare arrangedaccordingto the
' Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, especially pp. 50-104.
p. 105.
4Yates,
" The CanterburyTales ": Memoryand Form
(Knight
oftheThreeEstates. Thereis thearistocracy
conception
and Squire, with theirYeoman); then the clergy (the Prioress
and her entourage,the Monk, and the Friar); all the rest,from
the Merchanton, belongto the " commons,"exceptforthe Clerk
and Parson whom I shall mentionin a moment,and except for
the Summonerand Pardoner,two classless pariahs who are put
at the end.5 This perfectlynatural order is then subdividedChaucer might well have had in mind Geoffreyof Vinsauf's
advice, that one should divide a thing to be rememberedinto
small parts. He arrangesthe pilgrimsin associationsso natural
that because of them the people themselvesin such relationships
would have falleninto groupsin the inn or on the road, and we
are told they did so. There is the Knight, his son, and their
yeoman; the Prioress,her companionand " preestesthree"; the
Man of Law and the Franklyn; the five guildsmenand their
cook; the Parson and his brotherthe Plowman; the Summoner
and Pardoner. Call to mind any of these and theircompanions
come to mind automatically. Others are described together,
thoughwe are not told they travelledtogether: the Monk and
Friar (two kinds of religious); the Shipman,Physician,and Wife
(threebourgeois); the Miller,Manciple, and Reve (threesmallfryfunctionaries).
The well-known"idealized" portraitsseem throwninto this
orderat random. Three of them (Knight,Parson, and Plowman)
correspondto the Three Estates. I findit hard not to see the
portraitof the Clerk as idealized, and perhaps he representsa
style of life which Chaucer consideredseparate fromthe usual
three. But the Clerk comes forno apparent reason betweenthe
Merchantand the Man of Law, the Parson and Plowman forno
apparent reason betweenthe Wife and Miller. I should like to
offera possible explanationof this seeminglyhaphazard arrangement. If you take the descriptionof the Prioressand herfollowers
' Cf. the divisionsand subdivisionssuggestedby Kemp Malone, Chapterson Chaucer
(Baltimore: JohnsHopkinsPress,1951), pp. 149-157,and by PhyllisHodgsonin her
edition of the General Prologue (London: Athlone Press, 1969), pp. 31-34. The
Three Estates was by Chaucer's time an old idea which did not describethe social
structureof his day; on the gradationsof fourteenth-century
societyand its lack of
classes in the modem sense,see the speculationsof D. W. Robertson,Jr.. Chaucer's
London (New York: JohnWiley & Sons, 1968), pp. 4-11. What I suggesthereabout
the arrangementof portraitsis not necessarilyinconsistentwith the theoryof a
rankingbased upon an analysisof the originsof income" advanced
" socio-economic
by Ruth Nevo, " Chaucer: Motive and Mask in the 'General Prologue,'" MLR, 58
(1963), 1-9.
Donald R. Howard
and thatof the Guildsmenand theircook as singledescriptions
(whichtheyare), and if you countthe description
of the Host,
the portraitsof the GeneralProloguecan thenbe seen arranged
symmetrically
into threegroupsof seven,each headed by an
idealportrait:
Knight:
Clerk:
Squire,Yeoman,Prioress,
Monk,Friar,Merchant
Man of Law, Franklyn,Guildsmen,Shipman,
Physician,
Wife
Parson& Plowman:Miller,Manciple,Reve,Summoner,
Host
Pardoner,
AlthoughI do not mean to suggestthat thisarrangement
is like
statuesin nichesor an allegoricalpainting,I do thinkit interesting that the " images" in artificalmemorywere emblematicor
symbolical,that is, weremeant to call abstractionsto mind. To
the medievals, as Frances Yates points out, memory'shighest
functionwas to remembermoralprecepts. Miss Yates thinksthe
carvings inside Gothic cathedrals were mnemonic,6but surely
that is a matterof degree;theywere still carvings. Anyway,the
" ideal." portraitsundeniablyhave an emblematicquality, and
the otherportraits,forall theirwarts and red stockings-which
make them memorable-suggest,in the old phrase, " types of
society." Yet one of the principlesof artificialmemorywas that
one rememberedbest the image which startled one's feelings.
Hence the mixtureof particularitiesand abstractionswhich we
admire in the General Prologue was itself a phase of artificial
memory;as Geoffreyof Vinsauf said, "enjoyment alone makes
the powerof memorystrong."' Then, too, the symmetryof -the
arrangementis characteristically
medieval; some might suspect
numericalcompositionor numbersymbolismclickingaway in the
background,but I will let this be counted up on fingersother
at proportionableness
than my own. Such efforts
werea habit of
mind in the Middle Ages, and the ordered" places " of artificial
memorygave powerfulsupportto such a habit if they did not
create it. I should guess that Chaucer apportionedthe ideal
portraitsin this architectonicway more by habit than design;
howeverhe did it, the resultin the GeneralPrologue is an arbitrary shape or placement which resemblesthe artificialorder
imposedon wordsand images as an aid to memory.
