Afterword: The Form of the Reader

One of the chief fictions of a literary work is to summon its own competent reader. Gian Biagio Conte argues that an author not only "presupposes the competence of his (or her) own Model Reader" but also "establishes" that competence."2 Many of the distinctive formal features of the Canterbury Tales—the poet's reticence (Chaucerian "irony"); Chaucer's fiction of rehearsal; and the distributed authorship, with the layered narrative voices resulting from his pose as a compiler of the prior words of others—cooperate to shape a space for the interpretative acts of the reader it seeks to summon into existence.3 To this reader, the poet cedes a remarkable autonomy, as in the apology of the Miller's Prologue, where Chaucer repeats his obligation to rehearse verbatim the words of his invented pilgrim tale-tellers, and then steps away from large swaths of usually authorial responsibility by suggesting to the dissatisfied that, since they may "Turne over the leef and chese another tale" (I 3177), they should therefore "Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys" (I 3181).4 The selection and order of tales—and thus the very structure of the work—come at least partly under the control of readerly choices.In ceding substantial responsibility to the reader he summons, Chaucer acknowledges, in part, the realities of writing for real English readers in a manuscript culture that rendered so much beyond his control. The autonomy and control exercised by the model reader both result from, and contribute to, Chaucer's construction of his own authorial responsibility. But ceding control to real readers does not entail liking the consequences—and readerly choice in selection or interpretation does not preclude the possibility that that such autonomy has been foreclosed in significant ways. It is in this context that we should understand Chaucer's frequent, often dyspeptic, representations of bad or resistant readers. When the Man of Law—a model of the new English reader whose competence the work struggles to shape—grudgingly praises Chaucer for not telling tales of incest and rape (II 77–89), he clearly assumes that to represent something is the same thing as endorsing it. The distributed authorship of the Canterbury Tales disallows this assumption. Who represents? Who endorses? The work's form seems designed to render these questions not certainly answerable.The Wife of Bath offers two striking representations of resistant readers. Tormented by Jankyn's nightly readings from his compendium of antifeminist texts, she first tears one (or three) pages from the offending book, and then makes Jankyn throw the whole volume into the fire (III 667, 790, 816). Despite her rejection of the Book of Wikked Wyves, she has nevertheless been shaped by its contents. Her resistance is subsumed, substantially but perhaps not wholly, into the tired antifeminist trope of the unruly woman. Or is it? The rendition of Ovid's story of Midas in her tale suggests a more nuanced, less overdetermined tension between readerly and authorial intentions. According to Ovid, after Midas chooses Pan as the winner over Apollo in a musical competition, Apollo punishes him with ass's ears, the physical manifestation of his bad taste. Having learned Midas's secret shame, his barber (or, in the Wife's version, his wife) cannot contain it. He rushes to the marsh, digs a hole, and whispers the secret into the mud. The buried secret becomes public the next spring when the marsh reeds grow up and whisper to all: Midas has ass's ears.5 Keeping and spilling the secret, tellers and listeners in this chain have fundamentally different purposes that lie athwart one another. As a model for rehearsal—the retelling of stories, or literary transmission—this story suggests that the friction between the intentions of authors and readers is less a matter of resistance than of sheer divergence, maybe even incompatibility, of different materials.6 Hard to accommodate for the writer—who presumably has reasons for writing—the friction also greatly enhances the work's potential to live on in the adoption/adaptation by generations of readers, who read for their own purposes regardless of those of the writer. The profoundly discomfiting disconnection between the purposes of authors and of readers is built into the form of the Canterbury Tales.More than most other tales, the Prioress's Tale has invited some truly dismaying readers. The very form of the Canterbury Tales—ceding authority to, or perhaps more precisely acknowledging lack of authorial control over—readers good, bad, compliant, resistant, refractory—entails great risk. Actual readers exercise interpretative autonomy whether or not their competence has been summoned or reshaped by that form. The fifteenth-century scribes described by Joanna Bellis elide not only the context of the Canterbury collection but also the distributed authorship of the work. Both elisions underwrite Bellis's conclusion, that Chaucer was not sufficiently antisemitic to suit them or the audiences to whom they transmitted the text.7 Utterly conventional readers, they stick the landing in whatever mental or scribal gymnastics prove necessary to fit Chaucer into a seamless affirmation of the antisemitism that so often accompanies praise of the Virgin Mary. Another dimension of the literature of affirmation also exposes its fragility: the genre of "recovery romance," which, in Leila K. Norako's description, weaponizes even such humane instincts as empathy to serve a fantasy of Christian supersession that has already begun to fail.Far more malign, owing to its direct influence on antisemitic genocide in the twentieth century, is Édouard Drumont's 1886 screed La France juive. As J. R. Mattison shows, Drumont also elides the Canterbury context of layered voices and distributed authorship in order to appropriate Chaucer as a venerable authority for the history of European and Jewish enmity. Like the fifteenth-century scribal readings, Drumont's appropriation suffers from the Man of Law syndrome: the assumption that to represent is the same thing as to endorse. Do these readers attest to the work's failure to summon the right spirits? Or its failure to draw historical readers out of their preexisting habits of reading? Perhaps, as Bellis suggests, it is time to hold Chaucer accountable, despite his ploys of deniability and blame-shifting. In a significant rethinking of premodern European racialism, Samantha Katz Seal offers an antidote, showing that at crucial moments in the Prioress's Tale Chaucer is himself a resistant reader of bloodthirsty miracles of the Virgin, and more broadly of prevailing fourteenth-century cultural scripts of blood and race.The Wife of Bath's Midas story shows us that the truth can emerge despite the intentions of both authors and readers. As if to exemplify the Wife's point, Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson conclude that the Prioress's Tale "has remained a poem in motion, its impact and implications constantly evolving alongside its audience."8 Here, Anna Wilson challenges her own readers to be more critically alert to invisible existential presuppositions like innocence, "whiteness," and "the invisibility of white supremacy to itself," whether in the Prioress's Tale or in their own contemporary culture. And Karen Winstead, having originally considered this tale the most alien in the Canterbury collection, discovers that it is actually the most deeply embedded in her own twenty-first-century culture—and then discovers that reading it also gives her the means to understand and overcome the toxic "hate literature" it embodies. These readers find in the Prioress's Tale not just the occasion but also the means to confront their own assumptions and analytical frameworks, whether of literary or of social experience.More than any other, the Prioress's Tale forces me to confront my own analytical framework, for the comfortable fiction of the author's model reader turns out to have very uncomfortable implications. Perhaps that reader, having chosen to read the tale, could absolve the author of blame for its reprehensibility. But as Chaucer himself was unhappily aware, his model reader may be like one of Glendwr's elusive spirits—fictional, maybe unsummonable. Most days I am pretty confident of my version of the Canterbury Tales, which includes the Prioress's Tale as a caution against building our own precious human communities on the weakest of foundations: the violent exclusion of those defined as Not Us. But I could not tell you whether the work has summoned me as its competent reader, or whether I have summoned the work I need.