Chaucer's Voys

Abstract

IN THE PROLOGUE TO THE MILLER'S TALE, Chaucer apologizes for the tale's bawdy content by marking its speaker as a peasant-a cherl-a characterization supported by his physical description in the General Prologue.2 Most modern critics have read this set of marks as constitutive of the Miller's identity: the Miller is a churl. Yet Chaucer marks the Miller in other ways as well. The tale he tells is generically a fabliau, a form neither nor, for that matter, English. But more important, as I will argue, the Miller's bawdy tale explicitly puns on a learned academic discourse, namely, the science of number and proportion in medieval music theory. The Miller's Tale, in other words, is not simply a bawdy peasant story; it is a bawdy story told by a peasant that resonates ironically with disparate and academic discourses. The relationships between these various discourses has been obscured by the assumption that the meaning and function of the the tale is controlled primarily by the Miller's identity as a peasant. Historicist readings in particular, with their concern for the social meaning of texts, have focused exclusively on the Miller's churlishness, interpreting him as the of an English peasant consciousness.3 As a metonymic representation of a social group, the Miller presents the possibility of a social voice; the social meaning of Chaucer's text revolves around the extent to which that is allowed to speak. In emphasizing the Miller's social voice, however, these critics subordinate (or even deny) the social meaning of Chaucer's invocation of genres and learned disciplines. I will be focusing on Chaucer's use of learned academic discourse, not to propose a new hierarchy of discursive gestures, but rather to focus on the fusion of those gestures in the creation of vernacular fiction. My concern is-as I believe Chaucer's was-not the articulation of a particular social voice, but the creation of a one. The Miller does not a peasant consciousness; Chaucer uses the Miller's to effect thejuxtaposition of various literate discourses as a poetic strategy, a strategy I designate literary voice. I have appropriated the term literary voice from the conceptual vocabulary of the New Criticism, not to imply the Literary as a transcendent category-the very problem that historicist criticism seeks to redress in describing the participation of texts in various social discourses-but to acknowledge the specific-