Chaosbändigung im wilden Innen:
„Sir Thopas“ als karnevaleskes Zentrum der Canterbury Tales

• Andreas Mahler

Chaucer’s “Sir Thopas” is a fragment. When Chaucer-the-pilgrim is just about to reach the true beginning of his tale, the extradiegetic Chaucer-the-narrator makes the mediating host, Harry Bailly, ungraciously interrupt him(self) by complaining about the insupportable manner of the tale’s presentation, thus nipping his intradiegetic self ’s endeavors in the bud. The present article argues that this is a deliberate and – also in a literal sense – calculated move. Drawing on the Bakhtinian understanding of carnival as a heterotopian enclave, suspending and subverting serious everyday distinctions and hierarchies, the article sets out to show that “Sir Thopas” is both a fragment and complete: from the point of view of its story, it barely reaches its beginning, but from the point of view of its textuality, it ends right where its arithmetically determined textual logic says it has to stop. In placing a mise en aby me-like failure/success at the heart of his overall project, Chaucer, making use of a typical medieval device, mirrors (and re-mirrors) a major success/failure in a minor failure/success (and vice versa), and through this (at least tongue-in-cheek) seems to signal that, for him, his Canterbury Tales, though they are obviously and admittedly incomplete, somehow have achieved totality and closure after all.