Chapter Four—
Dangerous Desires and Play:
The Consolations of Fiction II

Artists themselves are probably the ones who best understand the meanings of their art-work—afterward, if they analyze their finished texts. However, artists are not likely to understand the deeper meanings of their own works during the process of creation when, using the forms and conventions of their chosen artistic medium and genre, they are struggling for control. Igor Stravinsky has said, for instance, that expression has never been the purpose of art. Rather, its purpose—the individual artist's purpose—is to impose order and unity on the multiplicity and confusion of feelings. Stravinsky is, of course, speaking of the conscious purpose of artistic creation, which seems to require, in effect, an attitude that "this is play." The artist imposes rules (or plays by rules and conventions of his genre and medium of expression) in order to gain mastery within the bounds of an unreal, fictional world, whether it be that of the symphony, the sonnet, or the painting of Madonna and Child. Stravinsky claims that, if his music seems to express something, this is an illusion (here used in the sense of delusion); yet elsewhere Stravinsky admits: "When we suddenly recognize our emotions, they are already cold, like lava."^[1]

The fictions of art are expressive on an individual and often on a social level, but the desires and anxieties art expresses can only be released to be transformed and dealt with under the assurance of a controlling framework. On the one hand, the act of making the artistic artifact involves a denial of the real world; it involves

the free and liberating step of entering into a play world that apparently constitutes itself against the real world,^[2] a game world in which the language of representation imitates and yet functions somewhat differently from the way language functions in the real world. We do not hear our neighbors naturally speaking rhymed verse. To enter into a work of art, both for the artist and for the recreating interpreter, involves an act of negation of the real world, but this negation does not annihilate reality. The combination of negation and affirmation in the structure of artistic play resembles that of the denegation, which patently affirms the opposite of what the person really means.^[3] Play does the reverse, denying in order to affirm. When we decide to make or to interpret a work of art, we say "no" to our immediate surroundings, to external reality, and this "no" and willing entry into a fictional world enable the artist to express and the interpreter to appreciate otherwise inadmissibly dangerous desires. By our willing denial of a representational intention behind the language of art—by trying to turn off the world, to cut art off from external reality, thus making it safe, a game we play according to its own rules—we gain the illusion of control necessary to turn on our own interior realities, to imagine, to dream.

After our initial willing entry into the game of art, there is a second controlling framework of negation that continually reminds us that what we are experiencing is "not real," "doesn't mean anything," is "not serious"—in short, is "not life," but something else. This second controlling framework includes all the conventions of artistic representation, the rules, so to speak, of the particular artistic game, which serve to distinguish the language of art from ordinary language and thus to deny that art refers to anything outside itself.^[4] That Chaucer wrote almost all of the Canterbury Tales in rhymed verse emphasizes the fictional nature of the representation. People do not ordinarily speak in poetry or embellish their speech with rhetorical amplifications; nor do they relate ordinary events artfully, to emphasize parallels and create suspense; nor do they usually speak through fictitious personae; nor do they engage in commentaries on their own speaking style. The conventions of artistic representation differ from or greatly exaggerate those of ordinary representation in a way that calls attention to language itself, and this self-referentiality of artistic representa-

tion tends to create the comforting impression that the world of art is closed off from the real world that lies outside art's ludic boundaries.

It is understandable why artists in their commentaries should try to prolong the framing "not" of fiction beyond the act of creation. To publicly explain the deep personal meanings of their artistic play, if they have analyzed and understood these, may not be in their own interest, and they may not be aware of the more general social malaises that affect them as individuals and thus find expression, disguised to various degrees, in their art.^[5] When artists do explain the meanings of their work—its connections to the real exterior and interior worlds—their rational explanation or sentence often seems to us terribly unsatisfactory, even diversionary, masking. The same is often true, for the same reasons, of scholarly and critical interpretations of the meanings of works of art.

