Part
3. Male Characters
The Miller’s Tale opens with the introduction of the four main characters, the fictional situation,
and the key themes. Thus we find that a
rich carpenter in the city of Oxford has a student boarder in his house. This student or clerk, Hende Nicholas, seeks
to cuckold the old man by sleeping with the young wife, Alisoun. Another young man in the neighbourhood, the
parish priest, Absolon, also has sexual desires for the attractive and lively
eighteen-year-old wife. Thus there are
three men each seeking to possess one woman, forming three very different
pairs, with each of the men playing their roles against each other, and Alisoun
enjoying her controlling position in the middle of these games: the old
husband, jealous of all young men, anxious to keep his woman to himself, and
Nicholas, on the inside of the house, and Absolon, on the out-side, rivals for
her affections though essentially unaware of the other’s attentions.
This pair of young men and their rivalry
extends the usual jealous trio of the traditional fabliau situation. In other words, there are the following type
characters:
Ø
the senex, the old jealous husband foolish
enough to marry a young wife whose sexual appetite he is incapable of
satisfying;
Ø
the mal mariée, the frisky young woman
mismatched to the important old man and seeking physical play outside the
marriage bonds; and then a pair of young clerks who wish both to sleep with the
sexually active bride and to enjoy the pleasure of tricking the bourgeois husband.
The doubling of the young men also is a carry-over from the rivalry
between the two young lovers in the Knight’s
Tale. But more than that, there is a
structural problem always with doubling, insofar as you never know for sure if
you have two characters who are similar, one person who has been split in two,
or very separate persons who merely seem to be alike but really aren’t. In another sense, when you think about it in
a Jewish way, you can call up the way the Hebrew Bible treats Cain and Able, Aaron
and Moses, but above all Jacob and Ishmael. Because the two young knights in
the Knight’s Tale are a pair of
rivals and don’t quite match the rivals in the Miller’s fabliau—there are, in fact, three of them: one old, one young, and
another young man who is foolishly like both—belong to different storytellers
who tell different kinds of tales, the whole business becomes wildly and
eccentrically complicated.
In order to complicate matters still further, Chaucer has the Miller
tell a tale in which the climax of the jocular narrative weaves together a
number of highly resonant image-clusters or conceits. They belong as much to the Scriptural texts
which are the subject of much exegetical
discussion as to the tradition of the Romance
of the Rose, whose two parts—Guillaume de Lorris’s shorter, romantic
allegory of erotic love, and Jean de Meung’s continuation, much longer and
forever expanding into a vast satura
of mismatched tones, sub-genres, characters and situations. So what is a satura and how can we fit it into rabbinical concepts?
Satura, which yields eventually the term satire, is often described as a
hodgepodge, a farrago, a mishmash; or rather, as a supersaturated work that
boils over from its pot, or like a sausage sizzles until it breaks out of its
skin, it is a work of literature that seems to reverse the process of evolution
or orderly arrangement of the world through a return to primal chaos—an
un-creating of the world as we know it.
In literature, examples such as Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,
Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy tend to alternate
strong satiric components with sheer carnival-like topsy-turvy fun, always
spilling out of all established intellectual and scientific categories,
upsetting generic conventions at the same time as it recalls the rartonal,
commonsense world of ordinary experience.
This is certainly a characteristic of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, both
as a whole series of tales that try and try again to develop in an orderly
progress and then come crashing into one another, leaving the whole as a series
of incomplete narrative units and fragmentary arguments.
Seen from a Jewish point of view, however, the bubbling caldron and the
exploding structures have other meanings and implications than those implied by
classical rules of rhetoric or Christian-romance notions of decorum and
hierarchy. On the one hand, there is the
allusion to the heart of European Jewish kabbalah, in the sense later more
fully developed by Isaac Luria in terms of tsimtsum
(the condensation of time, spade and en ergies to allow for the emergence
of a divine creation), then the
fracturing of the primeval containers of the sacred forces, the breaking of the
vessels, the scattering of the sparks, and then the slow and seemingly endless
task of gathering up the fragments, most of the remaining sparks hidden within
historical time on the sitra acha,
the other side, in what seem like dark corners of evil and uncontrolled spaces
of passion.
