The Clerk's Tale and the expectation of astonishment
The suspense of knowing the ending
My Western Canon salon series with Interintellect continues on 11th July with Goethe. We are discussing The Sorrows of Young Goethe.
Penelope Fitzgerald mentions this as one of the stories that developed her love of plots with a twist at the end. But it appeared on the 1970 A-level exam with this question: “Whatever its other merits, The Clerk’s Tale does not achieve its effects primarily through surprise.”
So is it a plot with a twist or not?
Here’s the story. Walter, the Marquis, marries Griselda, a village girl. He decides to test her wifeliness and has her children taken away at birth. She thinks they have gone to die. Another Marquis, however, raises them in secret. Years later, Walter tests Griselda again: he sends her home and tells her he is marrying a younger woman. Griselda dutifully goes home but comes back to help with the wedding preparations. The big surprise is that the children are coming back. Instead of marrying one of them, Walter presents the young woman and the young man to Griselda as her returned children.
Obviously, in many ways, the ending is not a surprise. We know the children were secretly raised by the other Marquis. Maybe we would be surprised by the plot if we weren’t familiar with the genre, but that’s not a very good answer.
And I don’t think it’s true.
Anyone reading this story must get the lurking feeling that Walter is not really killing the children. He calls it a test. That means we pretty much know what's going to happen. The wedding doesn’t fool the reader. That tells us what to expect. Much like will-they-won’t-they plots we might not feel certain of the ending, but we know approximately what it’s going to be. And of course, like The Winter’s Tale, there is a happy ending.
The question is: how could someone who loves his wife and doesn't want to leave her do something like this, and how could they end up with a happy ending? The answer is that this is not a realistic story, it’s an allegory, a parable, to teach religious forbearance. Griselda is like Job or Abraham.
The Clerk’s Tale is a test story. Though we are not so familiar with these tales today, we still recognise the genre. In A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which is truly excellent), John Burrow said of The Clerk’s Tale,
In ordinary human terms the story is unbearable as well as impossible; and it must therefore be understood in an allegorical, or better, a fortiori fashion. It teaches us how to bear the adversities that God inflict on us—and so is really no more difficult to accept than the Abraham and Isaac story.
Just because we can figure out the sort of thing Walter is up to, doesn’t make it less shocking. If I could predict the future (in a credible way) and told you someone would fall off a building, you would still be horrified when you saw it happen.
So the answer to that A-level question is that The Clerk’s Tale works through the expectation of astonishment. It’s a plot mechanism like suspense, because we know what to expect, but what we expect is terrible. Dramatic irony heightens our sense of astonishment because it takes away the surprise. To feel the despair involved in being tested, we must have more awareness of the plot, not less. We are constantly asking not “what will happen?” but “how can s/he bear it?”
A few lines at the end show that Chaucer understood quite well that his medieval audience would not swallow whole this test story.
But o word, lordynges, herkneth er I go:
It were ful hard to fynde now-a-dayes
In al a toun Grisildis thre or two;
For if that they were put to swiche assayes,
The gold of hem hath now so badde alayes
With bras, that thogh the coyne be fair at ye,
It wolde rather breste a-two than plye.
But one word, lords, hear before I go:
It would be very difficult to find now-a-days
In all the town Griseldas three or two;
For if they were put to such tests,
The gold of them has now been so badly debased
With brass, that though the coin be fair to look at,
It would rather break in two than bend.
Chaucer knows that, as Burrow says, strict test stories “were not quite viable, as they stood, in the latter-day, or “now-a-day”, world.” And so Walter must “stand or fall as a human character”. There is no longer anything supernatural, spiritual, or Godly about his character type.
Chaucer has taken the old religious test story and made it all too human. That’s the real twist in the tale.
