[The Individuality of Storytelling Through Blogs: The Canterbury Tales]

By Christian Galvan, The Canterbury Blogs Team

In literature, reading a book is the most standard method for the reader to understand what the author is trying to portray. This interpretation of the author’s work is then left for the reader to organize and create their own model for what they understood from the author’s writings. In doing so, each reader creates their different analysis and views of the piece of literature. Fundamentally, storytelling and the way it is portrayed is the strongest way for someone to ventilate and attain an identity. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer provides a collection of tales that have different morals and intentions. Organizing these tales can be meticulous and sometimes confusing, as there are at least six main characters that tell stories and a minimum of four to five new characters in each successful tale. Moreover, remembering the chronological order in which these stories were told is overlooked, making many of the nuances included with the book hard to notice.  In the months of January-March 2008, an ambitious project called “The Canterbury Blogs” was developed by four students at University of California, Santa Barbara. After exploring this term long project that dissected each story and translated it onto an internet friendly blog format, it can be deducted that The Canterbury Tales is a work that transcends time and once modified into a modern format, the community and expressive features of Chaucer’s work are still relevant today.

            Within The Canterbury Tales, the amount of characters that have to tell their own story may seem overwhelming, as one can easily forget the facets and motifs that each tale represents. It is obvious that Chaucer was trying to establish his own set of ideas for society to ponder and lay down a bit of social critique himself. For one to understand this idea though, one must first organize the events in which each tale was carried out. Since the tales are told in a journey that spans a couple of days, stories are told each morning, afternoon, and evening. The first fact that one must conceive is that the book takes place in early April: “When fair April with his showers sweet, has pierced the drought of March to the root's feet and bathed each vein in liquid of such power, its strength creates the newly springing flower” (Chaucer, 1-4). The layout of the journey is set to take place when a new “spring cleaning” has taken place, a metaphorical way of saying that with each tale, each character might learn something from the other and possibly change their ways in the same way nature creates the new flowers that will rule throughout summer. For this purpose, keeping a careful track of the progression of time is very crucial in order to understand Chaucer’s work more deeply. Consequently, an interactive timeline was designed in order to track down each tale down to the hour and minute in which it was told. Dubbed the “Timeline Creator 2.0”, this tool allows a user to create his own .xml code that is read by the java compiler. The .xml code, which is the hardest part to create since it consists of various computer languages, was facilitated by this creator since through a meticulous process, takes each parameter for the timeline and effectively makes an event and details that are recognizable by timeline creator. Through the creation of an interactive timeline, the order of events in which each character told their tales was much more understandable.

            First of all, one the most compelling features of having a timeline to go with the tales is that each tale is divided effectively to the point that one can easily point out which character told what story and at what point. By clicking on “The Knight’s Tale” event, for example, one is reminded of the fact that the knight did indeed tell his tale before anyone else did. Additionally, it is also noticed that his tale did not take the whole length of the first day. This allows the reader to easily archive the knight’s ideas and then read the small summary that the event from the timeline has to offer. This small and minor summary is to remind the reader of the knight’s tale and to offer a very concise explanation of what the knight simply said, rather than a retelling of the story. In effect, one is left with a very organized and seamless view of the character’s tale and their standing in relation to all of the other characters stories. However, the timeline lacks emotion and charisma, one of the main attractions behind reading the witty remarks and tales that each character has to present. Consequently, each character’s event in the timeline links to an external website that is called “Livejournal”, that is meant to be a personal space for each character to tell their tales to the full extent and in an internet friendly “blog” format. In this manner, the timeline serves as a great outline that orchestrates the flow of the tales and tabs the personal journal for each character. In effect, one would say that the Timeline is a great supplement to the journal, but in the end, to fully understand the wild personalities and vivid vibes from each character, one must click within each journal.

