I have taught the Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” in my humanities class for 14 of the past 15 years. I initially read it as an undergad, then again in an insufferable grad school seminar that was as “on brand” as you can imagine: obsequious and pandering students with an obsequious and pandering Boomer professor. It was post-this and post-that, and at heart, he taught that Chaucer was essentially a nihilistic-yet-playful postmodern. I knew that this was inaccurate, but I too preferred the ironic know it all version, because I felt like an ironic know it all, too.
I dutifully taught the long four-part story that kicks off the Tales, but I did not really get it. I found the story to be hopelessly “vanilla”: knights and ladies, love at first sight, a contest to win her hand, and long speeches about life and love. I was just too post-Monty Python for all of that. It was too earnest, too saccharine. I much preferred the bawdy Miller and the saucy Wife. They were Chaucer at his irreverent best, skewering fools and sacred-cows with wild abandon.
But last year, something clicked for me. I always teach my students two basic things about reading great literature: 1) poetry is on purpose; 2) we humans are natural pattern-watchers. What we do in class is not magic, but a disciplined apprehension of form. This time around, the form of the tale, and indeed the whole of Chaucer’s project emerged from the irony. Chaucer has the knight go first on purpose. And I was beginning to understand why.
I have always seen that Chaucer’s work was really about the enduring comedy of life, and the undergirding disconnect between men and women, between the upper and lower classes, between the religious and the secular. The pilgrimage barely makes sense for us jaded moderns, and most of us just skip over the fact that this parade of profanity is unironically headed to the most popular pilgrimage spot of the martyred Thomas a Becket. It matters, but I will save that part for later.
As chance would have it, I stumbled upon this piece by Mary Harrington a day before I started the General Prologue on All Soul’s Day. I first found Mary on Twitter (@moveincircles), and she was writing about what she dubbed “reactionary feminism.” Her talk was about renegotiating roles in the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, a topic I always follow with great interest. She argues that feminism, worked free from the fairy tales, is a story of economic transitions.
“Specifically,” she continues, “it’s a story of how men and women re-negotiated life in common, in response first to the transition in the industrial era, then into the twentieth-century market society. If everyone seems to be arguing about men and women again, it’s because we’re in the throes of another economic transition.” I appreciate her focus on the material conditions because it is an area I tend to get to too late. Material conditions are important, and yet we are not mere material. As I argue in my former posts, we are deeply spiritual creatures.
As a long time prep-school teacher I have noted that we spend a load of time getting our kids into “top colleges” but never really talk to them about the true markers of a meaningful life. In other words we tend to focus on material-condition stuff and less-so on personal and spiritual ones. Instead, we remain comfortable only talking about those things that would make a “successful life”—or as David Brooks framed it a decade ago: the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. I find this fact both curious and damning. Though this poses genuine problems for everyone, it is especially troubling for young women. No one is comfortable talking to our high achieving females about love and marriage and children and all that. No. It is all about leaning-in and girl-boss fervorinos. I have watched with some interest the social media feeds of my former students as they wend their way through the wastelands of modern life. Some have succeeded; some have gotten married. But for many, they are in a kind of perpetual extended “post-college” hookup hell.
We are lying to our kids through a vast maze of omissions and elisions. And the costs for women are far more expensive and unequal than they are for men. Time is not on our side, especially for having and raising children. The reckoning will be harrowing.
In Mary's piece she notes that men and women are in a bad way. Marriage rates are in a free fall, loneliness abounds, and being able to establish lifelong partnerships is seen with suspicion and perhaps derision. This is due to the historical and economic transition we are living through which she calls “bio-libertarianism.” She notes
[m]illions of young people are trapped in a hell of transactional sexuality ordered not to love, or meaning, or the future, but to bare, squalid, hyper-mediated commerce.
Why can’t we get along? The Right blames feminism, but they do so with a low-resolution “pop” version of history that is thin and shallow. “We must do better” Mary notes. “We can do better. And we must, because today defending women’s interests is properly, and rightly, a defence of the family. Which is to say of all humans including men – understood as relational beings.”
Mary sketches out three positions or reactions to the modern crisis of negotiating the next economic transition—Trads, Cads, and Rads. In her schema she claims that all three positions are untenable and must be abandoned.