Boccaccio's rationale for the first tale of the Decameron, expressed through the persona of Panfilo, is a good example of a masking moral sentence . Panfilo announces that his tale will be about one of God's miracles, a special act of grace:

I propose to begin by telling you of one of His marvellous works, so that, when we have heard it out, our hopes will rest in Him as in something immutable, and we shall forever praise His name. It is obvious that since all temporal things are transient and mortal, so they are filled and surrounded by troubles, trials and tribulations, and fraught with infinite dangers which we, who live with them and are part of them, could without a shadow of a doubt neither endure, nor defend ourselves against, if God's special grace did not lend us strength and discernment. Nor should we suppose that His grace descends upon and within us through any merit of our own, for it is set in motion by His own loving kindness, and is obtained by the pleas of people who like ourselves were mortal, and who, by firmly doing His pleasure whilst they were in this life, have now joined Him in eternal blessedness.
(pp. 68–69)

The moral with which Boccaccio begins and ends this tale explains it as an exemplum of God's power. The tale is supposed to work like contemporary post-plague paintings to magnify God and demean man and to express man's extreme dependence on God's mercy. Such a moral sentence, which encourages identification with God and the saints in self-protection, is one way of dealing

with anxiety about death and powerlessness, but the fiction of the sinful Ser Cepperello's achievement of sainthood offers a different kind of consolation: a rebellious fantasy of man's own power over the manner of his death and of his ability to get what he wants from his fellow men and from God too. Taken together, the metafictional moral sentence and the fiction itself reproduce the structure of a denegation. The sentence is a morally "correct" affirmation that denies and thereby enables expression of the dangerous desire of the fiction. Our pleasure in this rebellious fantasy is covert; it is masked and controlled by a moral interpretation that assures us the fiction means just the opposite.

The more dangerous and openly expressed (nude of symbolic transformations) the desires expressed by the fiction and the closer its language to that of everyday representation (the less the artistic techniques and conventions call attention to themselves as such), the more boldly the artist must intervene on a metafictional level to point out the status of the art object as unreal. He may intervene by calling attention to those artistic techniques he does use—or by apologizing for those he is not using, which achieves the same purpose—or by giving the fiction a masking moral sentence, or by openly belittling his fiction and encouraging the audience to laugh at it and not to take it seriously. All such introductory metafictional denials enable the expression of forbidden desires in the ensuing fiction.

The medieval fabliau, a genre in which Chaucer excelled, so flagrantly satisfied erotic and aggressive desires and flouted authority that it had special needs for denying devices, some of the most powerful of which were metatextual or contextual. Of these negating frames, the most important has not been preserved in the manuscripts of the French fabliau collections, although Chaucer tries to suggest it in his Canterbury Tales . This frame is comic performance and reception, smiles and laughter that deny a dangerous, aggressive, "serious" intention on the part of the fabliau's teller or of those who identify with its characters, no matter how punitive the fictive dethronement of the "father," no matter how indecent the exposure of the fabliau's ribald language.

In order to understand how laughter may work as a metaverbal frame to change the meaning of all the signs, whether actions or words, within its bounds, we might think of the childhood game

of tickling, wherein the parent or adult signals with smiles and laughter and comic expressions the benevolent intention behind his aggressive tickle attack. The child uses the same smiles and laughter to show that he understands or that he has chosen to interpret as nonthreatening these potentially dangerous intrusions into his personal space by a stronger person than himself. As we see here, laughter as the response of the immobilized or weaker person may deny a threat from the outside, just as, on the part of an aggressive, stronger person, laughter may be an assertion that his own signs do not mean what they appear to. For the weak, passive, or subservient person (and this might include the audience of a fiction as well as any other social group), laughter may be an assimilating assertion of self, an attempt to take control of the situation and, in the case that it denies a seriously intended threat from an authority figure who is not laughing, such laughter may be rebellious. On the other hand, for someone in a position of power and authority (which might include the author of a fiction, its teller, or members of the audience who identify with these or with the fictive aggressor), laughter can also be a way of denying and ineffectively censoring aggressive desires, thus enabling their expression and enjoyment, a way of equivocating, of having it both ways.

As we shall see later at greater length, Chaucer's Host, temporary ruler of the group of Canterbury pilgrims, time and again uses laughter to deny his aggression in comic deflations and mocking exposures of other pilgrims, generally at the moment when he puts them on the spot by requesting a tale. The Host insists on the protective cover of play, which should enable him to tell "the truth" without making anyone angry: "'But yet I pray thee, be nat wroth for game; / A man may seye ful sooth in game and pley'" (A 4354–55). However, the fiction of "just play" occasionally fails and pilgrims do get angry over the Host's tendentious japes, which injure their public image and self-esteem.

