The Chaucer Review

The Chaucer Review 38.1 (2003) 83-97

Apply Yourself:
Learning While Reading the Tale of Melibee

Stephen G. Moore

Why should anyone be interested in a story that lacks analogical application to his or her own experience? ¹

—E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

The long Tale of Melibee ² is short on plot, its ratio of saws to story explaining both the neglect and the misinterpretation from which it suffers. Derek Pearsall has called the tale's plot a "peg on which to hang a vast quantity of moral discourse on a variety of matters," and he is one of many who find the Melibee a tale lacking a significant narrative dimension. ³ For other readers, however, this peg wobbles considerably. These critics hold that the tale's arrangement of events guides the reader on the interpretative path, but they trace the passage through the characters' absurd and disappointing actions as a sapper's tunnel undermining Melibee's progress in wisdom, Prudence's authority, and, hence, the tale's own claim to teach. I argue here, however, that a closer look at the Melibee's narrative structure will demonstrate its strong and positive contribution to the tale's meaning, and will, in addition, clarify the roles Prudence and Melibee play in creating that meaning. Reaching beyond the particulars of Melibee's feud (its ostensible subject) the deliberative Melibee teaches deliberation: it lays before its reader a model of good decision-making that emphasizes the importance of proper speech to making proper decisions. What is more, its narrative structure also develops in the reader skills essential to following this model. In particular, the tale inculcates a sensitivity to the shape of its own narrative contexts that develops an ability to see particular circumstances in light of larger patterns: in short, it trains its reader in the art of application. ⁴ The tale thus completes its meaning in an effect it has on its reader, an effect produced by a narrative structure whose patterns continually shape and reshape the reader's experience of the tale. Because the true complexity of the Melibee's narrative structure has not been fully appreciated, the dependence of the tale's meaning on that structure has not been properly understood. [End Page 83] Furthermore, flawed descriptions of how the tale's narrative structure guides the reader have perpetuated certain misreadings of the tale's key events as undercutting its didactic purpose.

The Melibee's narrative structure is complex because the tale is so recursive, continually asking its reader to see the events of the reading "present" in light of the reading "past" and vice versa. Thus the literal surface of the tale gains complexity and dynamism, with the reader's experience of the narrative retrospectively transforming settled perceptions of previously experienced events and patterns of action. Such recursiveness appears not only when Prudence revisits Melibee's flawed arguments and actions, but also when she re-narrates the tale's beginning to explain why Christ may have permitted the foes' attack. Furthermore, as the characters bring examples and maxims to bear on their own circumstances, the miniature narratives suggested by these quoted sententiae nudge and tug at the reader's sense of the shape of the main story, highlighting its contours through contrast or parallel. More implicit, but no less important connections also emerge between different segments of the main story itself, as past and present reading moments interact in the mind of a reader moving through the tale. ⁵ Reading the Tale of Melibee's narrative structure properly depends, in sum, on what Wolfgang Iser has described as an interaction between—to use a metaphor—past and present chapters in the story of the reader's experience of the text: "reading does not merely flow forward, but . . . recalled segments also have a retroactive effect, with the present transforming the past." ⁶ This interaction characteristic of all reading takes on special significance in the Melibee. The tale achieves its didactic purpose as its recursive structure directs the reader in acts of virtual rereading of recalled "perspectives," such...