The Miller’s Fun
Chaucer, Bakhtin, carnival, cruelty
Witches can be right
Giants can be good
You decide what’s right
You decide what’s good
Just remember—
Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods
We may question the offense with which Chaucer’s Reeve reacts to Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, as we may question whether and when any artistic depiction of a member of some group should be taken as a statement about that group generally; but the Reeve (who has a name, Osewold, that we really ought to use, much as we ought to use the Miller’s name, which is Robyn) is not reacting to nothing, and his offense ought to call our attention to how Robyn treats his tale’s carpenter, John. Osewold’s is an offense endearingly isolated and meek: as the other pilgrims laugh at Robyn’s tale, “oonly Osewold the Reve” sits apart and aggrieved, with “a litel ire … in his herte.” (Chaucer I.3860–62). In expressing this ire, he is initially reluctant and soft-spoken; though he arrives at a tirade eventually, he begins not by launching into one but by “grucch[ing]” and by “blam[ing]” Robyn’s tale “a lite” (Chaucer I.3863). We are asked to sympathize with Osewold, not to find him ridiculous, and Chaucer’s description of the other pilgrims’ laughter accentuates and refines our understanding of Osewold’s plight: while his fellows “laughen at this nyce cas / Of Absolon and hende Nicholas,” he has taken notice of poor John (Chaucer I.3855–56, emphasis mine). To him, that is, the tale has not been a frolicsome romp but an exercise in cruelty—which is why it is wrong to identify Robyn’s tale, as many critics do, as an example of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of medieval “carnival”: Bakhtin’s carnival knows no authentic cruelty, and Robyn’s tale, or more precisely its John-oriented subplot, not only is a decided noninstance of carnival but may even be read as a failure of the same.
Those who read Robyn’s tale as carnivalesque mistake various of carnival’s components for carnival itself. Ben Parsons argues that “Chaucer stresses that Robyn is a carnival type” by “enmeshing him in a series of references to [such] festive practice[s] and performance[s]” as bagpiping, feasting, seasonal games, and popular drama (Parsons 30, internal quotes omitted). He is right that festivity plays a prominent part in Bakhtin’s understanding of carnival, as Bakhtin finds in it one of carnival’s primary fora; but popular revelry is not essential to carnival, which may exist outside of it, as in the genre of “Latin parody or semiparody” composed by monks “[c]onfined to their cells,” and carnival may not, in turn, be reduced to festivity (Bakhtin 13). Tison Pugh similarly claims that when Robyn seizes control of the pilgrims’ tale-telling game from the innkeeper Harry Bailly, he is attempting to restructure it “as a carnival for commoners rather than for aristocrats” (Pugh 47, emphasis mine). Beyond this sentence, Pugh does not explain what exactly makes Robyn’s intervention carnivalesque. It seems unlikely that he intends to suggest that carnival is merely that which belongs to the People and not to the Élite; more probably, what he identifies as Robyn’s carnivalesque quality is that he combines a popular rebuke to the aristocracy with a ribaldry that encapsulates what Bakhtin calls “the material bodily principle, that is, images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life” (Bakhtin 18). On this point we give no argument: what can be called an image of the human body with its defecation and sexual life if not the one presented at the climax of Robyn’s tale, in which Alisoun “p[uts] hir hole” out her bedroom window and Absolon kisses “hir naked ers / Ful savourly” before feeling “a thing al rough and long yherd” and jumping back (Chaucer I.3732–38)?
True: the material bodily principle, social leveling, and hints of popular festivity are all present in Robyn’s tale, as is a still more central element of carnival: humor. In Robyn’s tale, as in carnival, grossness prompts us to join the pilgrims in laughing. We cannot quite believe what we are reading—He actually wrote that‽—and laugh out of surprise, disconcertion, and discomfort, as well as out of gleeful admiration for narrative audacity. For this reason Robyn’s tale competes only with the Merchant’s and the Summoner’s for comedic value (which competition, measuring by screentime in Netflix programs’ farcical B-plots, it is winning). Yet Bakhtin devotes much ink to explaining that the material bodily principle, social leveling, popular festivity, and humor do not carnival make, and he spends most of the introduction to Rabelais and His World differentiating the carnivalesque “grotesque” from other forms of the grotesque that he argues postdate and betray the grotesque’s original spirit. Bakhtin seems challenged by this changing nature of the grotesque—or rather, the changing nature of that which is called grotesque—and instead of directly defining the category opts to say what characterizes it: “the extremely fanciful, free, and playful treatment of plant, animal, and human forms;” distortion, called “a gross violation of natural form and proportions” by traditionalists; and “the lower stratum of the body” (Bakhtin 32–33, 21).