Chaucer's fictionalization of the storytelling situation enables us to see fabliau tellers using metatextual denying devices. The Miller, for instance, first takes care to announce that he is drunk and therefore not responsible for what he will say:

  "Now herkneth," quod the Millere, "alle and some!
But first I make a protestacioun
That I am dronke; I knowe it by my soun.

And therfore if that I mysspeke or seye,
Wyte it the ale of Southwerk, I you preye."
(A 3136–40)

Like the laughing person, the drunk person is defenseless, and this self-incapacitation prevents us from taking his threats seriously. When the Reeve protests because he perceives himself to be the butt of the Miller's fictional cuckolding of a carpenter, the Miller uses other denying devices. He insists on the difference between proverbs and tales—artfully organized language—and life; and he argues that an interpreter is free to make of his fiction whatever he wants, that a married man, like the Miller himself, is perfectly free to see the cuckolded husband of the tale as someone other than himself:

. . . "Leve brother Osewold,
Who hath no wyf, he is no cokewold.
But I sey nat therfore that thou art oon;
Ther been ful goode wyves many oon,
And evere a thousand goode ayeyns oon badde.
That knowestow wel thyself, but if thou madde.
Why artow angry with my tale now?
I have a wyf, pardee, as wel as thow;
Yet nolde I, for the oxen in my plogh,
Take upon me moore than ynogh,
As demen of myself that I were oon;
I wol bileve wel that I am noon."
(A 3151–62)

In spite of the Miller's denials, the Reeve is peeved and announces that the motivation for his own fabliau is revenge. He will set the Miller's "hood," just as the Miller has set a carpenter's "cap," by using force against force, churls' terms against churls' terms, fabliau against fabliau. The Reeve peels back the fiction of "just play" before he tells a fabliau that mocks and derides the Miller through the character of the cuckolded fabliau husband, whom he describes initially in the image of the Miller. Because of their metafictional frames, Chaucer's fabliaux are not just rebellious against authority in general (in ways to be discussed later), but they also deflate the pride of particular pilgrims who have earlier presumed to set themselves up by putting others down. The Cook calls the Reeve's fabliau a "jape of malice in the derk" (A 4338) and an-

nounces his own fabliau also as a tendentious joke, a "litel jape." For the Host's "playfully" disparaging comments about the Cook's pies and, implicitly, his stories, the Cook promises to get even later by telling a jape against the Host:

. . . 'sooth pley, quaad pley,' as the Flemyng seith.
And therfore, Herry Bailly, by thy feith,
Be thou nat wrooth, er we departen heer,
Though that my tale be of an hostileer.
But nathelees I wol nat telle it yit;
But er we parte, ywis, thou shalt be quit.
(A 4357–62)

The rules of the game permit only fictive revenges for fictive injuries. The player who gets angry is a spoilsport and suceeds only in making his own fall into a reality. The way to counter the mocking debasement of a rival's fabliau is to laugh it off and then tell a fabliau featuring one's rival in the role of scapegoat. In this situation, the laughter of the butt saves his esteem by announcing one of two things (neither of which may be true): either that "the shoe does not fit," that he does not perceive himself in or identify with the fabliau's scapegoat, but instead with the winners; or that he does identify with the scapegoat, but only partially, for "he" comprises more than one self, and his superior self, invulnerable, is capable of laughing along with everyone else at the inferior self mocked in the fabliau's fiction. This may be the relationship Chaucer intended to depict between the Merchant and the cuckolded husband in his tale. Not only is the "Merchant's Tale" a riposte to the Clerk's tale of an exemplary wife (which has already been deconstructed by the Clerk himself in his burlesque lyric envoy), but it may be the Merchant's way of putting himself on top by telling a joke on "himself" (that is, on his inferior or former self, as represented by the newly married, soon-to-be-cuckolded January).

