Canterbury tales

1. GENRE SPECIFICITY OF "THE CANTERBURY STORIES"
World famous J. Chaucer brought his "Canterbury Tales". Chaucer got the idea for stories from reading Boccaccio's Decameron. Modern poetry begins with Jerry Chaucer (1340-1400), diplomat, soldier, scholar. He was a bourgeois who knew the court, had an inquisitive eye, read a lot and traveled through France and Italy to study the classical works in Latin. He wrote because he was aware of his genius, but his readership was small: the courtiers, but part of the workers and merchants. He served in London Customs. This post gave him the opportunity to get acquainted with the business life of the capital in many ways, to see with his own eyes those social types that will appear in his main book, Canterbury Tales.²
The Canterbury Tales came out from his pen in 1387. They grew up on the basis of a narrative tradition, the origins of which are lost in ancient times, which declared itself in the literature of the XIII-XIV centuries. in Italian short stories, cycles of satirical tales, "Roman Acts" and other collections of instructive stories. In the XIV century. plots, selected from different authors and in different sources, are already combined in a deeply individual design. The chosen form - the stories of traveling pilgrims - makes it possible to present a vivid picture of the Middle Ages. Chaucer's view of the world includes Christian miracles, which are narrated in The Abbess's Tale and The Lawyer's Tale, and the fantasy of Breton le , which appears in The Weaver 's Tale of Bath, and the idea of Christian forbearance in The Story the tale of an Oxford student. All these representations were organic for medieval consciousness. Chaucer does not question their value , as evidenced by the inclusion of such motifs in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer creates images-role. They are created on the basis of the professional class characteristics and the inconsistency of the heroes with it. Typing is achieved by duplication , the multiplication of similar images. Absolon from The Miller's Tale, for example, appears in the role of a minister of religion - a lover. He is a church clerk, a semi -spiritual person , but his thoughts are turned to God, but to pretty parishioners . The prevalence of such an image in literature is evidenced, in addition to numerous French fablios , by one of the folk ballads included in the collection Secular lyrics of the XlVth and XVth centuries ". The behavior of the hero of this short poem is very similar to the actions of Absolon . The repetition of the image makes it typical.
All literary scholars who have studied the problem of the genres of The Canterbury Tales agree that one of the main literary genres of this work is the short story.
“Novella (Italian novella , lit. - news), - we read in a literary encyclopedic dictionary, - a small prose genre, comparable in volume to a story, but differing from it in a sharp centripetal plot , often paradoxical, lack of descriptiveness and compositional rigor. Poeticizing the incident, the short story reveals to the utmost the core of the plot - the center, the ups and downs, reduces life material into the focus of one event ".
Unlike the short story, a genre of new literature at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, which brought to the fore the figurative-verbal texture of the narrative and gravitated towards detailed characteristics , the short story is the art of the plot in its purest form, which developed in ancient times in close connection with ritual magic and myths, addressed primarily to the active, and not the contemplative side of human existence. The novelistic plot, built on sharp anti- theses and metamorphoses, on the sudden transformation of one situation into its direct opposite, is common in many folklore genres (fairy tale, fable, medieval anecdote, fablio, schwank).
“A literary short story arises during the Renaissance in Italy (the brightest example is the Decameron by G. Boccaccio), then in England, France, Spain (J. Chaucer, Margaret of Navarre , M. Cervantes). In the form of a comic and instructive short story, the formation of Renaissance realism takes place, revealing the spontaneously free self-determination of a person in a world fraught with vicissitudes. Subsequently, the short story in its evolution starts from related genres (story, short story, etc.), depicting extraordinary, sometimes paradoxical and supernatural incidents, breaks in the chain of socio-historical and psychological determinism.