On the other hand, as hostile or ignorant critics of Talmudic logic
complain, rabbinical argument, both in terms of halachah and aggadah,
seems to lack orderly logical procedures and this expand into all sorts of
irrelevancies, fantasies and banal non-sequiturs. By demanding, too, that what such texts do
should either cohere to the rules of logic, the models of narrative
development, and other academic principles or designate themselves as merely
illusions, delusions and vertiginous play, they overlook the essential wit and
dynamic of rabbinic thought. The created
world, based on the primacy of language and the justice guaranteed and embodied
by such divine names, can exist only insofar as it always testing, teasing, extending and
confirming its reality through such games.
To take it all too literally and to demand of it a confining human
dimension is to negate its eternal mystery.
The most important things in history and private experience cannot be
limited to predictive law and dogmatic interpretations.
Thus, once we understand these cross-cultural complications of a
seething mass of textual energies playfully running against its own apparently
contradictory elements—the explicitly classical and implied Christian order of
the Knight’s Tale in confrontation
with the rough-house bawdy and blasphemous jocularity of the Miller’s Tale, for instance, we can to go back and see how each of the
characters in the fiction is described by the Miller, what themes and images
are associated with their characters, and how they interact with one another.
The old man, senex, is a
carpenter, and this occupation puts him into a typological series that includes
Noah the builder of the Ark and Joseph the husband of Mary the mother of Jesus
Christ. Nor should we forget that Jesus
too is a carpenter by trade, and this serves as an emblem of both his humility
as God among ordinary men, and as a figure of the artifex, the Creator of the World.
The odd thing is that the teller of the tale, the Miller seems to know
the biblical stories and their interpretation neither from direct reading of
Scriptures himself—there is no evidence that he is literate—or from listening
to sermons in church. Rather he knows
what he knows through watching and perhaps even participating in Corpus Christi
pageants. These urban dramas were only
partly supervised by ecclesiastical officials. They were productions mounted by city
corporations, each dramatic unit under the direction of one or more guilds; it
was the masters and parish committees who arranged for scribes to compose or to
up-date the plays, organize the construction and maintenance of the movable
stage-wagons, supervise the players, and negotiate with the other guilds to
give some coherence to the festive games.
In the years following the expulsion of Jews in the 1290s, it is likely
that some Jews who had been musicians, dance-masters and teachers became
associated with these Corpus Christi pageants (called for by Lateran Councils
at about the same time, in order to ensure a separate celebration of the newly
proclaimed doctrine of the Real Presence, distinct from the Easter celebrations
of the Passion and Resurrection, as a way of circumventing clerical ignorance
and resistance to the concept of Transubstantiation), religious—but not
ecclesiastical—performances. They would
do this covertly through former connections to craft and merchant guilds and the newly
formed Preaching Orders of Friars (inside of which, we now know, Jews sometimes
entered as a kind of half-way house to deep conversion, being able to operate outside
of the strict regulations of monasteries and so maintain a secret inner life).[i]
Noah is important, too, because in the English mystery plays he was a
drunken fool, who could not control his own wife, and in both ways prefigured
in a very imperfect manner the character of Saint Joseph. Though he foreshadowed Christ the builder of
the Church wherein humanity may be saved from the deluge of sinfulness and thus
find salvation through the waters of baptism, Noah reveals the weaknesses and
ignorance of people who lived before the revelation of Christ. Saint Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary,
is an old man in the mystery cycles who seems a fool because he marries a young
virgin, believes her bizarre tale of insemination by angelic means, and watches
jealously over her; each of these traits, however, rather than stigmatizing him
as a wretched creature actually reveals him as a worthy fulfilment of Christian
promises—obedient to God’s will even to the point of social humiliation, faith
in the miraculous truth of Mary’s story, and instrumental in protecting young
Jesus until the time is ripe for his mission in the world to begin. Thus the Miller’s foolish errors, stemming
both from his own ignorance of Scripture and his inebriated state, release into
the subliminal text words, images, and concepts that we can see from our new
perspective as forming patterns that belie the traditional Christian
associations of characters and icons and generate subversive notions of a more
Jewish kind that Chaucer may have been partly aware of and which hidden Jews in
his audience would have picked up.