            Before the sharing of tales commences, the general prologue helps to introduce each of the characters and some of the traits that are fitting of them. The comprehension of these attributes are should garner attention, since to understand the main concept behind a person’s storytelling, one must understand the person first. According to the Canterbury Blogs group members, the consensus was that Livejournal offered the greatest personalization per blog and allowed for an extensive array of choices to customize each profile. Within the “profile” section of each blog, every character had an “interests” section, which helped to function as a gateway that expressed the narrator’s sentiments towards each character in a personal way. For example, the knight is described as a chivalrous figure that had nothing but respect and loyalty for his country and king. This helped to give the knight interests of an “admirable career, chivalry, my country, my horse, my son- the squire, my sword” (Livejournal). These interests would then go under clickable links that would allow the user to click through and filter out other characters that would have the same interests that the knight would. To put it simply, through each character’s interests, one can see the functionality of the Livejournal community, as users with similar likes and dislikes can meet each other through the “tags”. These tags classify each person based on their interests. While the knight may not share as many interests as people today (chivalry and horses are not in every soldier’s minds nowadays), it helps to differentiate him from the other characters in The Canterbury Tales. Through this minor, but effective feature, the reader of Chaucer’s work may find out that the knight is one of the many unique characters of the pilgrimage that has his own way of behaving and viewing life. Therefore, in order to understand these characters in the easiest way possible, it was deducted that each character had to be described accordingly to the general prologue. In this manner, one can simply navigate through their profiles and get a good idea of what to expect from their serious, comedic, or wild personality. Additionally, one ends up treating these characters like real life people that have their own blog, which makes them accessible and ultimately, more relative to today’s standards of personalization.

            First and foremost, throughout The Canterbury Tales, each character has a different individuality in explaining their tales. In order to convey this feature, the customization of the blog was important in order to add to the sense that one is, in essence, visiting the storyteller’s personal space/blog. To do this, selections of themes were carefully chosen in order to match the character’s preferences, aura, and personality. Citing the Wife of Bath’s page as an example (wifeofbath.livejournal.com), a theme that consisted of flowers and green was chosen. Like walking into a typical female’s room, the features on the Wife of Bath’s page show that she is in fact very feminine and exhibits the summertime personality, through the use of spring time flowers. Moreover, the green color was added in order to show that one of the main attractions she saw in men was their money, which was the reason that she married many older men at first. The Wife of Bath’s avatar is a woman posing seductively under a “SEX” logo is an exemplification of the overall theme of the wife’s page. In stark contrast, the knight’s page is very dark and even has a picture of a king shown at the very top in order to show his loyalty to his country and the hierarchy that it observes. The royal red, green, and black background also helps to display the knight as a serious character. The fact that these themes personalize the characters as much as a college dorm room would convey the inhabitant shows the strength of these blogs. To a certain extent, words can only do so much in order to portray beings the way they were rightfully meant to be. Visuals make these beings more palpable and the colors associated with them add more symbolism and imagery that one might otherwise overlook when simply reading the tales. In the end, the goal of the themes was to make the character’s pages accurate online representations of what one would see if these characters were sharing their tales with an audience in real life today.