Yates, pp. 50-57, 79-81.
PSetria Nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967), V.92020 (p. 89).
6
324
" The Canterbury Tales ": Memory and Form
III
If thesesuggestions
have any validity,thenwe have to see the
GeneralProloguein an unaccustomedway. It is not just the
of the work,but its heartor backbone. It is not a
beginning
portrait-gallery
orcross-section,
buta calculatedpieceofthematic
writing
whichevokesat thebeginning
oftheworktheexperience
of beingalive in the author'sworld.If in the GeneralPrologue
specimensdescribedseriatimwereall he wanted,Chaucerwould
have been well advisedto parcel out the portraitsamongthe
a
tales. But that is not whathe was after.He was describing
groupof personagesand theirrelationships.
As an aid to the
reader'smemoryof this group,the GeneralPrologueis like a
vade mecumwhichwe mustcarrywithus as we proceedintothe
tales. It informs
the whole;it centersattentionuponthe artistnarrator'sconsciousnessas essentialto the conceptionof the
whole,and makesus awarethatin consciousness
thingsrememberedare by naturethingsofthisworld.
what gives unityto the
The GeneralPrologueis therefore
his work this way Chaucer followed
whole. In constructing
ofVinsauf'sadviceperfectly:" Let the mind'sinterior
Geoffrey
"firstcirclethe wholeextentof the
compass,"said Geoffrey,
material."8 Criticshave worried
endlesslyabouttheorderofthe
Most Chaucercrititales,and about the work'sincompleteness.
cism assumesthat moretales were to be added and a return
journeysupplied;hence a fair amountof that criticismdeals
withwhat Chaucerdid not writeratherthan what he wrote.
Yet the work,as I have describedit, is such that it mightbe
added to or subtractedfromand neverlose the principles
of its
General
introduces.
It
is
the
which
true
unity
Prologue
that
thereare groupsof linkedtales: the sequenceKnight-MillerReve-Cook,the" marriage
group,"and thetalesofFragrment
VIt
(ShipmanthroughNun's Priest). It is true,too, thatthereare
unlinkedtales: theMan ofLaw's, thesecondNun's and Canon's
Yeoman's,theManciple's,and thePhysician-Pardoner
fragment.
we
could
the
work
the
order
in
of these
But reading
transpose
linkedor unlinkedsegments-could"Turne over the leef and
cheseanothertale"-without losingthegreaterunitywhichthe
of the
GeneralPrologueimposes. Indeed the incompleteness
81A 55 (p. 17).
Donald R. Howard
in partthe
ofits orderreflect
workand the apparentrandomness
ofmoral
it. Anditsinclusion
as we experience
qualityofmemory
themedievalnotionofmemory's
talesand moralpreceptsreflects
highestfunction.
Tales hangs
The problemoforderand unityin The Canterbury
notionsabout the kindofworkit is. We see
uponouringrained
musthave done,against
it in a literaryway as Chaucerhimself
the literarybackgroundof its time,withliterarydevicesand
in our minds. We take as its analogues
literaryart foremost
similarcollections-theDecameron,Sercambi'sNovelle,Gower's
the Roman de la Rose. And one conclusionwe come
Confessio,
to is that, against these literaryanalogues,its most original
featureis its setting,a pilgrimageto Canterbury.9But if we see
the work as a rememberedaccount of a pilgrimage,its true
analogues are accounts of pilgrimages.There were many prose
accountswrittenin the late Middle Ages about the pilgrimageto
plus a very popular fictionalaccount, Mandeville's
Jerusalem,10
Travels,"-and a poetical (and allegorical) one, the Pelerinagede
la vie humaine. Such analogues generallyhave a first-person
and somenarrator,oftendescribethe author's fellow-travellers,
timesmentionquarrels among the pilgrims.They never include
suppliedby otherswhichthe
tales, but oftenincludeinformation
authorreportswith detachment.It is pertinentto the study of
The CanterburyTales that such accountsdo not ever describethe
'Robert A. Pratt and Karl Young, "The LiteraryFrameworkof the Canterbury
Tales," in Sourcesand Analoguesof Chaucer'sCanterburyTales, ed. W. F. Bryan and
GermaineDempster (1941; rpt. New York: The HumanitiesPress, 1958), pp. 1-33.
Pratt and Young, reportthat Sercambiused a
Most writerson the subject,following
pilgrimageas a settingforhis Novelle; but the journeyis never so called and does
not resemblea pilgrimagein any ordinarysense. It is a trip,as in the Decameron,to
escape the plague.
to this vast topic,see Travel and Travellersof the Middle
10 For an introduction
Ages,ed. ArthurPercivalNewton (New York: Knopf,1926), especiallypp. 159-194.