To Bakhtin, however, the single most important aspect of the grotesque as it originally emerged is its generativity, which both arises from and gives rise to its joyful tone. What is important about the first grotesque objects is not that they bespeak “a gay, almost laughing libertinage” so much as it is that they bespeak “a gay, almost laughing libertinage”—and the unforced, free-wheeling spirit of their laughter in turn makes the libertinage authentic (Bakhtin 32, emphasis mine). The grotesque, in its truest form, “is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving” (Bakhtin 21). Over time, Bakhtin argues, the grotesque lost this gay and generative spirit and thus ceased to be carnivalesque, degenerating into “the pure satire of modern times” (Bakhtin 12). Not all laughter is created equal: whereas carnivalesque laughter “is also directed at those who laugh” and so “expresses the point of view of the whole world,” modern satirical laughter is negative (Bakhtin 12). It places the laugher “above the object of his mockery,” opposes him to it, and thus destroys the “wholeness of the world’s comic aspect” (Bakhtin 12). Modern satirists are not solely to blame for the decay of authentic grotesquerie, though they represent its rather grim endpoint: the Romantic movement helped to cheapen the grotesque and its laughter by being too deliberate and self-conscious about laughter’s liberatory potential. Bakhtin remarks that a “characteristic discussion of laughter” from the “Romantic grotesque tradition” praises laughter’s “liberating power,” but gives “no hint of its power of regeneration.” In this romantic passage, laughter “loses its gay and joyful tone” (Bakhtin 38). Romantic grotesquerie is not exactly humorless, but its humor is ideologically overdetermined and is inauthentic and disingenuous as a result. To Bakhtin, there are different kinds of humor, with different kinds of significance. Humor does not equal mirth, and when “moral sententiousness and abstract concepts” replace gaiety, the generative “positive pole of grotesque realism … drops out” (Bakhtin 53).
Thus Bakhtin identifies tonal gaiety with material productivity, and here we should remark that he has a political agenda—or rather two political agendas, one open and one slightly less open. They do not oppose one another. Bakhtin is explicit that carnival represents the true spirit of the People, and his open aim is to use carnival as the basis for a conception of revolution. His less open aim is to use it as the basis for a conception of revolution opposed to that of Stalinism. Bakhtin was living in 1940s Moscow when he wrote that no “dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook” (Bakhtin 3, emphasis mine). Unchallengeable state power and five-year plans (not to mention joyless piety) being hallmarks of Stalinism, it is not plausible that Bakhtin did not have that system in mind when he wrote this passage; and in the alternative he outlines, the destruction that must accompany revolution is always linked with renewal and flourishing. In true grotesque imagery, “death is not a negation of life … but part of life as a whole—its indispensable component, the condition of its constant renewal and rejuvenation. Death is here always related to birth; the grave is related to the earth’s life-giving womb” (Bakhtin 50). In a carnivalesque revolution, as in any revolution, the haughty shall be brought low, but they shall be brought to an equal lowness, not obliterated. A “special form of free and familiar contact” forms “an essential element of the carnival spirit” (Bakhtin 10). Bakhtin does not buttress with evidence his historical claim that during medieval carnival, “[p]eople were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations,” but it is still a powerful one (to use a phrase that appears to be Bakhtin’s coinage, it has “theoretical pathos”; Bakhtin 10, 54). Of course, one can criticize carnival’s lack of vengefulness as toothless—no less an authority than Marion Turner, writing in An Oxford Guide to Chaucer, reports that many critics regard carnival “as a device for letting off steam within a constraining social order”—but there it is: carnival is everywhere generative and joyous and nowhere punishing or cruel (Turner 386).
