Between Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Peter Ackroyd’s Clerkenwell Tales: A dialogue of the contemporary novel and medieval literary conventions

Abstract

Ackroyd’s novel might be viewed as a narrative territory, emerging out of the dialogue between the contemporary and medieval cultures, their literary texts and alternative concepts of history and fiction. The paper analyses the multiple ways in which the novelist rewrites The Canterbury Tales. If Chaucer’s poem presents a microcosm of late medieval English society, Ackroyd’s novel is a collection of vignettes, making up the image of London in 1399, when the integrity of the city is shown as threatened by political intrigues and heresy. Ackroyd also remodels Chaucer’s pilgrims into such characters which suit the demands of the contemporary narrative and help him to develop his fictitious plot. Despite the apparent structural similarity of both texts, the concept of pilgrimage as a linear and movable frame of Chaucer’s poem is replaced in The Clerkenwell Tales by that of the city in turmoil, whose image, focalised by individual characters, and emerging out of a mosaic of various perspectives, appears as both solid and elusive. The literary debt is demonstrated, therefore, to be less straightforward than Ackroyd suggests. He replays certain tones of Chaucer’s poem but what he borrows is usually given a new form and endowed with new implications. This simultaneous assertion of the dependence on the medieval material and its transformation seems to enact at the level of the narrative discourse a warning against unquestioning acceptance of any overtly pressed meaning, which, as the implications of the story indicate, might be potentially dangerous at any time.