Daily Inspiration Quote by John Hutton

Take Chaucer "at face value" and you end up with a dud: a "complete drip". John Hutton’s line is a sly warning shot at the most common student mistake and the most seductive reading habit - confusing a speaking voice for a biography. It’s funny because it’s blunt. "Drip" is playground contempt, an intentionally unserious word aimed at puncturing the over-earnest tendency to treat canonical writers like solemn marble busts. Chaucer, of all people, is a perfect target: The Canterbury Tales is a ventriloquist act, a crowded room of personas, each one tugging at the reader’s sympathy or disgust, often in the same breath.

The intent is pedagogical: get readers to stop demanding sincerity and start noticing craft. "Face value" is what you accept when you’re rushing, when you want literature to behave like a diary entry or a TED Talk. Hutton’s subtext is that a sophisticated reader assumes performance first. Chaucer’s narrators are often naive, fawning, prudish, or strategically blind - not because Chaucer was those things, but because those masks let him satirize power, gender, class, and piety without preaching. The apparent "drip" is a decoy, a way to lure you into complicity before the joke turns and you realize you’ve been judging the world through a compromised lens.

Contextually, this lands in a classroom culture that still treats "authorial intent" as a moral truth-teller. Hutton nudges students toward a modern critical instinct: separate author from narrator, read tone as an instrument, and assume that intelligence can wear an idiot’s grin.