Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, at least from a textual standpoint, remains unfinished. At least two tales are incomplete or interrupted, the Cook’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale, the order of the tales has been debated, and some of the tales are seemingly thrown in at the last minute. And within our current deconstructionist zeitgeist, critics like Catherine Belsey suggest that readers should not seek “the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions” (365). So despite the obvious textual flaws and a multiplicity of meaning and interpretation, many thematic functions of The Canterbury Tales are, however, complete — at least in an Aristotelian sense in that they imitate life and its contradictions. Life rarely suggests unity intrinsically, but must have unity imposed upon it for its denizens’ comfort. We, as humans, decide that we will take the pilgrimage of life to its ultimate conclusion. We decide to impose that order on our ostensibly quixotic existences — we decide to play the game.

Continue Reading

A tragedy must not be a spectacle of a perfectly good man brought from prosperity to adversity. For this merely shocks us. Nor, of course must it be that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity; for that is not tragedy at all, but the perversion of tragedy, and revolts the moral sense. Nor again, should it exhibit the downfall of an utter villain: since pity is aroused by undeserved misfortunes, terror by misfortunes befalling men like ourselves. There remains, then, as the only proper subject for tragedy, the spectacle of a man not absolutely or eminently good or wise, who is brought to disaster not by sheer depravity, but by some error or frailty. Lastly, the man must be highly renowned and prosperous — an Oedipus, a Thyestes, or some other illustrious person. –Aristotle, The Poetics

Continue Reading