In addition to these kinds of contextual and metafictional denying devices, the medieval French fabliaux—and, even more so, Chaucer's elaborate English versions—displayed poetic and narrative artifices that announced, from within the fabliau fiction, "this is play." The rustics featured in many fabliaux did not signal to courtly and high bourgeois audiences realism or a serious at-

tempt at representation, but, instead, artifice, fiction. For low bourgeois or popular medieval audiences, the main characters of certain fabliau plots were changed from rustics to nobles to emphasize the fiction. (Likewise today, the audience of the television series Dallas is not, for the most part, rich people; and peasants have never been the ones who got pleasure out of playing shepherds.) One man's reality is another man's fiction. The situations of medieval fabliaux were meant to seem artificial, not real. As for their language, the fabliaux were usually written in rhymed couplets, and the rhymes were sometimes quite rich and ingenious, calling attention to themselves and turning the signifier into the signified, the object of the story into play with language itself. The effect of such artifice is to create an unreal space and time and thereby enable the expression and appreciation of the fabliau's fulfillment of rebellious and forbidden desires.

In the medieval fabliau, in spite of all the strictures of age and authority, youthful—indeed, largely infantile—desires are satisfied in one way or another. These forbidden desires are of various sorts, and different aspects of the same fabliau may address different desires. One that I will discuss later is the desire to break the rules of proper speech, not only with respect to polite diction (avoiding dirty or rustic words), but also with respect to clarity of expression and singularity of intention (avoiding ambiguity and double entendre). Nevertheless, it would probably be fair to say that the chief desire expressed and fulfilled through the fictional action of medieval fabliaux was some version of the Oedipal fantasy: the cuckolding of the old husband by the younger man, aided by the desirous wife, who is not satisfied with her husband's sexual abilities. Like the mimed plays of Atellan farce centuries earlier, medieval fabliaux involved a basic Oedipal triangle of characters—father figure, son figure, and the desired and desiring female (wife/mother) figure. These characters might be doubled or supplemented by peripheral characters to modify in some way the fundamental comic action of dethroning and deriding the father figure.

All of Chaucer's fabliaux present variations on the Oedipal conflict. In the "Miller's Tale" we might say that the young boarder, Nicholas, contends not only with a jealous father figure in his host, the old carpenter, but also with a younger brother in Ab-

salom, who is after (indeed yearning "as dooth a lamb after the tete" [A 3704] for) the same love object as Nicholas, the carpenter's wife Alison. The "Reeve's Tale" gives both the figurative sons satisfaction by providing the jealous father of the story, the miller, with both a wife and a daughter to protect from the young clerics whom he shelters for the night in his own bedroom. Both women in this tale chose "son" over "father/husband," the wife by preferring the younger man's lovemaking (A 4230), the daughter by switching loyalties to reveal to her lover her father's treachery and to give back the stolen grain (A 4240–46). In the "Merchant's Tale," old January is cuckolded in his own pleasure garden by his young squire, Damian, who has got in by counterfeiting January's "key"; and in the "Shipman's Tale," the thirty-year-old "yonge monk"—that Ur-Don Juan, "Daun John" (B² 1233)—claims relation to the older merchant in order to gain closer "aqueyntaunce" with his wife and eventually to cuckold him under his own roof.

There is comparatively little overt physical aggression by the son figure against the father figure in Chaucer's fabliaux; instead, filial aggression is disguised or transformed, generally by displacing it to other characters. The miller's wife in the "Reeve's Tale" is the one who knocks him out with a blow to the head; in the "Miller's Tale" the naive husband hanging in his kneading trough in the rafters both actively and passively participates in the comic "mechanism":^[6] he cuts the rope, which precipitates his fall, which fractures his arm and brings, along with Nicholas's howling, all the neighbors in to mock his foolishness. Having set himself up in a gigantic male genital configuration at Nicholas's instigation, the carpenter, upon the cry of "water," cuts loose one member of the hanging trinity in an act that we may perceive, although he would not be in a position to do so, as a figure for self-castration. Only in the "reeve's Tale" does the father figure know he has been cuckolded. January in the "Merchant's Tale" is glimpsingly conscious of the wrong done him by his squire and his wife, but he is easily persuaded otherwise, and the merchant and carpenter in the "Shipman's" and "Miller's" tales never even suspect that they have been dethroned and dishonored. But this is often the case in medieval fabliaux, where the fun comes from the deception, from our understanding of the "true" sense of the signs (spelling his cuckolding) that the husband is blind to or takes in a different sense.

