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Joyce's Own Father: The Case for Chaucer

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 JOYCE’S OTHER FATHER: THE CASE FOR CHAUCER

HELEN COOPER

There is abundant evidence of the importance that “the medieval”

held for Joyce. One medieval author with whom he was closely fa-
miliar, but whose influence has been almost completely unconsid-
ered, is Geoffrey Chaucer. Joyce owned a copy of Chaucer’s
works, and is known to have returned to them at every stage of his
career. Most particularly, he was reading the Canterbury Tales at
the time he began to revise Ulysses, and the marked conceptual and
linguistic similarities between the two works, backed up by some
textual and verbal detail, strongly suggests that the Tales was a
direct inspiration behind the revision. Each of the Tales, like each
of Joyce’s chapters, has its own socially or individually
differentiated point of view, which is carried through in differences
of genre, style, language, and sometimes even page layout. The
naturalism of each work is extreme for its age, but co-exists with
an intense awareness of the linguistic medium through which
“reality” has to be expressed. Joyce’s own comments on his work,
and those of critics such as Umberto Eco, are sometimes almost
indistinguishable from an account of the Tales: the dependence on
language, the encyclopedic nature of each work, the rich assembly
of cultural allusion. Both works are also strongly self-referential.
The authors, furthermore, share a markedly similar outlook on the
world; and both are concerned to make their own writings a
meeting-point for great works of the past with the widest possible
range of literary forms and styles of their own ages.

***

He recommended me to study the Book of Kells ...

“You can compare much of my work to the intricate
144 Helen Cooper

designs of its illuminations, and I have pored over its

workmanship for hours at a time in Dublin, in
Trieste, in Rome, in Geneva – wherever I have been,
1
and I have always got inspiration from it.”

“What we want to avoid is the classical, with its rigid

structure and its emotional limitations. The medieval,
in my opinion, had greater emotional fecundity than
2
classicism.”

Those two snatches of Joyce’s conversation, both recorded by

Arthur Power, carry a significance belied by their brevity. Both
insist that Joyce’s medievalism is real and significant; not
something to bring into consideration when one has exhausted the
possibilities of Mallarmé, Ibsen and Homer, but something that
was for him an area of first recourse – an area from which he drew
constant inspiration, not only in the particular shape of the Book of
Kells, but in the intricacies of form and structure that it inspired;
that the “emotional fecundity” that he found in the Middle Ages
generated the plenitude of his own exuberance of subject, style and
language. Both suggest too that the influence of the medieval on
him was something far broader than the authors most commonly
referred to in this respect, Dante and Aquinas; and that many of the
medieval works that inspired him may have disappeared from

1. Arthur Power, From the Old Waterford House, Waterford and

Dublin: Carthage Press, 1940, p. 153. The influence of the Book of Kells
is explicit in Finnegans Wake: see James S. Atherton, The Books at the
Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,
expanded edition, Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1974, pp. 62-67, and
Beryl Schlossman, Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language, Madison: U of
Wisconsin P, 1985, pp. 183-191. Joyce would probably first have seen the
Book of Kells in Dublin; he also knew Sir Edward Sullivan’s extensively
illustrated description (The Book of Kells, London, Paris and New York:
Studio Press; first published in 1914, it went through three further edi-
tions by 1933), though there is no copy of it among his surviving books.
2. Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart,
Dublin: Millington Press, 1974, p. 95.
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 145

view, just as, without that one mention, one would not have
imagined that the Book of Kells would have been a continuing
preoccupation of his throughout his years on the continent, the
years that saw the writing of Ulysses, so long before its influence
emerged in Finnegans Wake. There is, however, one further major
author who I believe similarly enthralled Joyce, and who, I would
argue, was the single major influence on the transformation of
Ulysses into the extraordinary work it is; and that author is
Geoffrey Chaucer – a writer Joyce was happy to refer to by his
eponym of the father of English literature with a casualness that
3
bespeaks long familiarity and acceptance.
We take for granted that it is the father of the Western
tradition of poetry, Homer, who underlies Ulysses: it is evident in
the title and the chapter designations, and Joyce frequently talked
about the connections and described them in his letters even though
they would be hard to deduce from the text alone. What I want to
propose in this paper is that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a
second source for Ulysses as basic and as broad-ranging in
influence as Homer. Most specifically, I would suggest that it was
through re-reading Chaucer in the course of writing his own
masterwork that Joyce was enabled to see the new possibilities of
form, structure, voicing, the interlinking of leitmotifs – all those
elements that make Ulysses so remarkable and distinctive – that
transform the chapters of the major but essentially traditional novel

3. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and revised Edition, Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1982 (hereafter JJII), p. 658 note, in a letter to Sylvia Beach
(23 October, 1932): “I spent a wobbly half hour on the top of your ladder
today looking for the father of English literature but could not find him.
Can you lend me a complete Chaucer for a few days? Mine is locked up.”
Joyce had just arrived at a Paris hotel after travelling from Nice, hence
the lack of access to his books. In the case of Chaucer, “English” does not
seem to have carried any implication for Joyce of a colonizing language
or literature: he was too early to share responsibility for the depredations
of Ireland from the sixteenth century forwards that most dominated Irish
cultural memory; and Joyce commented on the Eurocentric nature of
English literature in Chaucer’s time (Letters II, p. 134).
146 Helen Cooper

that had begun to appear in the Little Review into the greatest single
work of modernist literature.
As with the Book of Kells, the evidence for Chaucerian
influence is pervasive but inexplicit. Chaucer does not bulk large in
any study of Joyce’s allusions and intertextualities, nor in the
indexes of critical works or biographies; but the level of influence I
would posit is much deeper and more extensive than specific
allusions would allow. Finding sources for Joyce’s intertextual
references in Ulysses is an endlessly fertile task, as a glance
through any Joyce bibliography will show. Identifying stylistic
4
allusions is, as some critics have ruefully noted, somewhat harder;
and the larger elements with which Joyce works – models of
structure, of whole conceptions of language – is harder still. When
one tries to work out what Joyce’s models were for these basic
large concepts, it does not help that they are not necessarily the
same as offer themselves for identification through the specifics of
verbal reference. All the external evidence for Joyce’s interest in
Chaucer testifies to a level of knowledge and interest much greater
than the sparsity of specific allusions would suggest; but Chaucer’s
influence works at the larger and deeper level of manipulation of
overall structure and at that of the conception of language, not of
the individual episode or word. Moreover, if I am right as to the
date at which it became of such importance to Joyce, the lack of
overt verbal parallels in the text is to be expected: the words were
already to a large extent in place, and Joyce’s revisions took the
form of transforming the structure of what was already there, and
of refashioning the existing words into a web of echoes and
interconnections across the whole work.
The strong external evidence for Joyce’s knowledge of
Chaucer puts beyond doubt a familiarity that might be questioned if
one were to seek verbal parallels alone. The evidence that he both
knew his works and admired them is scattered but clear. In 1912 in
Padua he got full marks for an exercise on “The Good Parson of

4. See e.g. Michael Patrick Gillespie, Inverted Volumes Improperly

Arranged: James Joyce and his Trieste Library, Studies in Modern
Literature 10, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980, p. 75.
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 147
5
Chaucer”. No details have survived, but there must be a strong
likelihood that, given the good theological education Joyce had, he
had done what all too few twentieth-century readers of Chaucer do,
and read the Parson’s own penitential treatise that closes the
Canterbury Tales as well as the portrait in the General Prologue.
His interest in penitential sermons is witnessed both by A Portrait
of the Artist and by the references in Ulysses to a medieval work
closely related to the Parson’s Tale, the Agenbite of Inwit; and there
would in any case be evident self-interest, in terms of good tactics
for gaining a high mark, for Joyce to read the Tale as well as the
Prologue portrait. There is no doubt of his love of the Prologue
itself: in Zürich, apparently at the time he was working on the
revisions of Ulysses, he read aloud to Frank Budgen from it,
savouring the lines, and commented on Chaucer’s clarity: “He is as
6
precise and slick as a Frenchman.” He was presumably on that
occasion reading from his own copy of Chaucer: this was the 1915
reprint of Skeat’s one-volume Oxford edition of the Complete
Works. He also possessed a selection of the Tales, in the shape of
an 1895 Masterpiece Library volume; and he had taken his interests
to the length of obtaining a critical work, the 1893 reprint of
Adolphus William Ward’s Chaucer in the English Men of Letters
series.7 He was familiar enough with the complete works to know
that the rather obscure minor poem the ABC to the Virgin would

5. JJII, p. 321, where it is described as a “written examination”; more

precisely, it was a model lesson – see Louis Berrone, James Joyce in
Padua, New York: Random House, 1977, pp. xxi-ii, 39-42.
6. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” and other
writings, Introduction by Clive Hart, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972, p. 186.
On the dating of Joyce’s revisions to Ulysses, see A. Walton Litz, The Art
of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,
London: Oxford UP, 1961, Appendix C, pp. 142-149, and Michael
Groden, Ulysses in Progress, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
7. Michael Patrick Gillespie, James Joyce’s Trieste Library: A
Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center, Austin, Texas: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1986,
# 105, 106, 536. The Ward volume contains underlining and annotation in
Stanislaus Joyce’s hand.
148 Helen Cooper