Chaucer as a poet was influenced by French and Italian literature even before the creation of The Canterbury Tales. In the work of Chaucer , as you know, some pre-Renaissance features already appear, and it is customary to refer to the Proto-Renaissance. The influence of the creator of the classic Renaissance novel Giovanni Boccaccio on Chaucer is debatable. Only his acquaintance with the early works of Boccaccio and the use as sources of the Boccaccievs " Filocolo " (in the story of Franklin), "History of famous men and women" (in the story of a monk), " Theses " (in the story of a knight) and only one of short stories of the Decameron, namely the story of the faithful wife Griselda , according to the Latin translation of Petrarch (in the story of a student ). True, some echo with the motifs and plots developed by Boccaccio in the Decameron can also be found in the stories of the skipper, the merchant and Franklin. Of course, this roll call can be explained by an appeal to the general tradition of short stories. Other sources of the Canterbury Tales include Yakov Voraginsky 's The Golden Legend , fables (in particular, those of Mary of France) and The Romance of the Fox, The Romance of the Rose, the chivalrous novels of the Arthurian cycle, French fablios , and other works of the medieval , partly of ancient literature ( for example , Ovid). Meletinsky also says that: “Legendary sources and motifs are found in the stories of the second nun (taken from the Golden Legend, the life of St. Cecilia ), a lawyer (the story of the vicissitudes and sufferings of the virtuous Christian Constanta dating back to the Anglo-Norman chronicle Nicola Trive - the daughter of the Roman emperor ) and a doctor (ascending to Titus Livius and the "Roman of the Rose" story of the chaste Virginia - the victim of lust and villainy of Judge Claudius). In the second of these stories, legendary moti - you are intertwined with fabulous ones, partly in the spirit of the Greek roman , and in the third - with the tradition of Roman "valor". A taste of legend and a fairy-tale basis are felt in the student's story about Griselda , although the plot is taken from Boccaccio.
Representatives of various strata of society went on a pilgrimage. According to the social status of the pilgrims can be divided into certain groups:
High society (Knight, Squire, church ministers);
Scientists (Doctor, Lawyer);
Landowners (Franklin);
Owners (Melnik, Majordom);
Merchant class (Skipper, Merchant);
Artisans (Dyer, Carpenter, Weaver, and so on);
Lower class (Plowman).³
In The General Prologue, Geoffrey Chaucer introduces the reader to practically every pilgrim (simply by mentioning his presence, or by giving details of his character). The "General Prologue" in some way forms the reader's expectations - the expectation of the main mood and theme of the story, the subsequent behavior of the pilgrim. It is from the "General Prologue" that the reader gets an idea of what stories will be told, as well as the essence, the inner world of each pilgrim. The behavior of the characters presented by Chaucer reveals the essence of their personalities, their habits, personal lives, moods, good and bad sides. The character of this or that character is presented in the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" and is revealed further in the story itself, prefaces and afterwords to the stories. “Based on Chaucer's attitude to each character, the pilgrims participating in the journey can be organized into certain groups:
Ideal images (Knight, Squire, Student, Plowman, Priest);
"Neutral" images, descriptions of which are not presented in the "Prologue" - Chaucer only mentions their presence (clerics from the environment of the Abbess);
Images with some negative character traits (Skipper, Economy);
Inveterate sinners (Carmelite, Pardoner, Bailiff of the church court - they are all church employees) .
Chaucer finds an individual approach to each character, presenting him in the General Prologue.
“In the poetic Canterbury Tales, the compositional setting was national - the setting of the scene: a tavern by the road leading to Canterbury, a crowd of pilgrims, in which, in essence, the entire English society is represented - from feudal lords to a cheerful crowd of artisans and peasants. In total, 29 people are recruited into the company of pilgrims. Almost each of them is a living and rather complex image of a person of his time; Chaucer masterfully describes in excellent verse the habits and clothes, the manner of carrying oneself, the speech features of the characters .
As the characters are different, so are Chaucer's artistic means . He speaks of a pious and brave knight with friendly irony, because the knight looks too anachronistic with his courtesy in a rude, noisy crowd of the common people. About the son of a knight, a boy full of enthusiasm, the author speaks with tenderness; about the thieving majordomo, miser and deceiver - with disgust; with mockery - about the brave merchants and artisans; with respect - about a peasant and a righteous priest, about an Oxford student in love with books. Chaucer speaks of the peasant uprising with condemnation, almost even with horror.