The verbal duping of the father may have the symbolic effect of a cuckolding, as, for instance, in the fabliau of "La Saineresse" ("The Lady Leech"),^[7] in which a husband who has boasted that no woman can deceive him is duped and cuckolded by his wife: she has her lover enter the house in the guise of a female leech, who then proceeds to "treat" her in the privacy of her bedroom. Afterward, the wife uses the vocabulary of leechcraft to give her husband a figurative account of her lovemaking (and his cuckolding) under his very nose. The husband, of course, does not suspect a thing:

Par .iii. rebinées me prist,
Et à chascune fois m'assist
Sor mes rains deux de ses peçons,
Et me feroit uns cops si lons;
Toute me sui fet martirier,
Et si ne poi onques sainier.
Granz cops me feroit et sovent;
Morte fusse, mon escient,
S'un trop bon oingnement ne fust.
Qui de tel oingnement éust,
Jà ne fust mès de mal grevée.
Et, quant m'ot tant demartelée,
Si m'a après ointes mes plaies
Qui moult par erent granz et laies,
Tant que je fui toute guerie.
Tel oingnement ne haz-je mie,
Et il ne fet pas à haïr,
Et si ne vous en quier mentir;
L'oingnement issoit d'un tuiel,
Et si descendoit d'un forel
D'une pel moult noire et hideuse,
Mais moult par estoit savoreuse."
Dist li borgois: "Ma bèle amie,
A poi ne fustes mal baillie;
Bon oingnement avez éu."
Cil ne s'est pas apercéu
De la borde qu'ele conta.
(MR, vol. 1, pp. 291–92)

Three times s/he^[8] repeated the procedure, / and each time placed / on my thighs two lancets / and gave me such a hard blow / that I was virtu-

ally martyred by it, / and still I couldn't bleed. / S/he gave me great blows and often. / I would have died, I believe, / if it hadn't been for a wonderful ointment. / Whoever has some of this ointment / no longer feels any pain. / And when s/he had pounded me so much, / afterwards s/he anointed my wounds, / which were by then great and ugly, / with the result that I was completely cured. / That ointment I surely don't dislike, / and it doesn't do anything hateful, / and I'm not trying to deceive you. / This ointment came out of a pipe, / and this hung down from a case / with a very black, ugly cover, / but it was savory in every way." / The bourgeois [husband] said, "My dear, / although you were a bit roughly handled, / you got a good ointment." / He did not perceive / the trick in what she recounted.

The wife's little "allegory" of lovemaking, her elaboration of a masking, partially censoring fiction of medical treatment, enables her to enjoy her lover in spite of her jealous husband and the social and religious sanctions against such illicit pleasures. Our vicarious pleasure in the fulfillment of forbidden erotic desires and in the foiling of authority—in the "father's" cuckolding—are made possible by the double denial of the two fictional frames: first by all the generic artifices of the fabliau, second by the wife's fictionalizing of the fabliau action.

When a lascivious, middle-aged priest represents a higher, "fatherly" authority in medieval French fabliaux, the action may focus less on fulfillment of erotic desire (taking his woman, cuckolding the father) than on physical aggression and revenge (that is, on the actual bodily punishment or castration of the father figure). For example, in the fabliau of "The Crucified Priest" ("Du Prestre crucefié," MR, vol. 1, pp. 194–97) the cuckolded husband, who is a carver of religious statues, especially crucifixes, sets off to market with a crucifix on his back, but he does not "carry his cross" for long. He returns rapidly to interrupt his wife making love with the priest, who hides in the carver's workroom. To escape detection, the priest stretches himself out naked against a cross in simulation of a statue of Christ. The husband, after a leisurely dinner, sharpens his knife and goes into his workroom, where he notes the wellhung Christ and rectifies his previous error of making a crucified Christ with obvious sex organs; in short, he castrates the flawed image of Christ (the rival priest):

"Dame," dist-il, vilainement,
"Ai en cest ymage mespris:
J'estoie yvres, ce m'est avis,
Quant je ceste chose i lessai;
Alumez, si l'amenderai."
Li prestres ne s'osa mouvoir;
Ei ice vous di-je por voir
Que vit et coilles li trencha,
Que onques riens ne li lessa
Que il n'ait tout outre trenchié.
(MR, vol. 1, p. 196)

"Lady," he said rudely, / "I did a bad job on this statue. / I was drunk, I think, / when I left this thing. / Light up, and I'll fix it." / The priest did not dare to move. / And I say this truly, / that he cut off the cock and balls / so that he left him nothing / that he had not entirely cut off.