make an ideal matrix for Lucia’s lettrines; and he had done enough
research on it in books other than those he owned (possibly in the
multi-volume Skeat Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, of which the
single-volume edition is a largely unannotated epitome) to be able
to identify its source in the Middle French of Guillaume de
8
Deguilleville. His anxiety to find a copy of the “father of English
literature” when newly arrived in Paris in 1932 and without access
to his own books testifies to a continued interest, too. So the
foundations, at least, are in place for a rather bolder hypothesis as
to what Joyce learned from the first great English poet. It is also
worth noting, though it is impossible to prove that Joyce had taken
specific note of it, that the image that is so basic to his conception
of his vocation as writer, of being the son of Daedalus, is itself one
that he shared with the father of English poetry: in the House of
Fame, Chaucer’s most extensive examination of the theory and
processes of writing, the inextricable mixture of fiction, fact,
verisimilitude and authoritative text such as one finds in both The
Canterbury Tales and Ulysses is described as “domus Dedaly”,
9
“Laboryntus”, the labyrinth.
It is, however, the Canterbury Tales that offers the closest
model for Ulysses, and a summary reminder of how Chaucer wrote
the work may be appropriate at this point. He envisages a group of
some thirty pilgrims, a cross-section of society drawn from every
social and professional class, from the peasants, through townsmen
and priests, to the gentry, who by chance find themselves travelling
together: the Tales, like Ulysses, is based on a journey that is itself
based on a conventional model, pilgrimage in Chaucer’s case, the
Homeric seeking of home in Joyce’s. Chaucer then gives his char-
acters voices, each one different: twenty-four are represented, short

8. Letters III, p. 266 (November 1932).

9. House of Fame, line 1920, in The Riverside Chaucer, general ed. L.
D. Benson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987; the numbering is the same
in the edition that Joyce owned, The Complete Works of Geoffrey
Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915 reprint of
the one-volume edition first published in 1895. Chaucer is describing the
emblematic house of Rumour that mixes truth and lies in the fashion of
pilgrims’ tales (2120-2124), and of his own (and Joyce’s) writings.
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 149

of the full thirty since the work is not formally finished. And each
of those twenty-four voices is given its own tale, or in terms of the
10
structure of the whole work its own chapter, which differs from
the others not just in plot but in a socially or individually differen-
tiated point of view, and therefore as a consequnce in genre, in
style, in language, on occasions even in page layout. The
preliminary “chapter” of the work, the General Prologue, reads like
a piece of pure naturalism: the thirty pilgrims themselves meet up
one day in April at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a place as real and
familiar to late fourteenth-century Londoners as Bloom’s pubs
were to early twentieth-century Dubliners. The degree of natural-
ism, the apparent literary randomness of the whole process, is
extreme for its age – and that comment applies with equal validity
to the Tales and to Ulysses. It is in the chapters following this in
Chaucer’s work that the rival voices make themselves heard. The
next one – the first of the tales proper – is the Knight’s telling of an
aristocratic romance: this is written with a specialized palette of
high-style imagery, but a remarkable lexical range that can
incorporate courtly French-derived words and Latin-derived
philosophical vocabulary alongside a more homely native English;
and the sources for its plot lie in up-to-the-minute cosmopolitan
Italian literature, the sources for its ideas in late Classical
philosophy. It also offers a remarkable parallel to the schema of
correspondences that Joyce drew up for each chapter: the tale is
patterned on a series of planetary gods who each exercise influence
over one of the human characters, and also over the appropriate
sphere of action, physiological type, professional group, time of the
11
day and the week, architectural design and colour. Two tales later

10. One early manuscript of the Tales (Oxford, Corpus Christi College
MS 198), actually heads each tale as a capitulum, a chapter, complete
with number.
11. See J. D. North, “Kalenderes Enlumyned Ben They,” Review of
English Studies 20 (1969), pp. 129-154, and Douglas Brooks and
Alastair Fowler, “The Meaning of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale”, Medium
Ævum 39 (1970), pp. 123-146. On Joyce’s schema, see Stuart Gilbert,
James Joyce’s Ulysses, new edition, London: Faber, 1962, p. 41 and
passim. This too was a late idea: see A. Walton Litz, The Art of James
150 Helen Cooper

is a chapter (the Reeve’s Tale) that tells a cheap story of sex and
revenge in a vocabulary that scarcely lets in a single word that did
not come over with the Anglo-Saxons, or any word that does not
have a solid and specific referent in the world of things. Further
on one finds the Second Nun’s Tale, a saint’s life in which the
nouns all relate to the moral life – words such as truth, chastity,
villainy – or if the nouns look like things (crowns, for instance,
or garlands) they turn out to be spiritual or allegorical. If one
turns to the chapter Chaucer speaks in what he claims to be his
own voice, the tale of Sir Thopas, one finds a total separation
from the artist: a brilliant and deadly imitation of popular
romance, with a debased vocabulary, event divorced from
meaning, and a cheap sentimental appeal to the escapism its
readers have acquired from reading dozens of similar things
before – a virtuoso exercise in bad writing, for analogues to
which one has to look to Shakespeare’s Pyramus and Thisbe in
Midsummer Night’s Dream, or to Joyce’s “Nausicaa” and “Cy-
clops”.
Returning to Joyce with this model in mind is revelatory. It
immediately suggests new associations for “the task I set myself
technically”, as he described Ulysses in a letter, “in writing a book
12
from eighteen different points of view, and in as many styles”.
Chaucer’s procedure is almost identical. The voicing is much more
explicit in his work, his twenty-four speakers each being
individually identified, but the speakers are never sufficient
explanation for the tales they tell: they are masterminded by
Chaucer with as meticulous detail as Joyce masterminds his, except
that Chaucer, perhaps, is even better at pretending absence – by
putting a shadow persona of himself into the work and giving it
such a limited and inadequate role, he gives a more consistent
illusion of according complete autonomy to his voices. Umberto
Eco, in the most extensive study of Joyce’s medievalism to date,
describes how in Ulysses “the ‘dramatic’ technique eliminates the
continuous presence of the author and substitutes for his point of

Joyce, pp. 34-36.