The brilliant genre of literary portraiture is perhaps Chaucer's main creation. Here, as an example, is a portrait of a weaver from Bath.
And the Bat weaver chatted with him ,
Sitting famously on the pacer;
But to the temple
One of the ladies squeeze in front of her, -
Instantly forgot, in a furious pride -
About kindness and kindness.
Pretty and ruddy face.
She was an enviable wife.
And survived five husbands,
Crowds of girl friends, not counting.
What has changed in six and a half centuries? Is that the horse gave way to a limousine.
But soft humor gives way to harsh satire when the author describes the seller of indulgences he hates.⁴
His eyes shone like those of a hare.
There was no vegetation on the body,
And the cheeks are smooth - yellow, like soap.
It seemed he was a gelding or a mare,
And though there was nothing to brag about,
About this he himself bleated like a sheep ...
As the work progresses, the pilgrims tell various stories. Knight - an old courtly plot in the spirit of a knightly novel; carpenter - a funny and obscene story in the spirit of modest urban folklore, etc. In each story, the interests and sympathies of a particular pilgrim are revealed, which achieves the individualization of the character, the task of depicting him from the inside is solved.
Chaucer is called the "father of realism". The reason for this is his art of a literary portrait, which, it turns out, appeared in Europe earlier than a pictorial portrait. Indeed, when reading The Canterbury Tales, one can safely talk about realism as a creative method that implies not only a truthful generalized image of a person, typifying a certain social phenomenon, but also a reflection of changes taking place in society and a person.
So, the English society in Chaucer's portrait gallery is a society in motion, in development, a society in transition, where the feudal order is strong, but outdated, where the new man of the developing city is revealed. It is clear from the Canterbury Tales that the future does not belong to the preachers of the Christian ideal, but to business people, full of strength and passions, although they are less respectable and virtuous than the same peasant and country priest.
The Canterbury Tales laid the foundation for a new English poetry, based on the entire experience of advanced European poetry and national song traditions.
Based on the analysis of this work, we came to the conclusion that the genre of the Canterbury Tales was strongly influenced by the genre of the short story. This is manifested in the features of the plot, the construction of images, the speech characteristics of the characters, humor and edification.
Since in the time of J. Chaucer the novel and, in particular, the romance of chivalry were one of the main genres of literature, the writer simply could not ignore them. He used elements of courtly romance in The Knight's Tale.
In general, “novel (French Roman , German Roman , English novel ; originally, in the late Middle Ages, any work written in Romance, and not in Latin) is an epic work in which the narrative is focused on the fate of an individual personality in the process of its formation and development, deployed in the artistic space and time, sufficient to convey the "organization" of the personality. Being the epic of private life, "the image of feelings, passions and events of the private and inner life of people" [cit. according to 5, 330], the novel presents individual and social life as relatively independent, not exhausting and absorbing each other elements, and this is the defining feature of its genre content .