Before we assess John’s sad case of noncarnival, we should consider a part of Robyn’s tale that fits the carnival mold quite well: the Absolon subplot. Robyn’s tale consists essentially of two subplots, the more prominent of which (at, by my count, 328 lines of the poem) is the one in which the young scholar Nicholas tricks his landlord John into thinking a second Flood is imminent so that, by a rather overcomplicated mechanism, he and John’s wife, Alisoun, will be able to sleep together. In the other subplot (246 lines long), the “parissh clerk” Absolon, having long pined after Alisoun, propositions her as she and Nicholas are lying in postcoital repose, leading to the unfortunate ers-kissing incident (Chaucer I.3312). “His hoote love” now “cold and al yqueynt,” Absolon goes to obtain a red-hot plow blade from the local blacksmith and presents himself to Alisoun once more, thinking she will think that he has failed to learn his lesson and will put her bottom out the window once more. Alisoun does indeed seem to think he really is that dumb, but this time it is Nicholas who, “th[inking] he wolde amenden al the jape,” puts his hole out, “leet[s] fle a fart / As great as it had been a thonder dent” in Absolon’s face, and gets “skyn an hande brede about” burnt off his “toute” as a reward (Chaucer I.3799–3813).
There is no reason to believe that either Nicholas or Absolon is happy with his fate, but they end the tale on equal footing, each having something to laugh and gloat about. Absolon, after the ill-advised kiss, is left “frot[ing] his lippes / With dust, with sond, with straw, with clooth, with chippes,” to little avail, but he also declares an utmost desire “[o]f this despit awroken for to be,” and he gets that (Chaucer I.3747–78). Nicholas is in so much pain that “he wende for to dye,” but someone had to go second in the exchange of pranks, and he is in decent enough shape post–plow blade to effect successfully John’s final humiliation (Chaucer I.3815). More importantly, the description of Absolon’s quenched love suggests that the Absolon-Alisoun-Nicholas love triangle has been resolved and that Absolon will neither challenge nor wish to challenge Nicholas for Alisoun’s affections in the future. In short, neither young man has reason to feel negated. As a result, each might laugh at himself in addition to laughing at the other—in keeping with the carnival spirit. As an Oxford student, Nicholas is a better class of clerk than the provincial Absolon, but by a series of bawdy turns they are brought to the same low and vivifying level. Alisoun does not share in the humiliation—mainly, she gets some laudable “busyness of myrth and of solas”—but she is a full, even the primary participant in the lowness of it all, and we can imagine her hearty amusement at both her lover’s and her would-be lover’s fates (Chaucer I.3654).
The Absolon subplot of Robyn’s tale thus contains not only the trappings of carnival—sex, social levelling, and matters of anal concern—but its gay essence: Absolon and Nicholas produce no plangent tones. It is John, however, whose story injures Osewold’s pride. His portion of the tale shares some superficial qualities with carnival. Though Robyn reserves his juiciest images for Absolon and Nicholas, the core of John’s story is one man’s quest to sleep with another man’s wife, so John’s subplot fits the bawdiness criterion. Also sitting comfortably in the subplot’s would-be carnivalesque atmosphere is its elaborate, sophisticated parody of Noah’s flood, which converges with the Absolon subplot when Nicholas cries out for water to assuage his sphincteral singeing. And, of course, the subplot is one in which a land-holding patriarch is humiliated and brought low—literally, as John, upon hearing Nicholas’s cry, cuts his own tub down from the roof and plummets to the ground, where he lies “aswowne … both pale and wan” and nursing a newly broken arm (Chaucer I.3828).
Yet notice the pathos in that last line, and notice that John’s humiliation is total and one-sided. The line “The folk gan laughen at” him seems carnivalesque enough, but he is given no opportunity to laugh along with them because he is excluded from the community of thinkers: when he attempts to explain to the town why he cut himself down from a tub suspended from his roof, Nicholas and Alisoun tell everyone that he is crazy, and are believed (Chaucer I.3840). John is physically barred from general discourse, as his attempts to speak are “with othes grete … sworn adoun” by a town in which everyone now holds him “wood” (Chaucer I.3845–46). Cast from the sphere of the rational, he almost becomes subhuman: the townspeople “kiken” and “cape” into his roof, as modern-day zoogoers might into a cage, and Robyn’s report that they “turned al his harm unto a jape,” rather than being a celebratory comment on the renewing power of degradation, comes across as a pathetic picture of how John’s community has obliterated his dignity (Chaucer I.3841–42). He does not get to be in on the jape; if he tried, he would be sworn adoun by townsfolk whose laughter at him resembles nothing so much as the oppositional, haughty, bitter, and destructive laughter of Bakhtin’s modern-day satirist.