12. Letters I, p. 167 (June 1921).
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 151
13
view that of the characters and the events themselves.” Eco,
however, while associating such a procedure with Joyce’s
medievalism, offers no specific model; but it is there, in exactly
that form, in the Canterbury Tales, with its series of surrogate and
fallible narrators, each one assigned a genre, a style and an idiolect
14
– an entire poetics – particular to him or her. Eco further notes, in
a discussion of that comment of Joyce’s about his eighteen points
of view and styles, that “the operation ... is performed in language,
with language and on language (on things seen through the lan-
guage)” (p. 34). That too is precisely Chaucer’s method throughout
the entire Tales, just as extensively as it is Joyce’s.
A full demonstration of the pervasiveness of this transforma-
tion of the world through language in the Canterbury Tales would
take as long as would the parallel demonstration for Ulysses. Two
examples – one of how the process works in practice, one theoreti-
cal – will, I hope, be sufficient to indicate how close Chaucer’s
alertness to linguistic possibility is to Joyce’s. The first example, of
how the process works in practice, is an object, something “seen
through language” in Eco’s phrase: a garland of lilies and roses. In
15
the Knight’s Tale, Emily is weaving such a garland in a garden.
The intertextual resonances of the image tell the reader that she is
the quintessential courtly lady, such as one finds in the love-garden
of the Romance of the Rose or in other romances. The lilies endow
her with all the sexual charge of chastity – “chastity,” as C. S.
Lewis noted, being perhaps the most erotic word in the English

13. The Middle Ages of James Joyce: The Aesthetics of Chaosmos,

trans. Ellen Esrock, London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989, pp. 37-38.
14. See C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety
and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales, Chapel Hill and London: U of
North Carolina P, 1986, and the accounts of the style of each tale in
Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 2nd
edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
15. Canterbury Tales, I.1034-1054 (ed. Benson), A.1034-1054 (ed.
Skeat) (future references to the Tales conflate the two editions). A more
extensive account of the kinds of echoes and interconnections that
Chaucer makes between tales is given in Helen Cooper, The Structure of
the Canterbury Tales, London: Duckworth, 1983, chapters 5 and 6.
152 Helen Cooper

language; the roses, to be gathered while you may, suggest her

potential sexual attainability – the season is spring, and Emily is in
her most desirable nubility. Yet Chaucer knows, as St. Augustine
16
had pointed out, that while words are signs of things in the
physical world, things themselves can in turn signify the spiritual;
and so when a garland of lilies and roses reappears in the Second
Nun’s Tale, it is itself a spiritual one, out of season to show that it
is also out of time and unfading, a signifier of chastity without
17
fleshly desire, of martyrdom, and of the eternal bliss of heaven.
My second example of Chaucer’s alertness to “things seen through
language” is a discursive one, a statement of the principle rather
than just an illustration of it. It takes the form of a complaint by
one of his voices, his tellers, that the world changes according to
the words in which you describe it: that if you rape and pillage
enough, you become not an outlaw but a captain; that if your
mistress is upper class you call her a lady, if she’s low class you
18
call her a wench, but you lay the one as flat as the other.
“The operation is performed in language, with language and
on language.” Although Eco is talking here about medievalism in
general, time and again it is in Chaucer’s work that the phenomena
he describes take precise literary and verbal form. Eco describes
Ulysses, for instance, as a summa, a collection encompassing
everything – a summa of the universe, indeed; and he quotes from
Joyce’s letters again where Joyce himself describes the work as “a
19
sort of encyclopaedia”. The Canterbury Tales too presents itself
in just such terms, in the first instance in literary and generic terms
20
as an encyclopedia of kinds. There are three works in particular

16. On Christian Doctrine, especially I.2, II.2-4, 10, III.29, translated

by J. F. Shaw in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
of the Christian Church, vol. II, repr. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B.
Eerdmans, 1979.
17. Canterbury Tales, VIII (G) 220-280.
18. Canterbury Tales, IX (H) 209-234.
19. Eco, The Middle Ages of James Joyce, p. 33; Letters I, pp. 146-
147.
20. See Cooper, Structure, chapter 3, “An Encyclopaedia of Kinds”.
Dante’s Divina Commedia is often also described as a summa, but its
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 153

that can properly be described as a “book of books”. One is the

Bible: a work not only known to both Chaucer and Joyce, but
actively used by both of them. The second is the Canterbury Tales,
with its active agenda to contain within itself all literary kinds, the
stylistic decorum of all social classes, representatives of all areas of
literary authority. And there is Ulysses, with its cast drawn from a
city that itself becomes the world in little, its ceaseless exploration
of genre and language, its perpetual modelling of itself on the great
texts of Western tradition – on the Odyssey, the liturgy, Hamlet;
and, I believe, on the Canterbury Tales too as part of its own
encyclopedic voraciousness to contain the great. “A sum of cultural
references” is how Eco describes Ulysses, and he goes on to list the
various areas it refers to, from Homer and theosophy through
Ireland to odours and tastes (p. 44). Again, the Tales covers an
exactly equivalent – that is, near-universal – range of cultural
references, from Ovid and Virgil to Boethian discussions of free
will and predestination, the convergence of people from “every
shires end” of England onto the road to Canterbury one sweet
April, to the scent of the Second Nun’s rose garlands and the
smoothness of the wines in the throat described by the Pardoner.
Taken to its extreme (which is where both Chaucer and Joyce take
it), this all-inclusiveness results in the charge of obscenity that has
been levelled against both as a result of their cheerful acceptance of
bodily functions: breaking wind (at the end of “Sirens”, and as a
major plot component of the Miller’s and Summoner’s Tales) and
in the full and free expression of female sexuality (in Molly and the
Wife of Bath). Such corporeality is as important to their wholeness
of vision as are the parodies of the Mass that Joyce offers at the
opening of “Telemachus” and Chaucer in the Pardoner’s Tale, in
which any kind of transubstantiation resolutely resists happening
and which ends with a trinity of rioters poisoning each other with
21
bread and wine.

encyclopedic range of science and theology makes it a very different kind

from the literary and generic encyclopedias offered by Chaucer or Joyce.
21. See in particular Canterbury Tales VI.534-539 (on the alteration
of accident but not substance in cookery, the opposite process to the Mass),
651-655 (the corporeality of God), and 797-903 (the poisoning of the
154 Helen Cooper

The similarities are not confined to content: both authors also

take form itself as a primary carrier of meaning. Eco notes how the
form of a chapter in Ulysses, even of a word, “itself conveys its
subject matter” (p. 36); he sees in the work a “radical conversion
from ‘meaning’ as content of an expression, to the form of the ex-
pression as meaning” (p. 37). He is talking about “Aeolus” here,
that chapter where the content gets more and more attenuated as
the dominance of the form and structure – the newspaper headlines
and what follows them – take over the page and the ostensible nar-
rative completely. By the end of “Aeolus”, you scarcely need to
read it: you just need to look at it. And here too Chaucer has been
there first – not in newspaper form, of course, since they had not
been invented by the fourteenth century, but in what was perhaps
the nearest contemporary equivalent to broad popular dissemina-
tion, the tail-rhyme romance. Sir Thopas, one of the stories he
gives to himself to tell, is similarly increasingly attenuated in con-
tent as it progresses; and similarly, one can see just by looking at
the page how the form itself takes over from anything it might
mean. The Skeat edition such as Joyce himself owned shows how
strikingly the poem distinguishes itself just in terms of page layout
from the normative riding rhyme – Chaucer’s equivalent to Joyce’s
narrative prose – and how it gets increasingly out of hand, with
extra lines of egregious meaninglessness springing up out of
nowhere [see the illustrations on page 149]. The arrangement of the
poem in the earliest manuscripts is fairly certainly Chaucer’s own,
and makes the joke still more obvious: in these, Sir Thopas is not a
narrow poem, as it is in Skeat, but a wide one, meandering across
the page with less and less meaning until the words over towards
the right-hand margin are almost devoid of semantic content. The
verse form itself similarly goes to pieces, with what was initially a
layout that made some sense increasingly resembling the match
schedule for a tennis tournament with an inconvenient number of
players. There is no evidence that Joyce had any acquaintance with
this manuscript layout (though a facsimile of the most striking
manuscript to contain it was published in 1911, causing some stir

wine in contrast to the salvific powers of Christ’s “precious herte-blood”).

 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 155

Excerpts from Chaucer’s normative “riding rhyme” (Manciple’s Tale,

212-234) (above left) and Sir Thopas (1980-2006) (above right) as Joyce
saw them in his edition of the Canterbury Tales. (Reproduced by
permission of Oxford University Press.)

The same section of Sir Thopas from the 1911 The Ellesmere Manuscript
reproduced in Facsimile (reduced). (Reproduced by permission from the
1989 reprint published by D. S. Brewer)
156 Helen Cooper

on its appearance, and his interest in manuscripts is attested else-

22
where ), but it does show their analogous ways of thinking about
meaning as textual presentation particularly sharply. “Aeolus” and
Sir Thopas are both intensely playful; but the same concern
with structure, form, appearance on the page, can carry more
semantic weight than that playfulness suggests, for both
writers. Sterne goes in for wilder experiments with page design
in Tristram Shandy; Joyce and Chaucer exploit the effects of
different kinds of conventional text blocks, Joyce with the
headlines of “Aeolus” or the drama layout of “Circe” or the
question-and-answer format of “Ithaca”, Chaucer with the
parodied sprawl of tail-rhyme, his use of a long stanza form for
his tales of pathos, or solid blocks of expository prose for
Melibee and the Parson’s Tale that announce their seriousness
from their very density on the page.
It is precisely these kinds of transformation that characterise
the reworking to which Joyce subjected Ulysses from 1918
onwards – from the time in Zürich when he read to Frank Budgen
from the Canterbury Tales. And it is in the writing he did in these
final years that verbal resemblances to Chaucer’s work begin to
appear, in addition to these similarities of conception, structure and
linguistic play. There emerges an exuberant parody of motifs
contained in Chaucer: “Aeolus” itself underwent the most
extensive revision, and in that context it may not only be Sir
Thopas that is relevant, but also The House of Fame, the poem of

22. On Joyce’s interest in manuscripts, in addition to the Book of

Kells discussed above, see Atherton, The Books at the Wake, pp. 68-69.
The Ellesmere Manuscript reproduced in Facsimile (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1911) was sufficiently notable to be given a two-part
review over two successive weeks in the Athenaeum, one of 4 1/2
columns, the next of around 3 (no. 4372, pp. 178-179, 12 August 1911;
no. 4373, pp. 210-211, 19 August). This facsimile has itself recently been
reproduced in facsimile, The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales: A Working Facsimile, with introduction by Ralph
Hanna III, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989. The fact that the same layout
appears in many of the other earliest manuscripts gives textual support to
the idea that it is indeed Chaucer’s own.
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 157

Dedalus, in which Chaucer gives Eolus the role of god of news and
“tidynges”, blowing information and misinformation alike
throughout the world in just the same way as Joyce’s chapter title
23
suggests. Some of these shared motifs may be the result, not only
of a common outlook or method, but of direct influence from
Chaucer to Joyce. The story of the Christian boy murdered by Jews
is given by both authors; and Joyce later adds one detail to his own
association of antisemitic ideas, of the casting of a murdered corpse
into a cesspit, that seems to have come straight from the
Prioress’s Tale.24 Lists, one of the typical elements of
medievalism identified by Eco (pp. 8-10), are one of the strongest
elements in this increasing convergence. The list of trees from The
Parliament of Fowls has been recognized as one of the analogues
of the tree-party in “Cyclops”.25 Chaucer presents his thirty
pilgrims of a broad range of professions and social ranks in
discursive fashion – knight, squire and yeoman; monk, friar and
prioress with her chaplain and priests; merchant and clerk and
lawyer and franklin; five specified guildsmen, a haberdasher,
carpenter, weaver, dyer and tapestry-maker; the shipman, the Wife

23. On the dating of Joyce’s revisions to “Aeolus”, which continued

through to the early proof stages of the work, see Litz, The Art of James
Joyce, pp. 6, 49-51, and Groden, Ulysses in Progress, pp. 95-114. On
Eolus’s role as god of news, see House of Fame 1567 ff, esp. 1769-1770,
2108-2120.
24. See 6.771-772, “Same idea those jews they said killed the christian
boy,” the ballad in 17.801-828, and the full telling of the story in the
Prioress’s Tale. The detail of the corpse being cast into a cesspit in an an-
tisemitic context appears in “Circe”, 15.3207-3211; the motif appears in
the Prioress’s Tale but not in the ballad quoted in “Ithaca”. Harry
Blamires confirms the Chaucerian source, The New Bloomsday Book: A
Guide through Ulysses, revised edn., London and New York: Routledge,
1988, p. 177.
25. Chaucer, Parliament 172-182; 12.1266-1295. See also Don
Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses, second
edn., Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988, ad loc. Gifford
further notes allusions to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (6.482) and the Clerk’s
Tale (9.620).
158 Helen Cooper

of Bath (with her double professions in matrimony and the cloth

industry), the parson, the ploughman, miller, manciple, reeve,
summoner and pardoner. The phantasmagorical procession of
“Circe” reads like the General Prologue run riot, with its secular
and ecclesiastical grandees down to the “honorary secretary of the
society of friends,” followed by

the guilds and trades and trainbands with flying colours:

coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law
scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimneysweeps,
lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian
warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers,
undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters,
assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers,
fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse
repository hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery
outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and
glovers, plumbing contractors. (U 15.1426-1436)

In the section of his Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale that tells of the

life of an unsuccessful alchemist (VIII (G) 790-818), Chaucer
furnishes a 29-line list of objects to demonstrate the solidity of the
material world and its refusal to transmute either into gold or into
spiritual value; the list culminates in

