Some critical remarks on the Parson’s Tale and the Retractions

The Parson's Tale seems a most inappropriate gloss for many of Chaucer's best poetic writings. It may be unexceptionable in its theological doctrine, but in literary terms it is ill-tempered, bad-mannered, pedantic, and joyless, and when it is used as a gloss to the other tales it distempers them, fills them with ill humour, coats them with dust, and deprives them of joy. I suspect that to reduce everything to the Parson's orthodox technicalities is to miss the point of poetry. Surely it would be more sensible and humane to use the rest of the tales as a gloss on the Parson's, counteracting its morbid negatives with a few of their healthy affirmatives. After all, what Chaucer was good at was not the formulation of doctrine on sin but the revelation of the marvellous variety of life in a world which, however sinful, is the only world we've got, and one that can mingle much delight with its inevitable corruption. The best medieval literature does not necessarily have anything to do with sin, and it does just what Chaucer does-offers joy to the reader. And that, despite the Parson, is no sin.

· E.T. Donaldson, “Medieval Poetry and Medieval Sin,” in Speaking of Chaucer (Norton, 1970), 173

The Parson's Tale is the last word of the Canterbury Tales; it is not the only word. Its timelessness, paradoxically, has stood the test of time worse than those distinctively fourteenth-century figures of the crusader Knight, the well-mannered Prioress, and the Pardoner of St Mary Rouncesval. Modern taste ranks the literary dazzle and the wit of the Nun's Priest above the scholastic moralizing of the Parson. To Chaucer, both were valid. We live in a world that allows for beast-fables and the Wife of Bath, but that has little time for saints' lives and penitential treatises. The narrowing is ours, not Chaucer's.

· Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: the Canterbury Tales, 407

This view, that Chaucer, at least from the moment he wrote the General Prologue, intended to close this poem with something like ‘The Parson's Tale,' will of course not please all readers. Quite apart from those who are unwilling to look at him as anything other than a cherished precursor of modern or post-modern sensibilities, some readers will find it stupid to think that such an intelligent, sensitive, sympathetic artist as Chaucer would "labor over fool's gold” and create characters and tales full of life, realism, and pleasing artistry, only to revoke them at the end. One could reply to this objection that perhaps, as he did in Troilus, Chaucer deliberately involves his readers (and even more his Narrator, of course) emotionally in the storytelling and in the world he creates in the tales, but that at the end of the poem he as deliberately leads them to a higher plane and thus effects in them a catharsis of mind and will. Fool' s gold is what looks like gold in the eyes of fools, and I would maintain that, for alert medieval readers or listeners, the poet embedded enough hints in the early parts of the work to remind them that there is a higher reality behind the phenomena that strike our senses. Isn't this artistic process and structural progression, which plays with the reader's sense of appearance and reality, just like what happens in Paradise Lost, where Satan with his gigantic sense of freedom and self-determination eventually turns into a snake with ashes in his mouth--even if some readers may continue to feel that he is the real hero of the poem?

· Siegfried Wenzel, “The Parson’s Tale in Current Literary Studies,” in Raybin and Holley, eds., Closure in the Canterbury Tales: The Role of the Parson’s Tale (Kalamazoo, 2000)

Second, and the source of the greatest controversy, is the thematic relation of the Parson's Tale to the rest of the Canterbury Tales. Among the many discussions of this issue one can distinguish four positions: (1) the moral absolutism of the Parson's Tale has been implicit throughout the tales, guiding our judgment as we read them and now receiving its full expression and authority; (2) the Parson's Tale provides a retrospective commentary on all that has gone before, and our understanding of the tales should now (but only now) be revised in the direction of its moral judgments; (3) the Parson's Tale is itself subject to the comic and dramatic norms that govern the rest of the Canterbury Tales and its absolutism is simply a last contribution to the multifarious voices of the Canterbury conversation; (4) in both style and substance the Parson's Tale is utterly foreign to the rest of the tales, its significance is primarily biographical, and as a conclusion to the tales it provides at best a pious gesture towards conventional standards of literary seemliness.

