Chaucer, Miller's Tale Part 2

A Question of Genre

Now we will look at the tale the Miller tells.  As all textbooks point out, it belongs to the genre of fabliau, and in the context of The Canterbury Tales it is a parodic revaluation of the tale that preceded, the Knight’s romantic pseudo-classical love story, a near allegory of the way refined chivalric personalities fit into the moral parameters of Boethian philosophy, a popular form of late antique Christian Platonism.  The Miller’s Tale also anticipates further developments in the tales which immediately follow and thus deepen the satire and the artistic concerns of the whole collection of poems.  But what really is a fabliau?

In the first place, a fabliau is, as its French name implies, a fable, that is, a tale, a story, a narrative, but with certain specific qualities: (a) the characters, places and actions belong to non-courtly circumstances but are (b) told by and to courtly persons for the purposes of comedy and satire because (c) refined manners, values and ideals are seen from bizarre points of view and thus tested and found wanting or proved as more valid than merely natural or physical needs and desires.  In brief, a fabliau is a courtly poem about the lower classes and how funny they are when they try to act out aristocratic rituals and live by chivalric ideals. 

In the second place, a fabliau, as an artistic parody of courtly romance, can bring out the inner absurdity of chivalric manners and ideals and show how inadequate they are to the natural, social and even spiritual needs of human society.  Even more than that, however, as we shall see in The Miller’s Tale, the parody is not just of romantic characters, actions and actions appropriate to an aristocratic community; but more particularly a recreation in comical and farcical terms of the Song of Songs, and thereby of Christian love as both a social ideal and a mystical experience.  Along the way there are other allusions, echoes and references to biblical, liturgical and ecclesiastical texts, but these do not create sustained subtexts to The Miller’s Tale, except perhaps the occasional mention of the mystery plays and especially that of Noah’s Flood.

Most important of all, though, are the inner dynamics of the tale itself and its relationship to the other characters on the pilgrimage to Canterbury and their own tales—each of which, as we indicated, serve as expressions of the personality and social tensions created by Chaucer’s fiction. 

From a Jewish point of view the tale is an aggadah, a mashol, and a midrash. These terms have some overlap with normal modern critical language but also have specific rabbinic inflections.

Aggadah could be any narrative or poem or joke or anecdote or some combination, as one sees in the Passover Haggadah, which tells the story of Exodus (in a special way, without Moses and almost completely an unaided action) embedded in two other explicit sto0ries and one underlying implicit event: first, the flashback account of how Abraham left his father’s idol shop and set out to find a Promised Land for a new monotheistic religion and second how the first rabbis after the Fall of the Temple established the academy in Yavneh and then in Bene Barak so as to celebrate the Passover as a symbolic and witty conversation amongst themselves; and underlying that, the stage-directions (the Seder)  and text for the festival play of the family at home praying, singing, narrating and explaining their symbolic meal.  While some scholars want to emphasize the  tension between an aggadah and a halachah, that is, between a poetic or imaginative text and a legal debate on the Law, so that whatever is not one is the other and vice versa; it seems more appropriate here to see the aggadah as a multi-media event, with words, images, gestures and other features, such as food, drink, laughter and so on.  It is in this sense, that The Miller’s Prologue and Tale, like the whole of The Canterbury Tales, can be said to be an aggadah, with its formal order or seder made dynamic and fluid by the internal jokes and cross-character allusions.

Mashol is something like a fable, a parable or a homiletic example.  Paired with its nimshol, the “moral” of the tale, tells what something is like, what it may be compared to, or how it may be understood through analogy, allegory and symbolic interpretation.  Usually, a fable is taken to be a short tale with all or most of the characters beasts who speak and carry on as though they were human beings; its brevity consists of a small number of characters, a limited space of action, and restricted period of time.  However, in some fables the characters can be inanimate objects or beings, leaves talking on a tree, dishes and pots in a kitchen, or a pail and a well of water.  A parable is similar in scale and intention, but its characters tend to be all human, social or professional types—a father and a son, a king and a prime minister, a farmer and a tax collector.  In the homiletic example—the exemplary characters may be historical or literary persons whose names are familiar, such as King Alfred and the spider, George Washington and the cherry tree, or Shylock demanding his pound of flesh.  The mashol may be inclusive of all these variants, but also take in when appropriate riddles, jokes, singing rhymes and other festival activities.  The nimshol or explicit statement of meaning or “moral” to the anecdote, whether it comes at the beginning or the ending of the story, may be sometimes ironic, highly allusive and oblique, or only given in an implicit manner.  Whatever the stated purposes of the tales told by the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury from London or on the way back, these morals are put into dispute by the whole or part of the listening audience, especially by the Host, Harry Bailly, who tries to impose a pompous, serious middle-class tone to the proceedings, as well as by the petty rivalries and misunderstandings of the other characters, such as the Wyf or Bath or the Miller.  As we shall see later, the debates and conversations prove to be the actual dynamic core of the Chaucerian anthology.

Midrash is strictly-speaking an exegetical exercise in drawing forth meaning from sacred texts, whether of the Tanakh (The Pentateuch, the Prophets and the other Writings of the Hebrew Bible) or of the Talmud or other types of rabbinical writings.  In recent years, however, midrash has been given a wider dimension, including much that falls under the heading of secular creative literature, and also visual, musical, choreographic and dramatic commentaries of sacred and non-sacred texts or historical events.  I have also used the term in an active verbal sense of midrashing one’s own private experiences or group participation in climactic occurrences; that is, the midrash may be more than spoken, painted or danced—it can also be a way of transforming the world and its memories.  On the one hand, then, The Miller’s Tale incorporates various interpretations of the Shir ha-Shirim, the Song of Songs, into the bawdy events and parodic language of the characters who act out the passage in Proverbs wherein the bourgeois housewife attempts to seduce the young student on the streets while her old husband is out of town on business and leads the gullible youth down into Sheol.  On the other hand, in small and in large, that is in individual tales and in the whole of Canterbury Tales, Chaucer creates comical counter-interpretations to conventional Christian readings of sacred texts and sacred history, if not explicitly from a Jewish point of view, then certainly from a highly critical anticlerical position within the Church.