Unslekked lym, chalk, and gleyre of an ey, [egg white]

Poudres diverse, asshes, donge, pisse, and cley,
Cered pokkets, sal peter, vitriole... [waxed pouches]

The largesse distributed by Bloom’s bodyguard in “Circe”,

where ordinary experience is transmuted into substanceless dreams,
similarly mixes the exotic, the worthless, and the sham spiritual,
“commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges,
expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup ... 40 days’
indulgences, spurious coins...” (U 15.1569-1574).
A list is a summa in little. Enlarged to the size of the Canter-
bury Tales or Ulysses, a summa suggests something all-embracing,
complete, by virtue of its sheer extent. It does not, however, supply
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 159

any hints about closure in the literary sense: how can a summa end
other than by reaching the end of knowledge? Chaucer and Joyce
again resolve the problem in comparable ways. In Joyce, the day
ends; Bloom returns home; and Molly, the Penelope figure, closes
the book with her long monologue, a single voice that comple-
ments and supersedes all the other voices we have heard before. In
the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims are nearing their goal, and the
shadows are lengthening as this day too draws towards its close. In
place of the multiple voices of the pilgrims, Chaucer provides a
similarly long and monologic speech that closes down all the
voices we have been hearing before. It is not from his most directly
comparable figure to Molly, the Wife of Bath, though earlier in the
work she takes over the discourse of the Tales completely for a
while to expatiate on the subject of women’s sexuality in general
and her own in particular, in what may be the fullest literary
precursor to Molly’s speech. Chaucer’s final monologue, by con-
trast, is put into the mouth of the Parson, in the form of the
penitential treatise that Joyce is likely to have read at least as early
as his Padua essay. At the start of the Tales, Chaucer had promised
an ending back at the Tabard, and a prize supper for the best story.
The work in fact ends with the Parson’s looking forward to the
final ending in heaven, where there is no more hunger and thirst,
but every soul is “replenysshed with the sighte of the parfit
knowynge of God” (Canterbury Tales X(I).1079). Behind Molly,
there lurks a sense of that other homecoming, Ulysses’ own
comparable and contrasting return to his faithful wife; behind the
Parson, there is the ghost of that comparable and contrasting
earthly feast.
These common phenomena are not simply, however, examples
of shared practice: Chaucer and Joyce also share theory. “A book
which is a model of itself” is how Eco describes Ulysses (p. 1); and
it is hard to think of a better description of the Tales too, story-
collection, story-competition, a book about its own telling; even, in
intention – though it is an intention that is not fulfilled – a book
that would evaluate itself, in the final judgement of the best tale.
Both works are endlessly, relentlessly and brilliantly self-
conscious, self-referential. In a recent discussion of syllabus reform
at my home university of Oxford, one seriously promoted idea was
160 Helen Cooper

that the teaching of literary theory should be done through the

teaching of the Canterbury Tales: narratology, generic theory,
semantics, the role of the author, poetics, authority and influence,
rhetoric and irony and allegory and mimesis and its limits – they
are all there. Something similar could be done through Ulysses; but
not, I think, through any other work, for only Chaucer and Joyce
set out so deliberately to stretch the resources of language and the
written text to such extraordinary lengths. This does not prove
direct indebtedness, of course; but there comes a point where,
given Joyce’s familiarity with Chaucer, the elements that he shares
with him become less likely to be coincidental than the product of
inspired emulation.

Let me give a summarizing conspectus of what I see as the

parallels between the writers and their works.
First is a falling together of temperament, a way of looking at
the world that is at once shrewd, potentially satirical, hugely
accepting, and that combines humour with underlying seriousness
of purpose: a similarity that provides the concluding analogy in
Frank Budgen’s characterization of Joyce’s mindset as demon-
strated in Ulysses, and indeed evident on any reading.26 Both find
comparable means to express this reading of the world. “A comedy
could be written with the purpose of showing how a wide variety of
national types will present themselves, when brought into mutual
contact by an occasion peculiarly fitted to call forth their individual
rather than their common characteristics”. Joyce will have read
those words in his copy of Ward’s Chaucer (p. 118), along with the
comment that the occasion comes to include a national and a
political aspect. Ward’s particular formulation, with its emphasis
on character representation, is typical of early twentieth-century
criticism and is not adequate to either author; but the appropriate-
ness of the formulation to both is still striking.