The senex is also the type of
the bourgeois jaloux as seen in the
opening of the Book of Proverbs. His
wife is the strange woman who looks out of her window, while her husband is
away on business, to find vulnerable young men to seduce and lead down to
perdition. In this typology old age does
not bring wisdom; rather it brings self-delusion and greed, the ignorance of
not knowing who one is in the sense of assuming an old man can marry a young
wife without consideration of her physical needs, and greed in the sense of
falsely valuing money as a miser and thinking wealth permits possession of a
wife rather than love and honour. Though
the Psalter had become part of standard Christian hymnology and the poems of
King David read in sermons as proof of the teachings of Jesus, the psalms also
express Jewish anguish in times of adversity, hope for messianic redemption,
and trust in the efficacy of Jewish Law even when it is not able to operate
openly in a rabbinical community.
But Hende Nicholas seems anything but the naïve and callow youth seduced
by the Strange Woman of Proverbs. His
foolishness lies in other places than in mere lack of worldly knowledge about
sex and women. Instead, he is obsessed
by astrology, and neglects his normal studies at the university, to seek out
the secrets of the world through study of the stars and planets. This is “al his fantasye”—intellectual hubris, arrogance, and the madness of
inquiring into the secrets of God’s mysterious Providence. Behind—or rather inside—of the Miller’s words
as he tells this story, there are subtle webs of allusion that Chaucer is
weaving together. The fantasy of the
clerk’s astrological speculations is also a complex web of deceit. For when hende
Nicholas locks himself in his room supposedly to pour over the secret books
of astrology, he is also engaged in private and illicit sexual activities, his
calculations on the astrolabe and his playing of the psaltrie, surrounded as they are by exotic and erotic herbs and
spices, stimulate his lust and his fantasye
becomes that of masturbation: he dreams of making love to the old man’s
young wife but most of all he seems in love with himself and his own sophomoric
wit.
Nicholas’ handiness will be seen to be more than just a deft bit of self-love
but also a transgressive manipulation of the sexual desires of Alisoun and a
quick-witted attack on his chief rival for her affections, Absolom, with the
comic punishment of the old carpenter a secondary result. The words and phrases are a tissue of
double-entendre and puns on his forbidden secret games. The allusions to liturgical hymns, the echoes
of the Song of Songs and the references back to the opening lines of the General
Prologue all constitute a mesh of pseudo-mystical language: they signal a
sterile, egotistical spilling of his seed, a sinfulness rather than a
world-creating, charitable overflowing of Christian love. As we shall discuss much later in this essay,
some of the wordplay is created through the sounds and letters of the names. It is not just that Alisoun and Absoloum are
visually close in appearance, especially in the opening A and the final consonant soun/soum,
but they may be broken up and reassembled in various ways.
[i] See Norman Simms, "Passion,
Compotatio, Rixus and the Shameful
Thing: English Guilds and the Corpus Christi Cycles" Mentalities/Mentalités 11:2
(1997) 45-60; “Mrs Noah’s Secret: A Psychohistorical Reading of the Chester
Cycle Third Pageant” Parergon 14:2
(1997) 15-28; “Medieval Guilds, Passions and Abuse” Journal of Psychohistory 26:1 (1998) 478-513; “Bishop Lobo’s
Nightmare” Sefarad: The Sephardic Newsletter (23 September 2003)
12:8, part 4 (Sea12.8.4) pp. 1-13; “Marranism: An Essay in Shame and Hope” Joseph Bulbulia and Paul
Morris , eds., What is Religion For? (Wellington:
Victoria University. 2004) pp. 121-145; “Jews
on the Late Medieval Stage” Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies 12
(2010) 13-22.
.
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