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It is necessary, then, that the Parson's Tale should provide not a fulfillment to the tales but an alternative, a complete and exclusive understanding of character, action, and even language. But in concluding we must return to the paradox in which the tale is grounded. If it cancels out rather than completes that which precedes, its position at once enforces and weakens its authority. His tale takes its origin in the very dramatic and realistic context which it will dismiss, and it is a denial of the tale-telling game that in the first instance quits the Manciple. In sum, while the Parson has the last word he must wait until last to say it, and although the transcendence of his message is never in doubt he must wait until the imperfect and even immoral expressions of merely verbal art have been passed in review. Chaucer and the pilgrims have it both ways, but this should lead us to question neither their nor Chaucer's sincerity. . . .Both the licentia and the medieval habit of the repentance of old age encourage us to see the Parson's Tale as another instance of literary penance. This is a penance that is neither perfunctory, as the care with which the tale is composed suggests, nor unexpected. Rather it is a part of the fitting shape of the Christian life, hardly a hypocritical volte-face but an inevitable and gratifying process of change and fulfillment. 'Young devil, old saint' runs one of the proverbs that express this conception, and its cynicism is tempered with a benign assurance that each man's history is concluded with a reversal that is both fulfillment and justification. It is in this radically linear awareness of the range of human action in its response to divine requirements that we should locate the paradox of a tale that can at once 'knytte up al this feeste, and make an ende.'

· Lee Patterson, “The ‘Parson’s Tale’ and the Qutting of the ‘Canterbury Tales’,” Traditio 34 (1978): 333, 379-80

In the disclaimers of The Canterbury Tales, the Decameron and the Roman de la Rose, we meet more than a good-humoured defense against a minority puritanism. We meet a genuine anxiety about the moral worth of fiction. It applies particularly to low fictions such as The Miller's Tale or The Merchant's Tale, less so to serious quasi-historical or philosophical works such as The Knight's Tale or The Clerk's Tale, not at all to serious Christian works like The Man of Law's Tale or The Second Nun's Tale. There is no difficulty in defending these as morally elevating or, at least, spiritually safe. The apology does not extend to fabliaux; yet writing fabliaux is a duty, as well as a pleasure, in any anthology that aims at literary inclusiveness and generic diversity. And part of the pleasure may stem from the writer's frisson of moral unease. Chaucer does not ignore this tension. He constructs from it the frame of his collection.

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The play that is narrative, and materialism - for materialism, like narrative, is a love of earthly things; and the penance that is perfect renunciation, death and the celestial Jerusalem; the way to Canterbury, and the highway to truth: these are the contradictory truths that exist, "like stages or stations of a journey," in the sequence of the frame and structure of The Canterbury Tales. Even for a Parson, sin has its compensation--redemption; and in fragment I as we have it, the sin and its retraction stand side by side just like the opposed values--fables and truth, play and penance--of the Canterbury pilgrimage. They stand side by side just as they do in The General Prologue, which announces and foreshadows the pattern of the whole. The matter can fairly be stated like this: the religious nature of pilgrimage is conspicuously begged in The General Prologue and cries out for a penitential correction. Since pilgrimage is connected with storytelling and begins the frame, there is nothing strange in the idea that penitential correction should end it.

· David Lawton, “Chaucer’s Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 26, 35-36

Chaucer's Retraction appears to be anything but a single and unified utterance. Rather, it breaks into two sets of assertions, assertions which are mutually exclusive. Chaucer's opening benediction of his art is totally subverted by his closing malediction of his art, and vice versa. His closing appeal to Christ, his mother, and all the saints to save him from the sins of his written poems is entirely at odds with his opening appeal to Christ and to the Bible as the author and authority of the Christian truth and goodness in and of his poetry. Chaucer's readers--humanist, exegete, or whatever--find themselves trapped willy-nilly in the middle of Chaucer's final, paradoxical assessment of his art. If the humanist has been wishing to suppress the Retraction as an unwanted supplement to the complete body of Chaucer's poetry, he ironically will find within that supplement a liberal aesthetic position that embraces, extends, and exaggerates his own. And the exegete, who has been suppressing in various ways the supplement, the sweet "solaas" of Chaucer's poetry, will find in the Retraction a blessing of that supplement taken from the very Scriptural authority which the exegete had himself been using to devalue secular writing.

On the other hand, the exegete will find in the Retraction an aesthetic position so conservative that it seems more a critical mockery than a sympathetic support of his own. And the humanist will of course find in the Retraction not only a position that so Scripturalizes all literature that his own aesthetic seems much too secular, but a counterposition that pretty much sends his aesthetic packing off in the direction of hell. No wonder the Retraction has been read uncarefully even by those who embrace it, for it is an embarrassment to all.

· Peter Travis, “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction,” Exemplaria 3 (1991): 146-47