Lumiansky's Paradox: Ethics, Aesthetics and Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale"

Now, for the first time, twentieth-century readers can have The Canterbury Tales in their own modern, idiomatic language, unembarrassed by archaic expressions or by attempts to torture the free and easy rhythms of the original into rhyme and meter.

The famous stories-the wise, the witty, the racy and romantic-are given unexpurgated in a translation at once faithful to the original and in a prose as clear and modern as a freshly minted coin.

Whatever our response to this advertisement is now, Simon and Schuster thought that audiences in 1948 would respond favorably to this dust jacket blurb for R. M. Lumiansky's newly printed edition of the Canterbury Tales. The good folks at Simon and Schuster tried to sell the book on many levels. The Canterbury Tales will enlighten ("wise"), entertain ("witty"), endear ("romantic"), and even arouse ("racy"): not even Harry Bailey could ask for more. All of this, of course, is only possible if the book circulates like the newly minted coin at the close of the passage. Books must be read if they are to have any transformative effect (titillating or otherwise), something of which writers are well aware-I don't think Lumiansky is any exception. But if we consider-as Chaucer certainly did at the close of Troilus and Criseyde: "Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye . . ." (V. 1786)-the enormity of this prospect, the fact that one loses control of one's own writing once published, then we may come face to face with a sense of responsibility for the future that will ultimately inherit our texts. I doubt most of us tend to think in these terms on a regular basis, but I believe Lumiansky did so on at least one occasion, and his recognition of the ethical consequences of his own scholarly work serves as a telling exemplum of the paradoxical bind that results when two competing senses of obligation crash together in the course of "doing one's job."

Of all of Chaucer's poems, "The Prioress's Tale" is perhaps the most prominent example of a difficult or problematic text that challenges medievalists' ability to "do our job" without conflict. Not only does the poem present a variant of a particularly troubling form of medieval anti-Semitism (the Blood Libel), but "The Prioress's Tale" also has been praised in the past (directly and indirectly) tor the beauty of its verse. As aesthetics remains an important-even if often understated-reason for teaching not only Chaucer but literature in general, coming to terms with the ethical demands enjoined upon us by the tale's potent combination of anti-Semitism and art remains a legacy and a central problem for medievalists who read and teach this poem to students in an era during which religious bigotry remains very much part of our world. What might it mean to treat the Prioress's anti-Semitism with "respect"-the term is Art Spiegelman's-is the heart of this essay's concerns and at the heart of what I call Lumiansky's Paradox.1 By exploring this paradox, I endeavor to perform one possible manifestation of that respect, one that places postructuralist ethics alongside the practice of literary criticism within the context of the modern university.

Lumiansky's Paradox

Shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War, Lumiansky published a modern edition of the Canterbury Tales, a prose translation intended for a broad audience of non-specialists.2 His modernization should be seen as part of a growing trend toward the translation of Chaucer's works, one that had already produced Nicholson's famous Fine Print edition illustrated by Rockwell Kent as well as F. E. Hill's illustrated edition. Indeed, as Lumiansky argued, Chaucer's work deserved such a broad contemporary audience not only because it belonged to the canon of English Literature, but also because it contained "new ideas and attitudes toward our own twentieth-century world and the people in it which can come to us from thinking about the motives and actions of these people in the Canterbury Tales" (1948, xvi). Clearly, Lumiansky envisioned his edition as providing a useful tool for the modern age; however, the utility of the prose translation stemmed, somewhat ironically, from Lumiansky s belief that only through prose, rather than verse, "can we approach the language and spirit of Chaucer today" (xvi). The audience envisioned for this prose edition would be at once "modern" (denizens of the twentieth-century) and "medieval" (capable of hearing the "language and spirit of Chaucer" in a way analogous to his medieval audience). Temporarily inhabiting both worlds, post-war readers would enjoy the fruits of sentence and solace in a way surpassing the one-dimensional understanding of Chaucer's poetry as an artifact from another time.

Inhabiting two vastly different historical and cultural realms is not so easy, as Lumiansky's edition itself demonstrated. The ethical imperatives of the "modern world" may come into conflict with the culture of the "medieval world." Publishing only three years after the public revelation of the full horrors of the Shoah, He found himself in just such a bind. Lumiansky chose to pass over "The Prioress's Tale", offering in its stead an explanation and a summary, both of which deserve closer attention. The summary is placed within the Tales as a substitute for the tale itself: