Donald R. Howard: the "idea" man

Scholars so often assume that the plan for the Canterbury Tales is the Host's proposal in the General Prologue--two stories going and two stories on the return--and that Chaucer did not complete it for want of time or interest or because he changed his mind. Howard's thesis, instead, is that "he had a far more complex idea and he did in large measure execute it." (The Idea of the Canterbury Tales)
     It was a revelation to be told to "consider this failure of the plan a feature of the story, not a fact about the author's life"! Then we can read the book "as it is, not as we think it might have been." Howard proposes--"It is unfinished but complete." After noting a litany of omissions, Howard's conclusion is fascinating: "The pilgrimage is eerily symbolic when you squint and see the whole."
     Critics often see passages difficult to interpret as lines Chaucer must have meant to delete. We need to give the poet his due; we need to leave room for genius. We need to accept that "Chaucer did not need to finish the tales; what he wrote accomplishes what he needed to accomplish."
     Howard guides our thinking by indicating that the Canterbury Tales "was experienced differently in the fourteenth century from the way it is experienced now." For example, Chaucer's "visual images would spring naturally from the surfaces of the narratives creating associations and meanings at the deepest level of consciousness"--associations modern readers may not recognize at all. The detailed description of the pilgrim's clothing "characterize them as individuals [but], never as pilgrims." Typical rituals were associated with pilgrimages, but "not a word is said of any religious observation . . . shrines along the way are never mentioned."
     It has been a modern endeavor to calculate realistically how long the journey to Canterbury would take. For centuries, however, the idea of pilgrimage "had the metaphorical significance of a one-way journey to the Heavenly Jerusalem: the actual trip was a symbol of human life, and the corollary, that life is a pilgrimage, was a commonplace." This pilgrim journey takes place unrealistically in one day: beginning when the sun rose and ending as the gathering darkness signals the end of the life of man.
     The stories are not what makes the Canterbury Tales so remarkable. It is Chaucer's genius for creating the world of the pilgrimage that is unique and captivating. The poet "adds complexity by having his alter ego perform as the actual teller of all the tales."
     Rather than fragmenting the author's role, as many scholars do, Donald Howard accepts all possibilities regarding Chaucer the narrator as "the man, the pilgrim, or the poet, we never know positively which we are hearing and are not meant to know."
     The Canterbury Tales were not finished at the time of Chaucer's death. It is often assumed he would have changed or added much. Why has the Canterbury Tales been approached this way? "Because of the statement in the General Prologue that each pilgrim is to tell two tales on either leg of the journey. And yet this is not Chaucer's statement; it is the Host's, as reported by the narrator."
     As we arrive at the intro to the final Tale, it should be difficult to ignore "all the talk just outside Canterbury about knitting things up and making an end, one assumes the work is over." It appears that Chaucer, "far from having 'changed his mind,' never had any idea of depicting the return journey. The one-way 'pilgrimage of human life' was a conventional metaphor, and would have been an effective frame for the work."

Thanks to Donald Howard's "idea" we can read through the Tales without the distraction of nagging questions about its oddities. We can simply see many as the yet unrevealed genius of Geoffrey Chaucer.