This semester I have been taking Chaucer as one of my high level English classes. Over our trip through the Canterbury Tales something interesting has happened to me. In our modern setting for literature (ever since around the 19th century, I believe) there has been huge mania for the author to be absent from the work. Show, don't tell. I've listened to that phrase repeated over and over until I felt as though were I a horse, they would have been pounding dead chunks of me into the floor rather a while ago. I've been noticing Chaucer, though. In this work, his influence appears everywhere. His commentaries on everyone and everything are woven as delicately through the text as some exquisite thread woven through a tapestry. He speaks through the Wife of Bath,where he gives woman a voice and he tears apart old and shopworn ideas. He establishes the hierarchy (The Knights Tale), and then pulls it apart in front of our eyes (Like with dear ol' Topas). I find I value his opinion, albeit from hundreds of years away and beyond the grave. Where Shakespeare is oft regarded as The Bard (capital letters and all) Geoffrey Chaucer stands out in his work as a nicely flawed, and very real man. Now, likely his personality was nothing like the image I've crafted in my head about this author. Needless to say, there stands some evidence that he was anti-Semitic. He generally tends to be bitingly critical of some, while pardoning others easily and without second thought.
I find I enjoy this image. His contradictions and uncomfortable flaws make him seem like one of us, which may well have held his appeal for the community at large. Not an aristocrat and not a peasant, Chaucer straddled both worlds, and with his quirky honesty becomes appealing to all. Like a good friend, sometimes he drives me up the wall. Sometimes I hate him a bit. Never before in my life have I felt this way about an author. I find I had been content to leave the curtain drawn, and not cared to look at the man behind it. After all, the great Oz told me not to, right? This class has given me a different perspective. I find myself looking at literature in different ways, suddenly conscious about the author in ways I never had been before. Simply, it rocks toast. (Yes, toast.)
I find what I enjoy most to be the picture of him and his motley crew of pilgrims that has formed in my head. Luckily for me they don't have to be based in reality, I have my text, and my imagination. Happily, neither of these things have much to do with the world at large.