Chaucer and the Gift (If There Is Any)

Abstract

Chaucer and the Gift (If There Is Any) Britton J. Harwood If Chaucer meant the two narratives in the fifth fragment of the Canterbury Tales to play against each other, one perhaps interesting way they do so is to make a problem of the gift.1 The Squire's Tale-Franklin's Tale sequence not only ends, of course, with a question that seems to be about generosity ("Which was the mooste fre, as thynketh yow?"); it begins with magnificent gifts—the feast given by Genghis Khan ("Cambyuskan") on his birthday and the four magic objects sent him by another king.2 Over the course of the fragment, the reader must not so much, I think, "sort out Chaucer's sense of what it is to be 'fre' "3 as follow Chaucer's sorting it out. Jacques Derrida has come close to putting the gift under erasure ("the gift, if there is any [s'il y en a]"). In his [End Page 26] own time and way, Chaucer, I am proposing, will eventually try to erase unproductive expenditure—what Georges Bataille called dépense—by safely framing and containing it by economy and exchange.4 Gift-giving or its possibility arises against the contrasting background that a tale-telling contest has set for it, economy and exchange, outlays for agreed-upon returns. At a certain point in commerce, buyer and seller agree upon a pretium for something that becomes a commodity at that point. The Franklin, for example, in essence readies the commodification of his son by offering to exchange him and "twenty pound worth lond" with anyone who can find him a young man of greater "discrecioun" (V.682-86). After the Host asks the pilgrims each to agree to tell four tales, the pilgrims enter into exchange by hearing a tale and thus incurring a determinate obligation. The Host asks them to promise (I.808-9), and this "tretee" secures a return for an outlay, like the agreement between Aurelius and the Orleans "maister" (V.1219) or the one in the Shipman's Tale, where the monk will enjoy the wife all night for a hundred franks.5 Erotic outlays can be economized even when money is not involved. So the falcon in the Squire's Tale takes the tercel's "herte in chaunge of [hers] for ay," having "yeven hym my trewe herte as free / As he swoor he yaf his herte to me" (V.535, 541-42). Consequently, when the male says he must leave for a while, their sorrows, seeming to mirror each other, form a similarly closed circle (V.584-87). The female asks that their conduct also reflect this mutuality: "Beth swich as I to yow have been and shal" (V.598). Promises of reciprocal conduct, in this case obedience, are swapped in the Franklin's Tale—the agreement being a "wys accord," like what makes commerce commerce, with the calculation of "prosperitee" on either side (V.791, 799).6 When the Squire's turn comes to pay the tale that he owes, he begins with what nevertheless threatens to rupture the circle of exchange—Genghis Khan in his utter self-sufficiency: "Hym lakked noght that [End Page 27] longeth to a kyng" (V.16). Even with the Franklin's reserve of plump partridges in their cages and breams and pikes in their ponds, he is a mere shadow of this prince, who is closer to Apollo, the "god and governour" giving to every thing "his tyme and his seson" (V.1031, 1034).7 The husband is similarly unconditioned in Boccaccio's Filocolo, the main source of the Franklin's Tale. The vow his wife has made to Tarolfo, her would-be lover, is judged by Fiammetta the queen to be invalid; thus, the husband's sacrifice of his honor by sending his wife unchastely to Tarolfo appears utterly gratuitous.8 Genghis's "diademe" (V.43, 60) flows out into a centrifugal flood of munificence and renown, exhaustive, independent, a circle breaking the circle of giving and taking—the crown of an unmoved mover ("of his corage as any centre stable" [V.22]). "Is not the gift," Derrida asks, "also that which interrupts...

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