A Thrifty Tale: Narrative Authority and the Competing Values of the Man of Law’s Tale

Abstract

A Thrifty Tale: Narrative Authority and the Competing Values of the Man of Law’s Tale Gania Barlow Criticism of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and its introduction, prologue, and epilogue is marked by explorations of the apparent inconsistencies or disunity within the tale, and between the tale and its framing materials. One important example is the sense of a clash between the tale’s ostensible sentence and the attitudes or interests of the Man of Law as narrator.1 This clash suggests a possible distance among three narrating voices: the named Man of Law, an “internal” narrator whose voice informs the tale, and Chaucer as the author who constructs the underlying meaning of the tale.2 The relationship of texts [End Page 397] and narrators, along with issues of narrative voice and intention, is at the heart of critical problems with the tale. Rather than considering these moments of disunity or inconsistency to be failings of the text, I believe that they call attention to the activity of narration, forming a layered meditation on the possibilities and dangers of narrative authority.3 In order to scrutinize those layers, I will first examine the tale in isolation, looking especially at the internal narrator and his methods. I will then reflect on the tale’s relationship to the Man of Law, to the framing material, and to the Canterbury Tales and its author. Within the tale and its frame, the different types of narrators act as characters or subjects who negotiate their encounters with the material, as well as shape that material by means of their narrative authority.4 The three tellers attempt to displace their own individual responsibility for their narratives onto other authors or authorities, even as they exercise their own considerable auctoritas. The dissonance created by these opposing movements brings to the fore the question of whose authority is at work, and to what end. I argue that in each part of the Man of Law’s Tale we are shown narrators who use their authority as a means of laying claim to the spiritual authority of their material. In the internal narrator’s encounter with his tale, for example, he displays interests divided between spiritual and secular forms of power. In theory, he supports the primacy of spiritual authority, which is certainly present in the tale’s most obvious sentence, but, in practice, this layman’s narration of that authority converts it to a currency that is simply one among other available currencies of power.5 I further argue that the tale’s introduction, prologue and even, perhaps, epilogue present us with lay narrators or speakers engaged in similar strategies, who recognize the “symbolic capital” of both spiritual and narrative authority6 and who use their proper currency of [End Page 398] narrative as a means of accessing a spiritual currency not otherwise available to them.7 This potential of narration to co-opt other forms of authority might seem viable only within the temporary and artificial community of pilgrims, for whom tale-telling is the primary currency. Insofar, however, as all of the pilgrims within that community also maintain their worldly identities and systems of authority, the tale-telling community represents a liminal space between the worlds of the pilgrims and the worlds of their narratives, in which alternative forms of value and authority can interact and come into conflict, bearing with them a potential to change the balance of power. In the turbulent political and religious climate of Chaucer’s day, in which issues of spiritual authority and the control of texts were notoriously intertwined, the strategy envisioned in the Man of Law’s Tale of enacting social change through narrative might have seemed either an exciting possibility or a grave threat. Narrative Strategies and Moral Authority In telling the tale of Custance, the internal narrator imitates the heroine’s piety and seems to support the virtuous sentence of the tale as he reiterates and explicates it. Yet while he acknowledges the value of that spiritual authority, he also uses it as a narrative device, appropriating its symbolic capital and converting its spiritual value into narrative value. Though he re-voices the conventional...