by Candace Barrington
The day after Central Connecticut State University shut down on 12 March, our English department students and faculty added a Coronavirus Notebook to their online magazine, Blue Muse. I was invited to submit an entry, and I decided a reprint might be a good way to kick off Pedagogy and Profession’s newsletter. We’ve retained the present-day English translations.
The original posting can be found at 23 March 2020, https://bluemusemag.com/2020/03/13/coronavirus-notebook/ .
I find myself thinking of the paradoxical curse, May you live in interesting times.
For thirty years, I’ve studied and taught a piece of literature that emerged out of “interesting times”: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Though it begins by invoking the sweet showers of April and the joys of going on pilgrimage with groups of strangers, it is haunted by the Black Death, the great bubonic pandemic that swept the Eastern Hemisphere in the fourteenth century. Generally, it’s been difficult for students (and me, if I’m honest) to grasp the horrors of the Plague’s rapid sprawl across Asia, Europe, and Africa. Many of the great social upheavals of the next few centuries can be tied to the demographic, economic, and political consequences of the sudden and terrifying deaths over a hundred million adults and children—somewhere between 35 and 60 percent of the population.
One of those who survived the Plague was Geoffrey Chaucer.
Perhaps because he would have been a small child when the Plague reached London in 1348, his literary works are more concerned with depicting the consequences of the Black Death than the plague itself. The one exception is “The Pardoner’s Tale.”
The tale is prefaced with a lengthy (and self-incriminating) sermon on greed before the Pardoner launches into a tale explicitly set during the fourteenth century’s Great Plague, described as a pestilence that has slain thousands. Personified as Death, the Plague sneaks up on the unwary and kills them without warning. The tale zeros in on three young men who spent their hours at bars and brothels singing, dancing, gambling, drinking, and igniting the “fires of lechery” (my translations from Middle English). Feeling immune to the Plague’s menace, they continue in this fashion until they learn that the Plague has struck one of their chums “as he sat on his bench upright.” Along with this news, they are warned that “it is necessary / To be forewarned about such an adversary. / You should always be ready to meet Him.”
Enraged by this news and ignoring the warning, the partiers declare their unbreakable brotherhood and decide they will seek out and kill “this false traitor, Death.” Of course—the partiers being who they are and Death being what it is—both the brotherhood and its ambitions are thwarted. The three end up betraying one another over eight bushels of gold, becoming murderers and the murdered in one stroke.
Chaucer’s tale about greed, the Plague, young people disregarding caution, and our debts to one another is on my mind as I move my courses to an online platform. One of those courses focuses on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. In the past, I’ve asked students to read “The Pardoner’s Tale” early in the semester. Although embedded in a complex series of rhetorical slights-of-hand, the core tale of the three rioters pursuing Death is accessible to students newly introduced to Chaucer’s fourteenth-century English. (In fact, the tale is so accessible that is has frequently been anthologized in story collections for children.)
This semester, however, we aren’t reading the tale until after spring break, when classes resume online for the rest of the academic year.
By then, my students and I will have had experiences that make us much more astute readers of “The Pardoner’s Tale.” We will have seen the perils of greed and the rewards of generosity. We will have learned that “being ready” with a well-stocked pantry and a good Internet connection is not enough. We will know deep down the dangers of being let loose from our jobs, the fears of contagion, and the loneliness of isolation. We might have a bit more sympathy for the Pardoner’s three partiers—and for one another as we come together (in whatever ways we can muster) to share our love of literature and to learn what the crises of the past can help us understand about our own “interesting times.”