Chaucer, Miller's Tale: Part 6

Conclusion

Perhaps the key to the deepest psychological meanings of The Miller’s Tale are suggested by the narrative commentary—out of place in the mouth and character of the Miller, and even inappropriate in the foolish literal-mindedness of Chaucer-the-Pilgrim—at lines 3611 ff.

Lo, which a greet thing is affeccioun!

Men may dyen of ymaginacioun,

So depe may impressioun be take. 

The words are supposedly about the carpenter and how he is foolish and superstitious enough to be taken in by the student’s false prophecy of a deluge equal to Noah’s.  Following the gloss provided by modern editors, we can translate these lines as:

Lo, what a great thing is feeling!

Man may die by their fancy,

So deep may the impression be taken.

In other words, this is a psychological statement in the terms familiar to late medieval moral philosophy.  Feelings are here the affective responses to external stimuli.  The fancy or imagination in medieval paradigms is the faculty of the mind that thinks in terms of imagery rather than abstract ideas, that is emotional and subjective rather than rational and objective, and that tends to draw analogies—make metaphors, similes and other figurative manners of speech—rather than make distinctions, put separate ideas into carefully constructed categories, and relate them by logical processes.  The impressions spoken of here are twofold, first the sensory reactions to the external world through the nervous system, second the mental reactions stimulated by short-circuits in the mind, memories shaping the reception of new experiences, and illogical leaps between categories.  With this deepening of our understanding, we can attempt to paraphrase this comment in a way that makes it indicative of the whole direction of the tale created by the poet for the Miller as part of the overall scheme of The Canterbury Tales.

Emotional feelings are powerful events in the mind of those who are not trained in reason and logic, who tend to follow the flow of impressions from inside their own minds, misconstrued and confused memories, superstitions and fantasies that create false images of the world and of the way in which the world is at once a natural, material and mutable place and at the same time an imperfect representation of the sacred world that is revealed ambiguously in signs because we have not yet purged ourselves of sinfulness.  Through both reason and revelation, however, human beings can learn to see themselves and their universe as related, as microcosm to macrocosm, as created world to the perfectly conceived idea of the world in God’s mind, a truth manifest in Christ’s incarnation and confirmed sacramentally in the Mass and textually in the pages of Scripture as properly explicated by the authoritative Church traditions.. Because, in this perspective,  men and women are confused by their own bodily desires and fears, they tend not to see clearly and to misread the signs around them—or to ignore them out of ignorance, laziness and egotism; but those signs nevertheless are real and powerful, and they are the medium through which God’s providential order operates, responding to moral choices, rewarding the virtuous and punishing the vicious.  The joke then would be on those who think they are totally free agents in an eternal, random and meaningless world, or who think they can manipulate the forces of the divine for their own selfish purposes, or who blindly accept words of authority without understanding what they really mean.  For those who do understand with humility and submission to the reason of the Church, the men and women who think they can fool or ignore the sacred reality that is always present inside the signs of the world, the evil doers are even bigger fools—and they create their own punishments and humiliations.  For those who approach the Catholic doctrines and practices of the Middle Ages with scepticism, moral hesitation, and outright fear of its persecutory behaviour, the way to read The Miller’s Tale is quite different—and the understanding of Chaucer-the-Poet and Chaucer-the-Pilgrim, as well as Chaucer-the-Historical-Person’s motivations and unknown reasons deep in his unconscious become more than ever academically controversial, intellectually elusive, and therefore existentially significant. From this other perspective, wherein each individual is not only created in the image of God but also has the contractual obligation to observe the Law and thus to maintain and even to enhance and correct the processes of the on-going creation, there is no excuse for shirking one’s duties: but there are conditions and circumstances which keeping to terms of the contract may be difficult or impossible, such as physical and mental illness or being in an environment of persecution.  In Judaism there is no Original Sin passed on genetically, as it were, from generation to generation through the inherently flawed physiology of conception and birth; rather, each person is responsible for his or her own actions and thoughts, but the judgment comes in terms of specific experiences. 

In The Miller’s Tale characters through their foolishness—their status as alazons, hypocrites and self-deluded innocents—create their own punishments, all of which lead towards comic turns, not serious and eternal pain.