Gautier Le Leu wrote two expanded variations on this plot involving the crucifixion/castration of the priest by the angry husband: "De Connebert" (MR, vol. 5, pp. 160–70) and "Du Prestre Teint" or "The Dyed Priest" (MR, vol. 6, pp. 8–23).^[9] In the former version the cuckolded husband, a blacksmith, gathers his male relatives together in a parliament to decide how to be revenged upon the priest who dishonors them all. This "epic" council is rendered comic by the low characters, subject matter, and language, which is brought down even further by subversively vulgar puns. One man offers to kill the priest, but the husband responds that he has no desire to take the priest's "vie" (punning on vit ), only his balls:

. . . Je n'ai envie
Qu'i perde ja par moi la vie,
Mais se gel puis ceianz tenir
Ne à l'aler ne au venir,
Je li voldrai coper les cous,
Par cui je sui Elnol et cous.
Por Deu, amis, or en pansez
Si q'an façois mes volantez.
(MR, vol. 5, pp. 163–64)

I don't desire / that he should lose, because of me, his life, / but if I could catch him here, / either going or coming, / I would like to cut off

his balls, / because of which I am an Arnoul and a cuckold. / For God's sake, friend, now consider / how you can accomplish my wishes.

The plan they elaborate forces the trapped priest to cut off his own testicles, nailed in five places to a wooden stump, to escape being burned to death. He saves his life (and his vit ), but it will henceforth be a chaste one: "'Vos ne batroiz jamais crepon, / Ainz manroiz vie de chapon'" (p. 169); "'You will never again pound the flesh, / but you will henceforth lead the life [or, bear the cock] of a capon.'" Gautier provides himself and his interpreters with alibis by means of his rather more elaborate than usual wit or joke-work (his clever rhymes, his puns, and his burlesques of the Crucifixion and of the epic parliament), along with his moral sentence against priestly philandering (for priests should truly be imitators of Christ). By means of such equivocation, he preserves a certain ambiguity of intention, which enables us to enjoy this vicious fantasy of revenge against an inhibiting authority figure.

The twelfth-century Latin fully dialogued play of Babio , which, for its content, Edmond Faral considered to be a fabliau just as much as later vernacular ones,^[10] also features the cuckolding and castration of the father figure by the son figure. In this case, the young servant, Fodius, in complicity with the wife, Petula, cuckolds the married priest, Babio, who is a miser and a coward, a foolish old pedant who "babbles" away, all sophistry and self-aggrandizing classical allusions, all words and no action. The names of the characters in this play are all comically significant. When Babio accuses Fodius of adultery with Petula, Fodius gets off the hook by means of a simple ruse of grammar. He swears that he is not fucking Petula, meaning at that very moment: "Iuro sacras per aras, non fodit hanc Fodius " (p. 44, line 272). When Babio does not catch the equivocation and takes fodit^[*] for the pasttense fodit^[*] , Fodius escapes, rejoicing in his own ingenuity and mocking the stupidity of Babio, "Beef-tongue," who cannot even distinguish between the sounds bu and ba: "Scit neque bu neque ba Babio lingua bovis" (p. 44, line 276). In the climactic scene of this hilarious comedy, which must have been enormously appreciated by young clerics under the discipline of their masters, Fodius jumps out of bed with Petula to catch Babio spying outside the bedroom; Fodius pretends not to recognize Babio, accuses him of

being a robber, and castrates him (p. 54, lines 451–52). Babio promptly decides to leave the couple in peace and become a monk, and the play ends with Babio repeating the old proverb, the truth of which the play has just demonstrated: never trust your wife, child, or dependent.^[11]

On the level of their plots, Chaucer's fabliaux, as I have already suggested, tend to focus on the satisfaction of forbidden erotic desires (the "son" cuckolding the "father" or the wife cuckolding her husband) rather than on the satisfaction of the "child's" illicitly aggressive, physically punitive desires against the "father." The "Summoner's Tale" is the exception to this generalization, and even in this tale the aggression of the fart is symbolically more deflating than it is physically harmful. Nevertheless, in the French fabliau version, "Li Dis de la vescie à prestre" ("The Tale of the Priest's Bladder," MR, vol. 3, pp. 106–17), the insult is much tamer: the dying man pestered by friars for a legacy leaves them his bladder. In the French version, the dying man is a priest and has no wife for the friars to be too intimate with, whereas in the "Summoner's Tale" Chaucer suggests an Oedipal triangle:

     The frere ariseth up ful curteisly,
And hire embraceth in his armes narwe,
And kiste hire sweete, and chirketh as a sparwe
With his lyppes: "Dame," quod he, "right weel,
As he that is youre servant every deel,
Thanked be God, that yow yaf soule and lyf!
Yet saugh I nat this day so fair a wyf
In al the chirche, God so save me!"
     "Ye, God amende defautes, sire," quod she.
(D 1802–10)

The friar assumes an authoritative attitude, as if he were not only spiritual father or "master," as he is addressed by Thomas and his wife (D 1781, 1800, 1836), but also master of the house; when he arrives he immediately drives the cat off the bench (D 1775) and orders just what he wants for dinner (D 1838–41). The friar's harangue warning Thomas against anger and asking for a penitential gift brings his spiritual son, for so he calls Thomas (D 1996), to the brink of explosion (D 2121). The sick man has been immobilized long enough. His revenge both demonstrates Thomas's power (by

tricking the friar into handling Thomas's anus and by the magnitude of his fart) and puts the friar down (literally, as he bends over awkwardly groping about Thomas's "pipe" ["tuwel," D 2148] and symbolically, through the friar's nose, which takes the brunt of the insult). Thomas's fart is a symbolic castration of the friar, a deflation of his masculine pride, and that is how the friar takes it. The anger of which Thomas relieves himself through the vengeful fart now inspires the friar. The problem of dividing the "gift" or "fartingsworth" in twelve, as the friar has promised to do in sharing it with his convent, is resolved in a way that multiplies the insult and puts the noses of his fellow friars on the line—or, rather, neatly lined up around the circle of a cartwheel, in a burlesque of contemporary representations of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, when Christ's disciples were inspired with the power of the Word.^[12] This resolution raises derision of paternal authority to a new high.

Some of the best medieval fabliaux mock and dethrone the "father" on several levels simultaneously. As I have suggested, the fictional action may feature the cuckolding or castration (the latter usually symbolic) of the most authoritative character or "father" by the "child" (usually either "son" or wife). An analogous cuckolding or castration may occur on the level of language when an illicit connotation dethrones an authoritative denotation, when an infantile or rustic or foolish interpretation overthrows a proper, conventional, authoritative one.^[13] The conflict featured in many fabliaux is a conflict of intention, of understanding; in this conflict the "childish" understanding displaces the authoritative, "adult" one, turning it into a misunderstanding. This is what happens, for example, in the previously discussed fabliau of the "Lady Leech" in the wife's euphemistic account of her lovemaking. The husband is attentive solely to the denotation of his wife's words as determined by their supposedly medical context, which she has constructed to mislead him. Because we know that a male lover lies beneath the disguise of the lady leech, illicit connotations arise in the wife's speech to form a second, erotic discourse that effectively displaces and dethrones the first—apparent, proper—meaning. The effect is that of an extended obscene pun.

In a number of fabliaux the dethronement of the authority figure is entirely linguistic, with the ruler being shown to be incapable of

controlling or legislating meaning, of imposing his interpretation on a word, a phrase, a sign. This is the case in the fabliau of "Le Roi d'Angleterre et le jongleur d'Ely" ("The King of England and the Jongleur from Ely," MR, vol. 2, pp. 242–56), in which the king questions the jongleur about his identity and, instead of getting conventional responses to his questions in the form of names, receives responses from the jongleur that avoid naming and define by relationship or else bring out possible puns and other types of double entendres in the king's words and idioms by assuming an entirely different context for understanding them than the king had intended. To the king's first question, "Who is your lord?" the jongleur replies, "The husband of my lady." This continues: "How are you called?" "The same as the one who brought me up." . . . "Where is your town?" "Around the church." "Where is the church?" "In the town of Ely." "Where is Ely located?" "On the water." "How is the water called?" "You don't have to call water; it always comes of its own accord." The jongleur's overly literal interpretations of the king's conventional idioms create équivoques , ambiguities that overthrow the authority of the king's words.