BibliothecaGeographicaPalaestinae,rev.David H. K. Amiran(Jerusalem:
R. RiWhricht,
of such accountsfrom
UniversitasBooksellers,1963) is a chronological
bibliography
a. d. 333. Some of the major narrationsmay be read in Peregrinatores
medji aevi
quatuor,ed. J. C. M. Laurent (Lipsiae, 1864); Early Travelsin Palestine,ed. Thomas
Wright(London, 1848); and The Libraryof the PalestinePilgrimsText Society,14
vols. (London,1887-97).
" On Mandeville'sbook as a fiction,
see JosephineWatersBennett,The Rediscovery
of Sir JohnMandeville (New York: The Modern Language Associationof America,
1954), pp. 1-86; on Chaucer'sknowledgeof the Travels,pp. 224-227. See also Donald
R. Howard," The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels," The Yearbookof EnglishStudies,
1 (1971), 1-17.
326
" The CanterburyTales ": Memoryand Form
returnjourney.They scarcelyevermentionit exceptin a per-
functoryway; the first treatment of the return journey that I
have found is in the account of Felix Fabri (1484). Against these
analogues, the two most original features of The Canterbury
Tales are these: that the author describes the pilgrims firstin a
group, and that the pilgrims tell tales.
We are likewise encumbered by ingrained notions about the
style of The Canterbury Tales. When people talk about its style
they always talk about combinations of pre-existing styles-of
the high and low, the French and Italian, the conventional and
natural. But if you take style in its broadest sense to mean the
full range of effectsand qualities which characterize a work, and
which thereforereflecta style of life or of civilization, " unity "
is as much a matter of style as of formor structure. The informing vision of the work, the idea of the work in the author's
consciousness, is what gives the work its style, its form,and so its
unity. And it is a unique feature of The Canterbury Tales that
its prologue reveals and imposes these principles of unity. The
General Prologue seems to have a random lack of organization,
but is artfully structured to reveal a typifyinggroup; the tales
seem to follow spontaneously, but many are artfullyordered into
thematic or dramatic clusters. The General Prologue includes
ideal figuresat fixedthough seeminglyrandom intervals; the tales
include ideal narratives-the tales of Constance, Griselda,Virginia,
Cecilia-dispersed among the tales or clusters of tales. In the
General Prologue, the Host dominates the group and is the leader;
in the tales he directs their order when he can. In the General
Prologue we get elements of class-conflict,conflictof interest,and
temperamental difference;in the tales these produce moments of
competition and aggression which account for the order of most
other tales. In the General Prologue, the very firstthing mentioned afterthe season is the pilgrimage to Jerusalem,in the allusion to " palmeres" and " straunge strondes"; in the Parson's
Prologue we are reminded of the glorious pilgrimageto Jerusalem
celestial.
In the same way, the narrator's feat of memory,announced and
begun in the General Prologue, opens to us in the tales a world of
rememberedfictions. The world of his memorycomes in the tales
to be the irrepressibleworld of story, passed by books or traditions to the pilgrims,by them to the author-narrator,and by him
to us. The quality of inner,rememberedexperience which we get
Donald R. Howard
3927
was inin the GeneralPrologue,J. V. Cunningham
has shown,"2
heritedfromthe dream-vision.
But in it memoryreplacesdream
of a
as theprincipleof form: thereis no longerthe possibility
revelation,
a somniumcoeleste,formemoryis tiedto experience
and the truthofmemoryis to be selected,not revealed.Hence
in theGeneralProloguethereis a pervasivesenseofobsolescence,
the passingof experience
intomemory.Old ideals,institutions,
the Christiancommonand customs-knighthood,
monasticism,
wealthwhichmade parsonand plowmanbrothers-areseen in
or to be forgotten.
The Knightis a
decline,as thingsforgotten
veteranof assortedpast campaigns,his son of a fewrecentand
questionableones. The Wife,dressedup in outmodedfashions,
is obsessedwithher own past and withideals (and books) of
long ago. The Prioresswears a medallionof some forgotten
occasion,theMonklets" oldethynges
pace." The narrator
brings
the pilgrimsinto the presentthroughmemory,and the Host
invitesthemto tell " Of aventuresthat whilomhan bifalle"; in
fromthepast,recaptures
somepartof
theirtaleseach,recaptured
notableto thepointof exaggeration
thepast. Literarytradition,
in the openinglinesof the GeneralPrologue,thusbecomesthe
substanceof the work: thingsremembered,
knownto the mind
and spirit,and preservedin language,are the worldof The
Tales-a worldmorereal,morearticulateand more
Canterbury
perdurablethanthe day-to-dayworld,the pilgrimage
of human
life,whichpurportsto be its subject. Yet at the end we get a
prose meditationabout the way to deal withthat day-to-day
in whichthe authorrejects
world,and afterit a tersestatement
that world,and withit his booksabout thatworld,and " many
anotherbook,if theywerein myremembrance,"
to embracethe
worldhe believedexistedbeyondmemory.
The JohnsHopkins University
12 "
Conventionas Structure:The Prologueto the CanterburyTales," in Tradition
and Poetic Structure(Denver: Alan Swallow,1960), pp. 59-75.
328
" The CanterburyTales ": Memoryand Form