I would like to speak up on behalf of the Trad position. Or, better yet, I would like to focus on the “Underneath” of the Trad position. Trad-Larping (as another friend Steve Skojec quips) is absurd and “pure fantasy fiction,” but I think we focus on the accidents and particularities instead of deeper patterns of being. The Trads are closest to something real, but are hindered by their low-resolution “take” on history, and lack of self-understanding. Their instincts may be on to something, but they suffer from a kind of “recency bias” and the great copium of false-nostalgia. As Mary points out, the Trads are not trad enough.
Whereas the Trads want “old fashioned” marriage with old-fashioned sex roles and old-fashioned arrangements, the Cads want free access to as much sex without commitment as possible. They’ve had a pretty good run of things the last half-century. But the price of this short-term strategy is mounting. “The cads have accepted this situation and resigned themselves to just scavenging whatever kicks they can get.” Rads want to dominate the other sex and “win.”
If we can get to the Underneath—to see what deeper forms animate the longing for wholeness—we may be able to reclaim an enchantment that can save us from our baser selves, from the the zombie-world we and our children currently suffer within. It is not a world, but rather an anti-world.
Teaching The Canterbury Tales as I first read her piece, I immediately saw it through the lens of three Tales centered on love, marriage, and the order of the world: “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” and “The Wife’s Tale.” Many of the individual tales hit on these themes, but as it so happens, I saw in Mary’s taxonomy a fairly neat fit for what I was in the midst of teaching.
I’d like to propose that the Knight’s vision sets the table, while the Miller’s contribution merely “requites” the Knight, and the Wife attempts to “requite” them both. The Miller is the Cad, while the Wife is the Rad. The latter two “riffs” are understandable reactions and certainly entertain. But scaled out, they ultimately fail because they reduce the human person to mere animality in a quest to win.
We need to re-assert and re-establish the world. Only the “trad” take of the Knight deigns to posit a Cosmos. And we are desperately in need of a Cosmos if we are to “live and move and have our being.” The cultural deposit has been drawn down, and the parasites threaten the host. I will contend in the next post that without the Knight’s vision, we are doomed to be getters and spenders, isolated in the bio-libertarian nightmare of Only-Fans and Tinder hookups on the one hand, or isolated power-hungry tools of the “individualist liberal anthropology” on the other. Both are scripts-to-death.
The Knight sketches out an Epic sensibility: his story attempts to reconnect this individuated collection of rogues and knaves (the other members of the “fellowship”) to a higher purpose. What Mary’s own “low-res” take on tradism misses is this deeper vision of what the Epic genre affords. My former teacher, the great visionary of genre theory, Louise Cowan, argues that the Epic is necessary. Without Epic, we have no arena. She notes:
What gives the epic its cultural priority, then, might be summed up as its function of cosmopoesis, its making of a cosmos wherein the other genres find their place and within which human life may be envisioned in its varied dimensions. A cosmos is a self-enclosed state of order which must be intuited; and certainly the epic cosmos—a poetic image—cannot be logically encompassed or defined, nor can all its components be listed.
Epic terraforms: it creates the world by structuring an arena by which and in which life has meaning.
In my next post I will sketch out the respective visions: the Knight’s idealism, the Miller’s avaricious imagination and the Wife’s ordering of power over love. I hope to show that much of our current discontent and confusion stems from our abandnment of our Epic sensibility. Without the Knight and his Epic tale, we have no language for duty, honor, sacrifice, obligation, nor love. Without these virtues, there is no “our” nor “us.”
The Knight Builds the World
Thanks for this. I haven't thought about the Canterbury Tales in a long time, but I like the idea that The Knight's Tale provides a grounding for the others. I recalled that there is some uncertainty about the ordering of the tales, but the knight's seems to come first consistently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_The_Canterbury_Tales.
I also want to thank you for your General Eclectic podcast. I often listen when I'm doing household chores. My favorite episode was probably the one with Jessica Hooten Wilson.
Now that my kids are grown, I'm trying to find a Catholic, classical school where I might make myself useful teaching. My wife says "I have one move left in me, and it's to someplace with less winter." (We're in New Hampshire.) Given that we're free to move, and knowing that you teach, I wonder if you have a recommendation about how I should proceed. I suspect high schools are rightly wary of someone in his fifties with a software background who proposes to relocate in order to teach. I'm at hardt@substack.com.
Again, thanks for all your good work, and may God bless you and your family.
Michael