Creative Reworkings: 'The Canterbury Tales' again

I mentioned David Lodge's reworking of 'The Canterbury Tales' in my last post. Another reworking (which I prefer) is Tim Gautreaux's 'Died and Gone to Vegas' which you can read here or in Waiting for the Evening News, or in Same Place, Same Things, or in The Best American Catholic Short Stories.

The story features a group of workers on the significantly named Leo B. Canterbury, a steam dredge which is going nowhere because of the "high winter winds", who tell each other increasingly tall tales over a game of cards.

However, as the game progresses we discover that not only the Leo B. Canterbury but their pilgrimage is on hold. What all the characters want, as Gautreaux himself explains in an interview with the Mississippi Review, is "to go on some sort of pilgrimage [to] the secular shrine of Las Vegas. Or as the dredge's pilot puts it: "Hell, we all want to go to Las Vegas. Don't you want to take one of us along to the holy land?"

Their stories (or "lies") are wonderful and wonderfully told but it is the ending which brings us back, cleverly and subtly, to 'The Canterbury Tales'.

The story finishes with Nick, the story's one college boy, imagining one more story, a story of disappointment at the gambling tables and another journey, this time away from Vegas: "He saw her at last walking across the desert through the waves of heat, mountains in front and the angry snarl of cross-country traffic in the rear, until she sobered up and began to hitch, picked up by a carload of Jehovah's Witnesses driving to a convention in Baton Rouge in an un-air-conditioned compact stuck in second gear. Every thirty miles the car would overheat and they would all get out, stand among the cactus and pray. Raynelle would curse them, and they would pray harder for the big, sunburned woman sweating in the metallic dress. The desert would spread before her as far as the end of the world, a hot and rocky place empty of mirages and dreams. She might not live to get out of it."

Though untrue (because it is only one possible future), it is the only story within the story that isn't a "lie". And the journey away from "the secular shrine of Las Vegas" is the only true journey in the story too, a journey to a place empty of mirages where other greater journeys at least become possible.

Creative Reworkings: 'The Canterbury Tales'

I'm currently working on a scheme of work for the 'Journeys and Pilgrimages' creative writing option for A Level English Language and Literature and am quite enjoying the challenge. I have been looking, for example, at how recent writers have reinterpreted earlier texts (as I mentioned in an earlier post).

For example, David Lodge turns his attention to the opening of 'The Canterbury Tales' in Small World:

"When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every heath, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences."

There is clearly comic potential in seeing conferences as modern-day pilgrimages, though I'm not convinced we can push the analogy very far. However, one way of getting students interested in apparently more inaccessible literature is to have them reinterpret it for their own times.

For anyone who's looking for a more conventional approach to Chaucer, Cambridge University have some useful resources. For the Oxbridge high-fliers, this website is great. And this one is good for for younger students.