Rather than a possible resolution to the “Marriage Debate,” Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale is a meta-critical poem designed to challenge his readers’ critical acumen and to assist in refining their interpretative skills. One element in the Tale’s instructive program is Aurelius’s little-noticed yet symptomatic love-wound, his sursanure. Outlining and then deploying the techniques of “symptomatic” literary criticism, this essay concentrates on five symptomatic modalities in the Tale—“parataxis,” “surface,” “intention,” “radical cure,” and “dehiscence.” While many readers share an unqualified admiration for the Franklin’s romance, the approach of this study argues for the necessity of reading the Tale symptomatically and “against the grain”—that is, closely, aggressively, unsentimentally, and counter-romantically.

Chapter 4 argues that the Franklin’s performance serves as the dialectical synthesis of the views on value of the preceding performances, encompassing the wondrous renewal of the Squire, the amoral instrumentalism of the Merchant, and the meta-value of the Clerk. In this way, the Franklin’s performance presents a sober, disenchanted, but nonetheless ultimately affirmative meditation on the creative power of fiction - one that recognizes fiction’s instrumental value but insists that a paradoxically knowing mystification of this instrumentality can be the basis for a practicable ethics for living in a fallen world. To pursue this argument, the chapter performs a close reading of the Squire-Franklin link (taking into account the bearing of manuscript evidence), examines key aspects of the tale’s prologue and narrative, and considers the Franklin’s portrait in respect to the social status of franklins in Chaucer’s day. It concludes that the performance formulates a commitment to literary value that not only transcends the vulnerabilities of the preceding tales, but is also precisely the literary value that someone socially situated like Chaucer is best positioned to create.

After presenting book’s justification, the introduction articulates its central argument: that the four-tale sequence of Clerk, Merchant, Squire, and Franklin enacts a dynamically unfolding, conflicted meditation on how literary value may be construed in a way that justifies the time, energy, and expense devoted to the writing of fiction - a justification made in respect to other activities pertaining to other values, especially to economic value in the sense of making a living. The introduction then considers the metacritical stakes and implications of this argument along the methodological dimension of the bearing of manuscript evidence on the principles of Chaucer interpretation and the conceptual dimension of the problem literary value. The former consideration reviews the manuscript basis for the book’s claim about the four-tale sequence; the latter consideration indicates theoretical debts (to, e.g., Bruno Latour and Georg Simmel) and introduces several key terms used throughout the book (the most important: literary axiology, axiological person, and axiological logic), explaining the relation of these terms to more traditional ones of Chaucer criticism.