Abby Berates Celebrated Classics No. 3

So this is how it is. I have midterms and midterm papers and online midterm quizes (lecturers are getting more and more creative with these things) right now, in addition to working two jobs. In other words, I don't have a lot of spare time to read for fun. Right now I am trying to plough my way through The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy (boy that's a lot of c's for one name) which is at once exasperating and oddly enjoyable, you will know the how and why of it all when I finally finish it and write a review. My prognosis is that this will happen around the time the human race will be almost wiped out by the effects of global warming, so you can read it and go "Hmm" and continue basking in the purple sunlight. In the mean time, since I do have to read a lot for all those various midterm permutations I'm being bombarded with, there will be a lot more classic literature bashing in this blog, which I know will make a lot of people very happy. Ok, it'll make the three people that read this thing happy. Ok, alright already, it'll make me happy. Yippeeee!

After that intro, I regret to inform you that there will be no bashing today, since I'm going to discuss Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterburry Tales, a major staple of the English literature canon, as ALL the freshman year English Lit students in the WORLD know, which I actually happen to enjoy! I can start by saying that the way this man managed to criticize every source of authority around him, be it the church, the court, the aristocracy or even storytellers like himself and still slip it by all of them is absolutely masterful. The critiques are so subtle yet so undeniably there! They are present in the fact that the most religious figures on the pilgrimage to Canterbury tell the most bawdy and raunchy tales, that the noble knights are rapists and tell pagan stories and that the infamous, slutty wife of Bath is perhaps the most psychologically complex character here. There are A LOT of tales in The Canterbury Tales as the title may suggest, and I'm not going to pretend to have read all of them. To those of you unfamiliar with the homogenous world of English Lit faculties, everyone reads the knight's tale, the miller's tale, the wife of Bath's tale, and sometimes the man of law's tale or the nun's priest tale. Those are the standards, expecially the first three. They all deal with people from different professions, different sphere's of life, different classes, different genders even! And the best part about Chaucer is that no one can enjoy complete respectfullness and seriousness, everyone gets poked fun at, at least a little bit. Stories get interrupted at their climaxes, narrators get pushed in and out of the complex narratory framework and the strict and structured world of the medievals is turned into a chaos in which all are equal. It's a pain to read in Middle English, with its old timey words and cooky spelling, but after having this text basically shoved down my throat for 3 years, and after much initial resistance, I can finally say that it's most definitely worth racking your brains over.