And Life's Wheel Turns Upon its Axis

I have never liked Chaucer. But, since I have pretensions to being a medievalist, I decided I owed it to his eminence that I at least read the Canterbury Tales. Oddly enough, I find they are an excellent read. I don't particularly enjoy the stories per se. They are crude, lewd, and enough of the humor is based on a thorough understanding of their world that I miss at least half of them. However, withal, the stories are engaging, and the poetry is catchy.

There are, moreover, two reasons why I am enjoying Chaucer. First, they are an excellent cure for condemnation of the present in favor of the past. I read xanga's featured blogs, they tell me how the world battles with feminism, racism, abuse, and sexual matters of all kinds. They show me that a major chunk of the world finds bodily function humor simply to die for and would choose the $10 dollar Hollywood flick over a good book any day, and cannot seem to fathom that sex may be a private matter. I read them, and I am tempted to think, "ugh, modern culture is a puerile joke, how could we come to this?! If only we had a predominately Christian culture this would never happen!" Well, first, given aside the fact that I keep reading featured xanga blogs, so that makes me party to it, the old world, the predominately culturally Christian one of medieval England is, almost without exception, made up of people exactly like us. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are full of bedroom humor, bathroom humor, and good humor. The Wife of Bath preaches the doctrine of husband management--surely she is qualified having caught, pleased, and left five. The Miller tells a tale of the idiot carpenter who's wife betrays him for the love of the parish priest. The Carpenter in the group gets upset and tells a worse tale of similar vein, and the Knight leads off with a tale of two boys who love each other like brothers, until they fall for the same girl, and eventually, kill each other to win her. The characters are by turns, merry, petty, brave, cowardly, spiteful, and given to joking and considering all the concepts we struggle with today, from feminism to homosexuality. They remind me that it is not era you are in that dictates what you can do and how you should live. All era's are tainted by sin, and for better or for worse, humankind returns to the same sins over and over again. If the Evangelical church swept across America and all converted, we would still have bad comedy-because there will always be human. So, it makes no good for me to pine for the old days when Christ and learning were at the fore, or to pine for the future when we will win or lose this fight for a "Christian culture" (whatever that actually is) but, to do my best in the time and era I have been placed in.

The Second Reason I like Chaucer is less deep. He has a genius for identifying people thoroughly and vividly. In three lines he can give you a picture of both an icon from a prior age who is yet an individual character in his own right. This gives him the play to mock the stereotype while still keeping familiar affections for his character. The Wife of Bath is of questionable virtue, but she is an endearing woman in all of it. This type of satire tutors me in charity. It is all well and good to pillory a bad ideology or group, but within every group there is a trace or tendency of good, and as an author or poet it is as much or more my duty to find that kernel of goodness and make much of it even as I try to undermine the evil. Straight satire may be cathartic, but will it hold true throughout the centuries? Is it winsome enough to snare the attentions of the audience beyond making them merely snicker at folly?

Here closeth a fount of thoughts upon Chaucer.