John’s subplot fails to be carnivalesque, then, because it lacks a positive and renewing force. In addition to failing to embody carnival, however, it also casts doubt on the possibility of selecting powerful targets even for authentically carnivalesque humiliation. John is Nicholas’s landlord and Alisoun’s much-older husband. As a carpenter, he is relatively wealthy (Dyer 226). Ostensibly, he holds the power in the tale and, if the name of the game is social upheaval, he should be a target. Class and power are complicated, though, and it is not always possible to discern who in a given situation has a higher class status or more power by looking at material relations. Nicholas is John’s tenant and to that extent is his inferior, but he is also a student at Oxford, which status carries considerable prestige. John is awed by Nicholas’s learnedness to the point of fear, and when Nicholas feigns paralysis, John laments that “Man sholde not knowe of Goddes pryvetee” and expresses his “rew[] soore” that “hende Nicholas … shal be rated of his studying” (Chaucer I.3454–63). Nicholas’s plan revolves around taking advantage of this awe to trick John into making way for him to sleep with Alisoun—in other words, around the conversion of nonmaterial prestige into highly material wife-swyving. John’s relationship with Alisoun is more nuanced: by holding her “narwe in cage,” he makes himself a ripe target for carnival, but Robyn also emphasizes his love for her, which is borne out in his immediate reaction to hearing of the alleged impending deluge: “Allas my wyf! / And shal she drenche? Allas, myn Alisoun!” (I.3224, 3522–23). He is done in by his unreciprocated love for her; notwithstanding the prevailing material conditions, it becomes a means for her and Nicholas to exercise power over him.
In Robyn’s tale, carnival is possible but not guaranteed, present but not pervading. Something that looks carnivalesque might be negative and socially corrosive. Chaucer seems to challenge Bakhtin from the past: How do you know, we hear him demand, whether you are participating in carnival or cruelty? The townsfolk’s laughter at John probably feels a lot like carnival to them, but it rings hollow. Identifying the right targets for socially-levelling humiliation is in Robyn’s tale a difficult exercise, and people who look like oppressors to be toppled can be sympathetic victims. Controlling husbands can pathetically love their wives, and even toward landlords there may be ethical obligations. And even with appropriately chosen targets, there are ameliorative and there are putrefying ways to humiliate. What we mean in calling the townsfolk’s cruelty “authentic” is that it goes only in one direction, that it serves only to assassinate a man’s dignity. If Robyn’s tale is intended as a carnivalesque seizure of the tale-telling game, it does a pretty mediocre job. Far from launching the Canterbury Tales along a new trajectory of populist creativity, it sets them down the degenerative path that ends with Roger the Cook’s abortive effort. The fact that the laughter of the pilgrims is directed at fictional characters and not at Osewold or any other of the Tales’ diegetically real characters is of little significance; cruelty is a quality that is as deleterious in the vice of its subjects as in the pain experienced by its objects—and this viciousness can, in turn, spiral across diegetic levels. Cruelty, once introduced, spreads. Carnival is always a source of light; anticarnival, which is what Robyn’s tale finally becomes, can only ever end with an abrupt fade to black.
This essay was revised bearing in mind the comments of Julian Giordano and Nicholas Watson, who are not, however, to be held to account for its misprisions, oversights, fallicies, and elisions.
Bibliography
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1968. Print.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ca.1400. Ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012. Print.
“Don’t Kill Bill.” Perf. Holland Taylor. Dir. Daniel Gray Longino. Written by Richard E. Robbins. The Chair. Created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman. Netflix. 20 Aug. 2021. Web series.
Dyer, Christopher. Standards of Living in the Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Accessed online at https://archive.org/details/standardsoflivin0000dyer/.
Turner, Marion. “The carnivalesque.” An Oxford Guide to Chaucer. Ed. Steve Ellis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 384–99. Print.
Parsons, Ben. “Trouble at the Mill: Madness, Merrymaking, and Milling.” Chaucer Review 53.1 (2018): 3–35. Accessed online at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/682933.
Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Maidson, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Accessed online at https://archive.org/details/chaucersubjectof0000patt/. While I do not quote it, Patterson’s discussion of Robyn’s tale was a useful jumping-off point for my comments on the tale’s power relations, and he is one of the only critics I encountered who notices the tale’s noncarnival cruelty.
Pugh, Tison. “Queering Harry Bailly: Gendered Carnival, Social Ideologies, and Masculinity Under Duress in the Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer Review 41.1 (2006): 39–69. Accessed online at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/199622.