In the Middle Ages, the romantic tendency is most fully manifested in the genre of chivalric romance, which brought with it freedom of narration, liveliness of dialogues, psychological " portraiting " of characters ("The Tale of Tristan and Isolde"). The narrative traditions of the French chivalric romance predetermined for a long time the leading position of French literature in the development of the novel.⁵
One of the most common genres in the literature of the Middle Ages was the chivalric romance (French roman chevaleresque , roman de chevalerie ; German Ritterroman , hofischer Roman ; English romance of chivalry , Spanish romance ; ital. romanzo cavalleresco ; Czech _ rytifsky roman ), which largely determined the literary development in the named era. “It arose in a feudal environment during the heyday of chivalry, for the first time - in France in the middle. 12th c. He took from the heroic epic the motives of boundless courage and nobility. In the chivalric novel, the analysis of the psychology of the individualized hero-knight, who performs feats not in the name of the family or vassal duty, but for the sake of his own glory and glorification of his beloved, comes to the fore . The abundance of exotic descriptions and fantastic motifs brings the chivalric romance closer to folk tales, the literature of the East and the pre-Christian mythology of Central and Northern Europe. The development of the chivalric romance was influenced by the rethought legends of the ancient Celts and Germans, and by the writers of antiquity (Ovid). The most popular were novels about the Knights of the Round Table, about the legendary King Arthur of the Britons, about the love of Tristan and Iseult, about the search for the Holy Grail. The cheerful ideal of free love and the search for adventure gives way to a Christian-ascetic beginning in later chivalric romances. Originally the romance of chivalry was in verse; from ser. 13th c. his prose adaptations appear (for example, the Lancelot cycle ). Knightly novels were also created in Germany and England. The poetics of the chivalric romance influenced the heroic epic , which was recorded at that time in the written tradition, the development of prose and versification (in particular, the Alexandrian verse). In parallel with the chivalric novel, the chivalric tale and short story developed. Already in the 13th century. parodies of the chivalric romance appear. In the 15th century. the genre declined, but with the advent of book printing it revived again in the form of popular prints (including in Russia in the 17th and 19th centuries). In Spain, the romance of chivalry flourished during the Renaissance, filled with his ideas. Cervantes in Don Quixote did not ridicule the chivalric romance as such , but epigone revisions and continuations of the best examples of the genre. Attempts by writers of a precision direction in the 16th-17th centuries. to revive the chivalrous romance, acquired the character of a conditional stylization .
In the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, all the pilgrim characters are most vividly presented as unique individuals, which distinguishes the work from any other novels of the Middle Ages. The author's approach to the description of the characters is notable for the fact that the author approaches the description of the participants of the pilgrimage in detail:
35: But nathelees , while I have time nd space ,
36: Er that I ferther in this tale pace ,
37: Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun
38: To telle yow al the condition
39: Of ech of hem , so as it semed me ,
40: And whiche they weren , and of what degree ,
41: And eek in what array that they were inne …
35: But still, as long as there is a place and time,
37: I think it would be appropriate
38: Tell you about the situation
39: Each of them, as they seemed to me,
40: And what they were, and to what extent,
41: And about their outfits...
Considering the image of the Knight as an ideal figure presented by Chaucer, the embodiment of dignity, nobility and honor, but at the same time having some shortcomings, we will conduct a study of the Knight's story, taking into account the structure of the story and the poetic means used by the author to create the completeness of the image of the character.
The story tells about the love of two cousins - Palamon and Arsita - for the daughter-in-law of the Duke of Athens, Emilia. The cousins, being princes of a hostile state, are imprisoned in a dungeon by order of Theseus, from the high tower of which they accidentally see Emilia and both fall in love with her. Enmity breaks out between the cousins, and when Theseus learns of the rivalry between the two brothers, he arranges a jousting tournament, promising to give the winner Emilia as his wife. By the intervention of the gods, Palamon wins ; Arsita dies by accident; the story ends with the wedding of Palamon and Emilia.⁶
It should be noted that the Knight's tale is one of the longest tales presented by the Pilgrims. One gets the impression of the solemnity, majesty of the narrative, since the narrator often deviates from the main action, presenting the audience with large fragments of detailed descriptions, often not related to the development of the plot itself (description of the women of Thebes, mourning the death of their husbands, description of temples, festivities, battles). Moreover, the Knight, as the story progresses, interrupts himself several times, returning to the main characters and to the main development of the plot:
885: But al that thyng I moot as now forbere .
1000: But shortly for to telle is my entente .
1201: But of this story list me nat to write .
885: But I must forget about that now.
1000: But my intention is to tell you briefly.
1201: But that's not what I want to tell you about.
2965: But shortly to the point thanne wol I wende ,
2966: And made of my long tale an end . 2965: But I'll get to the point quickly,
2966: And I will complete my long story ".