26. Budgen, James Joyce, p. 73; the comparison with Chaucer

concludes an exposition on Joyce’s attributes that include a “very humane
scepticism” – likewise, within the limits of his membership of a Christian
culture, an attribute of Chaucer’s.
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 161

Beyond issues of human comedy, the understanding of and

relation to literature expressed in their two major works are closely
comparable. Both Chaucer and Joyce present themselves as nodal
points for what has been written in the past. For Joyce, these are
the timeless historical texts of the Bible and the liturgy; then the
Odyssey for the ancient world, Hamlet for the high Renaissance,
the history of English prose style in epitome in the “Oxen of the
Sun”. Chaucer does it less in terms of specific texts (though he too
includes multiple authorities, allusions back to the wisdom of the
past) than by subject area. Epic and the ancient world are
represented in the Knight’s Tale, the very first story, so
establishing a classical point of reference for the work just as
Joyce’s title does. Other tales represent the early Church (the
Second Nun’s), the world of Arthurian legend (the Wife of Bath’s),
the age of chivalry (the Franklin’s), his own time in the knockabout
fabliaux of the Miller and Reeve. That list itself suggests a similar
movement to that of Ulysses, of the present as a come-down from a
saintly or heroic past, just as Dublin is a mock-heroic version of the
world of Homer.
Both authors also offer a kind of summary (in that medieval
sense of the summa) of the literature of their own age: for Joyce,
the range through the “straight” novel, newspapers, slushy
romances, surreal drama, catechistic school texts. Chaucer offers
romances of all kinds – the aristocratic-philosophical, the popular
tail-rhyme variety, interlaced romance, a Breton lai – and also a
saint’s life, comic tales, moral exemplum, a Miracle of the Virgin,
treatises of worldly and religious advice.
And both authors define for the future what literature can do:
how writing can be done, how the prison of the fixed past can be
opened up to new experiment. This had the rather paradoxical
result, in both instances, of stopping the future short in its tracks.
There is a sense in which Ulysses is modernism; and modernism
did not get much further in succeeding writers. It is a work that so
far pre-empted the future as effectively to stop it happening.
Something closely similar happened with the Canterbury Tales. It
was so revolutionary that advance was practically impossible.
Writers of the next century spent much of their time trying to
follow where Chaucer had led; but the more closely they tried to
162 Helen Cooper

replicate him, the more obvious it becomes that they could neither
match him nor advance.27 I suggested earlier that Chaucer himself
is a modernist in all but strict chronological terms; it is a measure
of that that his successors – especially the most prolific of them,
John Lydgate – are commonly regarded as being medieval in the
worst sense. That is not entirely fair to Lydgate in all sorts of ways;
but it is certainly true that it took English literature two hundred
years to catch up with Chaucer – until the age of Spenser and
Shakespeare. Nearly eighty years on from Ulysses, I am not sure
we have fully succeeded with Joyce.
The Canterbury Tales and Ulysses are both written within
three reference points, a kind of triangulation of operative
principles. One is a concern with the metaphorical nature of words
to discover new resources in language and style, to create along the
way an encyclopedia of genres and styles. Second, both authors
write with one eye constantly on a series of privileged texts to
which their own make reference, works of literary and philoso-
phical and religious tradition that inform their own. Third, and in
some ways most important, is an illusion of naturalism extreme for
their ages: the April road to Canterbury, the June day in Dublin,
each peopled with some characters borrowed in from real life –
verisimilitude spilling over into historical fact.28 In addition,

27. The conventional reading of fifteenth-century literature has tended

to be that they never did break free: for a recent exposition of their
failure, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers, Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1993. For an insistence on how much independence was achieved,
see The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen
Cooper and Sally Mapstone, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, especially
the Introduction and James Simpson’s opening chapter on Lydgate.
28. The fashion for identifying characters from the General Prologue
as being real-life fourteenth-century individuals emerged most strongly in
the 1920s, after the completion of Ulysses; modern scholarship has re-
duced the number of such characters, but not eliminated them completely.
That the Prologue invites such readings, whether or not Joyce knew of
them, is what is significant here, especially in the light of Joyce’s insis-
tence that literature should be life rather than art (see in particular Power,
Conversations, p. 34). For Joyce’s practice of mixing real and fictional
 Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer 163

working between those three points of the triangle, there is a

constant play of motifs and echoes, ideas and phrases that recur in
different contexts and change meaning with those contexts: an
interlacing of word and idea for which the closest analogue is the
Book of Kells.
The naturalism of both Chaucer and Joyce invites the most
literal of responses, Bloom’s progress recorded in inscriptions in
the pavements of Dublin, the plaque once marking the site of the
Tabard Inn that announced that here in 1387 Chaucer and twenty-
nine others assembled before setting out on pilgrimage. Such
literalism, however, disguises a retracing and interlacing at a
deeper level, of one text upon another. Joyceans who descend on
Dublin on Bloomsday to follow Bloom’s wanderings should
perhaps bear in mind that the traces of his footsteps are the
palimpsest of another journey, of thirty pilgrims on the road to
Canterbury.

Oxford

characters, see JJII pp. 363-368, but also Hugh Kenner’s review in the
Times Literary Supplement, 17 December 1982, pp. 1383-1384; and
Budgen, James Joyce, p. 130. See also my “Chaucer and Joyce,” Chaucer
Review 21 (1986), pp. 142-154: 143-144: this article, written before I had
realized Chaucer’s direct influence on Joyce, argues for the value of
applying to Chaucer the sort of critical understanding regularly brought to
Joyce.

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