Carnival and Pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales

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Carnival and Pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales          Chaucer introduced in the General Prologue and in some of the tales a side of medieval culture now unfamiliar, the carnival world of medieval popular life, which the Soviet scholar Mikhail Bakhtin discerned as the true context of Rabelais. The tradition is still known to us in certain survivals of celebrations and images--carnivals and circuses, clown faces and such. Carnival imagery is first placed before us in the General Prologue to prepare us for what follows in the tales. How different this is from the Decameron: Boccaccio in his prologue and frame made his ten young ladies and gentlemen examples of perfect decorum, and permitted the carnival world of buffoonery and grotesquerie to appear only in the stories, where we get wild images of an abbess throwing her lover's trousers over her head thinking they're her wimple, or of a lecherous monk led into the public square on a chain disguised as a wild man and there recognized and apprehended, images of popular medieval folk comedy, mocking and overblown. In Chaucer such images, though they appear in the stories too, are associated with the pilgrims themselves, whose behavior on the pilgrimage is itself carnivalesque. This medieval idiom belonged to fold culture; it was not "theater." In the modern world clowns and fools and jesters are played by actors, but in medieval life they were real crackbrains. "(They) remained," writes Bakhtin, "fools and clowns always and wherever they made their appearance"; by the same token madmen, dwarfs, and blind men were objects of fascination and mirth. There was a whole world of carnival with its own activities and tastes, its own sensibility and imagery, that survived in some places many centuries after the Middle Ages. In 1788 the poet Goethe described in his Italienishe Reise the carnival in Rome, preceding Ash Wednesday, no doubt an actual survival of medieval traditions though changed in many ways. The last vestiges survive still, fragmented in grotesque art, circuses with their "freaks" and spectacles, "amusement parks," and in such festivals as Halloween or, closer to the medieval tradition, Mardi Gras. In medieval times carnival was, according to Bakhtin's analysis, "the people's second like, "festive, parodic, egalitarian. The carnival spirit, in such medieval traditions as the Feast of Fools, mocked and degraded official life: it put laughter temporarily in place of official seriousness. To medieval people official life meant fear, humiliation, submission to the whims of those in power; the carnival spirit, in reaction, cultivated the misshapen and incongruous, combining images of birth and life
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with images of death, disfigurement or dismemberment. It is not accurate to think of carnival only as a temporary and permitted reaction of the underprivileged/ Bakhtin, as a Marxist, over-emphasizes this side, but he recognizes the positive side that celebrated human life per se. The best description of carnival from this viewpoint was made by a Christian writer, W.H. Auden, who was it in juxtaposition against the transcendent and eschatological aspects of Christianity: Carnival celebrates the unity of our human race as mortal creatures, who come into this world and depart from it without our consent, who must eat, drink, ...

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