“Long passages representing descriptions of temples, ceremonies, armor of warriors emphasize the pretentious luxury of knightly life. The descriptions are rich in figurativeness and metaphorical, although, as some researchers note, they are standard: "... Palamon in this fightyng were a wood leon , and as a crueel tiger was Arcite ... "(" ... Palamon in this battle is like a mad lion, and like a ferocious tiger - Arsita ..."); when describing captives, Palamon and Arsita ; the author does not go beyond the standard epithets: " woful " ("poor"), " sorweful " ("sad"), " wrecched " ("unfortunate"), " pitous " ("miserable") are epithets that are repeated throughout the story.
The central figures of the narrative (unfolding of the action) are Palamon and Arsita , but most researchers note that Duke Theseus is the central image. He is presented at the very beginning of the story as an ideal image, the embodiment of nobility, wisdom, justice and military virtues. The narrative opens with the introduction of the duke, a description of his virtues, although it would be logical to expect at the very beginning of the story the introduction of the central figures of the narrative, Palamon and Arsita . Theseus appears as a model of chivalry, an ideal figure, and then a judge in a dispute between Arcita and Palamon . The greatness of the duke is confirmed by military victories and wealth:
859: Whilom , as olde stories tellen us ,
860: Ther was a duc that highte theseus ;
861: Of Athenes he was lord and governor ,
862: And in his time swich a conquerour ,
863: That gritter was ther none under the sonne .
864: Ful many a rich contree hadde he wonne ;
865: What with his wysdom and chivalrie ,
866: He conquered al regne of femenye …
952: This gentil duc down from his courser erase
953: With herte pitous , whan he herde hem spike .
954: Hym thoughte that his herte wold break ,
955: Whan he saugh hem so pitous and so maat ,
956: That whilom were of so greet estaat ;
957: And in his arms he hem alle up hente ,
958: And hem comfort in ful good entente ,
959: And swoor his ooth , as he was trewe knyght …
987: He faught , and slough hym manly as a princess
988: In Plein bataille …
859: One day, as the old tales say,
860: There was once a duke named Theseus;
861: He was ruler and lord of Athens,
862: And he was such a warrior at that time,
863: What was not mightier than him under the sun.
864: He captured many rich countries;
865: By his valor and wisdom
866: He conquered the kingdom of the Amazons...
952: The good-hearted duke dismounted
953: With a compassionate heart, as I heard their speech.
954: He thought his heart would break his heart,
955: When I saw them so miserable and weak
956: What was not more unfortunate than them;
957: And he raised his whole army,
958: And gently comforted them,
959: And swore like a true knight...
987: He fought and slew many like a knight
988: In combat"
Theseus is an ideal image in terms of knightly virtues: he protects those who need it, has knightly prowess in battles, is prudent in controversial matters, and is sensitive to the suffering of others. So, as we have seen, the Duke of Athens, Theseus, is presented to the reader as a model of chivalrous behavior, an ideal image, which will then act as a judge in a dispute between two brothers.⁷
“The structure of the story is unusual for a simple narrative as a development of any plot. The symmetry of the structure of the story, the symmetry of the images, the pretentious static descriptions, the rich symbolism suggest not focusing on the search for skillfully drawn images, not on moral conclusions - all the reader's attention is focused on the aesthetic impression of the story ".
At the lexical level, a large number of epithets were noted (when describing characters, temples, rituals), but the standardity, repetition of epithets does not allow us to determine the stylistic coloring of the text. To a greater extent, the stylistic coloring of the text, the lyricism of the story is presented with the help of parallel constructions, enumeration (that is, at the syntactic level).
“The images presented are more symbolic than real. The images are revealed by the structure of the story - the structure presupposes the role and position of each character in the story, his characteristics (if any), symbolism .
The story presents the reader with an augmented image of the Knight as the image of a romantic hero.
At the same time, Chaucer rethinks the genre tradition of the chivalric romance. The writer presents all the characters as unique individuals, approaches their description in detail; creates the ideal image of the Knight, as the embodiment of the dignity of nobility and honor; uses a large number of epithets and metaphors; especially rich in imagery of his descriptions of nature and terrain.