Reading The Canterbury Tales is not unlike watching a very campy soap opera with good writers, ones with a sense of wit. On the one hand, it is the business of a soap opera to be campy, over-dramatized, well, soapy. Thus do soap operas make money and thrive. Such a seemingly simple medium, though, in the hands of quirky writers/producers/directors/etc. can quickly become complex. Take any given typical soap opera-ish action. Is it truly typical? Is it as simple and formulaic as it seems? Clearly, one can say, it is a soap opera, such is how soap operas work. On the other hand, though, one knows that the brass behind the show are a competent bunch, who is to say they are not being ironic, poking fun, even, at the very medium they profit from?

In the same way, we turn to Chaucer's Tales. The characters that tell the tales belong to Chaucer, in the same way that the characters in a soap opera belong to the writers. Chaucer can have them talk as he likes, display mannerisms as he likes. This is a power he exercises liberally, as shown by his deviance from the norm of characters as caricatures. Clearly, he desires this contrast and revels in the subtlety of the human condition -

And Absalom, so fortune framed the farce,
Put up his mouth and kissed her naked arse
Most savorously befgore he knew of this.

The Canterbury Tales, Penguin Classics, p 119

As a writer, Chaucer would have had to survive either based on his work's value as entertainment or on its value as instruction. He does not appear to lean towards instruction - even moralizing tales, such as the Wife Of Bath's tale, are downplayed and lightly mocked. It is clear that Chaucer makes his living by entertaining, not informing.

Moreover, the characters in his tales are themselves creative artists. The premise of the piece is that the entertain themselves during their pilgrimage through tales. And with this brush he paints himself into a corner - it becomes difficult to separate the failings of the characters from the failings of the author. The tale of the Nun is, of course, the work of Chaucer. But we are called to treat it as the work of the the Nun. This added level of indirection is hurtful to the literary calibre of the work. More directly: Every attempt at dramatic irony fails because it harms the realism of the tale it is contained in. The format of the work, with its tales within tales, brings the contrivance of the book to the forefront of the reader's mind, leaving a bad taste in the readers mouth. The choice of format is a black mark against the author, against his characters, and against the joy of any reader.

Chaucer is commonly heralded as one who broke with tradition and took the daring step of making his characters more multi-faceted, of breaking away from the formulaic, simplistic archetypes. True as this may be, Chaucer finds an even more convenient crutch to prop his book up, that of the characters themselves. By making the meat of his book tales ostensibly told by others, Chaucer neatly shifts responsibility to the same. Chaucer's literary lapses become the stylistic flourishes of his characters - he hides behind human fallibility to mask his own. His choice of style dilutes the potency of each literary flourish he may posses - and no element is more diluted than that of realism. Specifically, the semblance of reality in all of his tales is spoiled by our knowledge that all the instances of dramatic irony are in fact created - twice, even. Irony is appealing to humans primarily because of how seeming order is created from disorder - two concepts are linked through an arbitrarily common third. What gives irony its dramatic or humorous punch is it's happenstance. The coincidence that gives rise to irony it necessarily missing in literature, it would be absurd for us to assume that the words on the page are anything but what they were intended to be. But irony is still forceful in the world or literature because of the skill of author's in making coherence - in making irony appear in the world of their characters in the same way that it appears in the world of humans.

In the wife of Bath's tale, the initial situation is that a knight rapes a maiden -- a crime of power, of dominion. He is pardoned from certain death (conditionally) by the queen, the female half of the monarchy. His eventual answer to the question he must answer is that women want dominion over themselves and their husbands. Finally, the knight himself only gains happiness when he gives dominion over his life over to the woman, in the choice of what sort of wife he'd like to have. This thread of women and dominion is what provides all of the irony for the tale. On a dictionary level, this is ironic of course, but it is harshly diluted in power. The readers know that the tale is told first by the Wife of Bath and second by Chaucer. This highlights the contrivance of the "irony" - any semblance of reality in the tale is discarded by the heavy handed use of irony.

The only stab at irony in the nun's priest's tale is attempted through the repeated element of pride in Chanticleer's demise and escape. This particular tale is, by nature, off in the realm of fantasy already - but the dense irony strikes discordant even here. The reader nods its head calmly; there is no wit to this irony, only formulaic repetition of a theme. Chaucer's characters have stolen the thunder from his narrative, once again.

The pardoner's tale is the only tale of the four with any literary deftness, the pardoner plays on the drunkards' states of mind to evoke a concept of death as a real person, who conspires to kill off the young people of the town. In spite of this initial cleverness, the pardoner is unable to finish his tale except with a heavy-handed, moralistic, self-righteous ending. His interesting tinkering with the mental state of his characters is foiled by his desire to be neat and moralizing and concise; thus the literary wind is punched out of the tale by the irony of the character 'death'.

The last, and least, tale is the miller's tale. The man's humour is so base and crude that he makes no attempt whatsoever at any sort of irony or subtlety. Given Chaucer's success with the other tales, this seems a wise choice: better to tell a crude tale well than to attempt a more complicated one and tell it badly.

Chaucer is undoubtedly a genius, and The Canterbury Tales is no exception. Despite this, one must be careful to give credit is due: either the flaws of the tales are direct flaws in Chaucer's writing style, or they are flaws in his characters. This is true because he sets his characters up as author's in their own right. Insight as to which of the two one must decide is to be found in the treatment of dramatic irony. With careful analysis, it becomes clear that the flaws in the stories are (partially) a result of their irony that seems heavy-handed - Heavy-handed because of the extra level of indirection in the telling of the tales. Chaucer is a deft enough master of irony; he puts it to good use in his prologues - but in the tales themselves the format takes the edge off his skill. Every stab at irony cuts a glancing blow - and leaves each tale harder to enjoy.