Paul Strohm, "A Mixed Commonwealth of Style"

"A Mixed Commonwealth of Style"
Strohm, Paul. "A Mixed Commonwealth of Style." Social Chaucer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1989), pp.168-9, 171-78, 197-82, 225-27.

In this article Strohm pulls from Bakhtin and argues that the Canterbury Tales posesses polyvocality, wherein "its voices are never subject to dialectical resolution", and that it has this trait not because it is meant as a true reflection of a diverse and disrupted society, but because its polyvocality is a tool to meditate on the view of society as diverse and disrupted. By shattering the meditation into diverse and contradictory voices, the piece manages to address multiple issues and views without threat or danger. Strohm goes on to demonstrate that the Tales are not realistic depictions of medival England; the peasantry, which made up nine tenths of the populace, is entirely represented by the single plowman, who tells no tale. Furthermore, Chaucer also expresses doubt as to the use of fabulation to convey truth, implying that the Tales, being fabulations, should not be interpreted as taken from reality. Strohm concludes that the Parson's tale at the end of the work and Chaucer's Retraction posit the utopian idea that while the world is full of competing views of reality, the proper response to this is to seek "beyond the temporal sphere and beyond works that imitate that sphere -- ... in 'omina secula'", that all might come together by transcending their factions and rivalries. He also suggests, in the same breath, that the utopian value of the CT is its ability to accomodate a world where such mixed discourse may take place.

--Liz Soehngen (see also the excerpt in the back of our class text, the Norton edition of Canterbury Tales, p. 556ff.)