ABSTRACT
Harwood uses the work of Derrida to interpret the Nun’s Priest’s Tale as manifesting a Chaucerian anxiety that language is not a derivative of the ‘things’ it refers to but that it actually constitutes the ‘reality’ its users experience. Although Chaucer is ironic about the ‘supplementarity’ of language, and about the various ways in which it effaces what it seeks to present, and although his thinking is based on a standard medieval belief that signification is ‘fallen’ and subsidiary to an original ‘truth’, the divine Logos, that stands outside the signifying system, there is evidence in the Tale that language does in fact produce the origin that claims to produce it. Harwood posits a set of hierarchical (Christian) oppositions in the Tale which become similarly ‘destabilized’, and while Chaucer attempts to suppress his knowledge of the ‘dangerous nature of signs’, his Tale finally confesses ‘a sign of an epoch to come’. For introductions to Derrida’s work, see Jonathan Culler, On Reconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), chapter 4; Christopher Norris, Reconstruction: Theory and Practice, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 1991); Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
