What’s Wrong With Us?

Haven’t you ever laughed when somebody falls and hurts himself? Haven’t you noticed those funny comedies that exploit these reactions? In the Miller’s Tale, which makes fun of character’s troubles and accidents that should instead cause sadness, the carpenter is a constant target of mocking due to his protective behavior result of his wife’s appeal. The excerpt on the left shows one of the final incidents that cause laughter in the story, when the carpenter falls due to Nicholas’ and Alisoun’s trickery. It is interesting how the narrator takes his time to show the reaction of the people in the town, in order to give the reader time to recover from this funny sight.

Chaucer repeats this kind of comical connotation in the end of the Miller’s Tale when the narrator highlights all the funny events in the story, thus exploiting our feelings towards people getting hurt in order to remember us of the fun and laughter the story created. It is interesting how Chaucer juxtaposes the Knight’s Tale, a very solemn and ideal love story with this grotesque comedy of adulterous relationships. The end of the Miller’s Tale portrays the opposites shown by Chaucer in these two stories as the narrator intends to make the reader remember his story as one of memorable incidents and not one of ideals and perfect endings.

As I researched what is wrong with us, I found an article on the Scientific American webpage in which William F. Fry, a psychiatrist and laughter researcher of Stanford University explains that “Falls are incongruent in the normal course of life in that they are unexpected. So despite our innate empathetic reaction—you poor fellow!—our incongruity instinct may be more powerful.” (Fry) Falls break the regular course of our lives in such a way that they override the sadness and pity produced by somebody getting hurt. Fry continues by stating that “when we observe another person stumbling, some of our own neurons fire as if we were the person doing the flailing—these mirror neurons are duplicating the patterns of activity in the falling person’s brain. My hypothesis regarding the relevance of this mechanism for humor behavior is that the observer’s brain is “tickled” by that neurological “ghost.”” (Fry) Now you have a neurological reason for why you laugh when your best friend trips, falls and breaks his nose!

Authority And Its Followers

An authoritarian figure appears in the mist of doubt, of fear, of necessity, of ignorance. The gods’ appearance in the third and fourth parts of The Knight’s Tale shows how hypocrite human belief is, due to it’s necessity-based emergence. The first character to approach the gods is Palamon who tells Venus:
It is incredible how feeble Palamon’s arguments are, how necessity-based is his belief and how insignificant is what he offers. Is belief, such a profound feeling based on exchanging terrene objects and actions for miracles?

Chaucer gives us a second case to examine these petitions and the faith of individuals with Emelye who asks Diana:
Emelye is immersed in sadness due to her inevitable future as wife and mother, giving us a look at the complexities of life that makes us look for guidance and comfort. It is amazing how Emelye promises to be a follower as a maiden, that which she is asking to be rather than promising faith as a woman. It is noticeable how Emelye praises the goddess as if to convince her of solving her problems. Does faith require us to praise that for which we believe in?

The third case the author presents is Arcite’s who states that he will:
It is interesting how Arcite tries to convince Mars to help him by offering faith and worship. It is incredible how these gifts are based on the assumption that the favor will be granted. More incredible than this is that these gifts are granted, the individuals are helped out in their necessities, for what is a lord without his servants, what is a god without his followers?

The Mysterious Storyteller

Being a storyteller is a very challenging yet truly enjoyable activity. Being able to come up with interesting new ways of narrating a story, creating a whole new world for another person surely sounds difficult when considering the quantity of writing and storytelling that has happened in the world’s history. The narrator of the Knight’s Tale does a great job at creating a conversation with the reader who can sometimes be interrupted by the considerations and plain thinking of this individual.

Through the first two parts of the story the narrator makes questions as those seen on the excerpts to the left which guide the story to where he has intended it to go. As I am currently reading Rayuela for my Pre-AP Spanish Literature course I can’t stop comparing the narrator of The Canterbury Tales to Cortázar’s narrator who gives the reader glimpses of the story behind his characters as he finishes reading distant chapters and memories. Although I believe these narrator interventions and styles are not necessary to carry out the main ideas of the story they make the Knight’s Tale and other pieces who employ such a personification of the narrator different from the several billions of other stories that deal with the same themes and motivations. We are taught in our early years that it isn’t what you say but how you say it, in this case that is probably true.

In the Knight’s Tale we can observe how the narrator works out the course of his story by guiding the reader into connecting elements with other stories, pausing what is being told about a character to talk about another individual, finally leading us to a general idea which was the primary objective to get to as we can see on the right. Surely the narrator becomes an important element when trying to reach an innovative style of writing. Chaucer’s narrator does this with skill as seen in his interventions and the connections he produces in the text. The storyteller is the mediator between the reader, that entity that tries to make sense out of everything, and the story.

Migration, Exchange, Traveling

Literature is definitely a traveling experience. One in which words, create tantalizing building-block metaphors of communication that birth amazing new worlds to explore, manifesting live vehicles to travel in with a strange assortment of traveling companions, that bring all kinds of baggage with them. Dorian Merina explores this perception of literature in his short film “Migrations”, where he creates a setting of diffusion, of exchange, a boat. Merina begins his film by stating that on “the boats come the goods that cross the waters / like veins and blood rushing / the goods cross the waters” (15-17) while showing a boat-like figure crossing the waters. The combination of poem narration and film creates an even more vivid image of what the author is describing. This perception of the connection between literature and travel is manifested in the images, the thematic of the poem and even its mechanics.

An element I truly enjoyed while seeing this short film was the relationship between the words, the path created by the order in which these were placed, just like water hitting the hull of a ship. Merina uses words in Spanish and other languages to give a true migration, traveling feel to his poem, specially while including race terms such as mestizo and “a word like… / Achuete / atole / avocado / balsa / banqueta / cachuete / calabaza / camachile / camote / calachuche / chico / chocolate / coyote / nanay / tatay / tiangui / tocayo / zacate / zapote” (58-76). The author coordinates the colors with the words being presented, for example when saying “chocolate” he puts a brown, chocolate color that matches what he is saying. The order of the words, alphabetical, brings order to the poem, while flowing with imagination, with the sound of unknown words.

Merina exploits his inspiration to imagine when displaying animal-like figures while mentioning “buffalos geese swans horses males asses / caged birds that sing birds that talk / birds the color of ash the color of sunrise” (33-35) in a completely natural way. The video supported poem gains more life with these images, immersing the viewer in this completely new world. I really liked this way of exposing poetry, it gives the author new tools to create his world and expose his migration, his travel and truly convincing us that there is an exchange in literature.