Pilgrim, Audience, God: David Williams on the audience of The Canterbury Tales

This chapter of David Williams’ The Canterbury Tales: A Literary Pilgrimage presents a new way of understanding how Chaucer interacts with his audience. Williams argues that Chaucer creates “a complicated set of analogous audiences…to associate us, as audience, at various times, with one or another of these fictional audiences” (24). That is, Chaucer gives us the tools to “transcend fiction through fiction.” Williams describes this narrative construction as “cosmological,” and even goes on to argue that each pilgrim tells a tale that has a nuclei (perhaps more simply the “moral” of a tale?) that is received by several different audiences: other pilgrims, Chaucer poet, even God. This creates a narrative at an existential level and an opportunity for us as the reader-audience to “recognize ourselves by analogy as the ultimate level of a whole series of flawed authors,” which then begs the question of what our tale is. Williams asserts a “didactic Chaucer” that draws in us as his audience to participate as pilgrims. I’m not sure I’m wholly convinced of his argument, but it was the first of its kind that I have come across and gave me a new lens of trying to understand the function of storytelling in The Canterbury Tales.