            However, in truly understanding the way that this “Canterbury Tales” community worked, the blog had to make all of the characters intertwine and comment on each other’s tales, in a manner similar to the actual work. To put it simply, the ultimate purpose of these tales was to determine who would get a free dinner. This winner would be deemed the one with the best tale, according to the pilgrims. For this reason, input from each other’s tales was plentiful throughout the book, with an intermission found at least once in each tale. These interruptions would serve the purpose of giving more insight on how each pilgrim behaved and what their stance was on every major topic brought up in the tales. For example, in the Wife of Bath’s prologue, we get a nice idea of how plentiful and important sex was to her relationships, no matter what religion ordained. The Pardoner’s reaction in the book was surprise, as he had no idea that women like this existed. Effectively, his comment relays to the readers of the book that he is not into misogynistic relationships, and has a higher set of moral standards in comparison to the wife of bath. The sense of these characters interacting with each other is of great importance, since it is this small talk that determines the winner/best story. Without knowing what the audience (in the work) thought of their story, then the winner would simply come as a surprise and unnatural. To help with the expression of these minor comments, in a similar vein to instant messenger clients today, emoticons and internet slang was used. This would strengthen the translation into the blog arena. Some of the expressions found within The Canterbury Tales are simply missed since the reader may not feel familiar with some of the “emoticons” of the time period. In this new and web-friendly translation, words such as “LOL” and common spelling errors like “wat” are used to make the transition as accessible as possible. The effect of this method is that characters such as the summoner are given the justice that they deserve. In the book, the summoner is a twisted and inebriated character, reminiscent of your everyday drunkard. His common spelling mistakes and overuse of cuss words lets the blogger know that he is the rowdiest fellow out of the bunch. Without these minor additions, the translation would be considered the same as modern English, but in a less formal manner. In porting it over into the web friendly blogging scene, the effect of the Canterbury pilgrims’ community is that each character has a sense of identity and can contribute their own part into the work as a whole. For this reason, one can see that one of the greatest concepts that Chaucer wanted to explore with this work was to bring up the idea that every person has their own attitude and style to bring to the table. With plenty of themes, emoticons, and customization to choose from, the thematic aspect of Livejournal allowed us to scrutinize each character in a fashion that re-explored every single one of them, and exposed them in a familiar and modern identity that one would conceptually see today.

            Finally, one must ask the final question after reading The Canterbury Tales: What was the reasoning for Chaucer to have a group of different characters from different backgrounds interact and have each one tell their own individual and unique story? While the answer is not definite, by looking at the blog model for his work, it can be said that he was trying to show how each person has their own identity and cultural references that differentiates them from anyone else. In essence, “no two people are alike”. From the sober and stoic knight to the drunken summoner, each character’s wild personality is represented by their tale. Since storytelling has always been a way for people to personalize themselves, it is no wonder that translating this work into the blog scene would work wonders. To say that the blogs enhanced the sense of identity for each character would be putting it lightly. Every character has their own stance on different issues, and like any two people meeting today, the chances that two may get along all depend on similar tastes/distastes. The parallels are plentiful too, and can be seen in a simple room, like say, English 149 on Tuesday afternoons. Each student has a wiki page, and through traits like hobbies, tastes, music, and achievement, one builds an identity for each of these colleagues. Furthermore, by looking at the English 149 page as a whole, one can see that each one of these students has something unique to contribute to the class, the English 149 community. While the English 149 class may lack the drunken summoner, one can be sure that this class has students of different races, political parties, and sport preferences.  Similarly, Chaucer delves into the idea of a pilgrimage in order to get a group of different personalities together. By looking at The Canterbury Tales in a contextual manner, one can’t help but notice that it was Chaucer’s model for a community of pilgrims based on his time.

            Without a doubt, The Canterbury Tales is a mildly complex tale that has small events and details that one may miss on a first take. Translating these mild nuances into a timeline helps organize the pilgrims as a community, while creating blogs for each storyteller helps give the characters an identity that would be seen as plausible in today’s online world. The main goal of the Canterbury Blogs Livejournal project was to allow the character’s personalities to ooze through their tales and their blog pages, a part that the blog creators felt was vital in order to get the most realistic depiction of Chaucer’s work. Alternately, online communities allow people that haven’t met each other to interact. Like in The Canterbury Tales’ community, monks and knights were in the same group, an idea that is similar to the online communities. As a whole, this allows Chaucer’s work to be symbolical of each person’s identity in society, and whether they are of the lower or upper class, each of them act accordingly to the role society gives them. To modernize this idea, one may see a formal blog pertaining to a rich business owner, or a colorful blog that belongs to a young teenager. In either of these cases, blogs are a strong mechanism to exude one’s personality, showing that storytelling is and will always be the transcendent way to express oneself.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Bantam Classics, 1982.

"Livejournal." Livejournal. 13 Feb 2008 <http://www.livejournal.com/>.