Father Chaucer

Paternity is a powerful metaphor for literary authority and legitimacy, and thus Geoffrey Chaucer has been granted the supposedly supreme honor of being termed the “father of English poetry.” And yet, as this book argues, the idea of paternity as unchallenged authority is a far more modern construct. For Chaucer, the ability to create with certainty, with assurance in one’s own posterity, was the ardent dream that haunted human men. It was, however, a dream defined by its impossibility. For Chaucer and his peers occupied a fallen world, one in which all true authority belonged to God alone. This book argues that man’s struggle to create something that would last beyond death is at the very heart of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer faces his own desire as a poet and a man to sire something that will last within the world. But Chaucer also knew deeply that such a dream would remain always out of reach for mortal men. And so Chaucer’s Tales taunts men with the multiple breakdowns of human generation, the insufficiencies of human cognition, genius, and hereditary institutions. Yet Chaucer also makes it clear that he counts himself among this humble species, a fellow pilgrim beset by the longing to wrest some small authority from the sum of his own flesh.