Abstract
Ackroyd’s novel might be viewed as a narrative territory, emerging out of the dialogue between the contemporary and medieval cultures, their literary texts and alternative concepts of history and fiction. The paper analyses the multiple ways in which the novelist rewrites The Canterbury Tales. If Chaucer’s poem presents a microcosm of late medieval English society, Ackroyd’s novel is a collection of vignettes, making up the image of London in 1399, when the integrity of the city is shown as threatened by political intrigues and heresy. Ackroyd also remodels Chaucer’s pilgrims into such characters which suit the demands of the contemporary narrative and help him to develop his fictitious plot. Despite the apparent structural similarity of both texts, the concept of pilgrimage as a linear and movable frame of Chaucer’s poem is replaced in The Clerkenwell Tales by that of the city in turmoil, whose image, focalised by individual characters, and emerging out of a mosaic of various perspectives, appears as both solid and elusive. The literary debt is demonstrated, therefore, to be less straightforward than Ackroyd suggests. He replays certain tones of Chaucer’s poem but what he borrows is usually given a new form and endowed with new implications. This simultaneous assertion of the dependence on the medieval material and its transformation seems to enact at the level of the narrative discourse a warning against unquestioning acceptance of any overtly pressed meaning, which, as the implications of the story indicate, might be potentially dangerous at any time.
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Notes
- 1.
As argued by Burrow (1990, p. 32) in his analysis of Middle English literature: “Authority belongs to the auctor…To be an auctor is to augment the knowledge and wisdom of humanity”.
- 2.
Vitz (1992, p. 15) illustrates this distinction by placing the medieval characters along a vertical, “hierarchical or evaluative axis”, establishing “the range between superiority and inferiority” in contrast to contemporary characters built along “a horizontal axis” or “the axis of differentiation”, representing “normal as opposed to unusual, unlike” (Vitz 1992, p. 16).
- 3.
As Ellis (2005, p. 75) indicates, the pilgrimage to Canterbury begins in Southwark outside the city walls and the status of several pilgrims as residents of London is not entirely clear. The evidence gathered by (Ellis 2005, p. 75) shows that, apart from Chaucer and the Cook, directly identified as Londoners, the other pilgrims can only be treated as possible London citizens (Merchant, Sergeant of the law and Guildsmen), or possibly dwell outside the city walls (the Host, the Prioress, the Pardoner, the Manciple) or, as the remaining group, may not even be related to the experience of the city.
- 4.
- 5.
As Ackroyd explains in London: The biography Ackroyd (2003, p. 40), the double nature of London as “a city of God as well as a city of men” can be seen as embodied in the character of Clerkenwell, both a location of the Clerk’s Well, one of the ancient holy wells of healing, and a staging ground of both “miracle plays as well as more secular bouts of wrestling and jousting”. In Ackroyd’s opinion Ackroyd (2003, p. 40) this concoction of sacrum and profanum makes the area representative of whole London, and the novelist utilises this parallelism in the title of The Clerkenwell Tales.
- 6.
The pilgrimage motif is, nevertheless, repeatedly evoked in The Clerkenwell Tales: in reference to April as a month “when folk longed to go on pilgrimages” Ackroyd (2004, p. 35), which is almost an exact quotation from Chaucer’s “Prologue”; in Garret Barton’s (the franklin’s) reflection on St Paul’s Cathedral (p. 56); in Jolland’s (the monk’s) lesson on providence and destiny, in which the general motif of the pilgrimage of life is replaced with “a pilgrimage to Canterbury”(p. 99), in his quotation of from Chaucer’s “Ballad of Good Counsel” (p. 102), and also in reference to punishment imposed on the sergeant of law (p. 197).
- 7.
Medieval London could not be literally envisaged as a maze. In London: Biography, Ackroyd (2003, p. 2) uses, however, this image to represent the topography and history of contemporary London: “London is labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.”
- 8.
Ackroyd’s preoccupation with heretical activity of the predestined makes it impossible for pilgrimage to form a valid background of their intrigues, since heretics, and in particular Lollards, with whose beliefs Ackroyd compares and contrasts the views of the predestined in “Author’s Tale”, were, as Finucane (1977, p. 200) points out, severe critics of both image-worship and pilgrimages.
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Bukowska, J. (2013). Between Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Peter Ackroyd’s Clerkenwell Tales: A Dialogue of the Contemporary Novel and Medieval Literary Conventions. In: Fabiszak, J., Urbaniak-Rybicka, E., Wolski, B. (eds) Crossroads in Literature and Culture. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21994-8_27
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