The most clever series of such twisted idioms occurs in a situation of horse trading. After offering to buy the jongleur's horse, the king questions him on its qualities, and the jongleur defeats the king's intentions by understanding each of the king's horsetrading idioms as though it referred to human accomplishments: "Does he not know how to draw ('trere')?" "He knows nothing of the bow or crossbow." . . ."Does he amble ('emble') well?" "He has never been taken at stealing." . . ."Now tell me, is he healthy ('seinz')?" "He's no saint ('seintz'), of that I'm certain." To the king's command that he answer correctly ("à droit") what land he is from ("De quele terre estez vus?"), the jongleur replies, once again, "à rebours" (against the grain, the wrong way):

—Sire, estez vus tywlers ou potters
Qe si folement demaundez?
Purquoi demandez de quele tere?
Volez vus de moi potz fere?
(MR, vol. 2, p. 247)

Lord, are you a tile maker or a potter / that you ask me such a silly question? / Why ask me what earth I'm made of? / Do you want to make pots out of me?

The deflating lesson the jongleur then proceeds to teach the king, at some length, is that people will interpret in the way the suits them, especially to build themselves up at another's expense: "Car nulle rien ne purroi fere / Qe um ne trovera le countrere"; "For I can do nothing / that someone else won't interpret the wrong way" (MR, vol. 2, p. 255). This subversive fabliau's concluding, rectifying moral, expressed in Latin, is that the best rule to follow is the Golden Mean: "Medium tenuere beati."

The fabliau of "La Male Honte," by Guillaume le Normand, also dethrones the ruler by means of wordplay. A peasant named Honte dies and sends a friend to the king of England to deliver to the king the "male" (bag) containing the peasant's worldly fortune, which is the king's by right when one of his peasants dies without an heir. The conflict of intention in this tale arises when the peasant, in his crude manner, announces to the king that he has brought him "la male Honte," meaning Honte's bag. The king, however, does not perceive that "honte" is a name; he automatically thinks, given the appearance of the speaker, that the peasant's phrase is a shameful malediction aimed at undermining his own power (and potency). In his anger, the king has the peasant thrown out of court and beaten. The peasant does not understand why he is being treated so roughly, but he is determined to keep his promise to his dead friend, so he makes his announcement two more times, each time to the king's increasing astonishment and outrage, until finally a counselor advises the king that he is in the wrong not to inquire what the "male Honte" is, whereupon the peasant explains, and the king rewards him by giving him Honte's bag. The joke is not on the peasant but on the king, for vulgar understanding and jumping to conclusions. When the peasant returns home, he broadcasts the story of the king's misunderstanding, to the king's real shame this time:

  Ce dit Guillaumes en son conte
Que li vilains en a portée
La male Honte en sa contrée.
Si l'a as Anglois departie;
Encor en ont il grant partie;
Sanz la male ont il assez honte,
Et chascun jor lor croist et monte.
Par mauvais seignor et par lasche
Les a honte mis en s'ataiche [or "sa taiche"].^[14]

So says Guillaume in his tale, / that the peasant carried / Honte's bag back to his land. / Yet he shared it with the English. / They still have a big part of it: / without the bag, they got plenty of shame, / and every day it grows and increases. / Because of a no-good, cowardly lord, / Shame has put them in her hat ribbon [or, her purse].

The fabliau of "La Male Honte" is a rebellious one with political undertones that uses a rustic, childish figure to mock authority.

As I have already suggested, illicit intention or understanding (the improper, unconventional joining of words with the "wrong" context) is equivalent, on a verbal level, to an act of cuckoldry (the improper, illicit joining of a wife with the "wrong" man). Some of Chaucer's fabliau "fathers" are very deliberately cuckolded by their wives and their wives' lovers linguistically, intellectually, as well as physically; they are encouraged to interpret the signs of their own humiliation in the "wrong" contexts. We experience pleasure in the subservient, "childish" characters' freewheeling, arbitrary interpretation of signs and their ability to make the "father" believe this interpretation, thereby putting themselves and their illicit intention on top. May, for example, double dupes January in the "Merchant's Tale," first by copulating with Damian in the tree, then by providing January with and convincing him to believe an outlandish context of interpretation that reverses the true meaning of the signs he has just witnessed, with the result that he consents, albeit unwittingly, to his own cuckolding. May convinces him that she was "struggling" with a man on a tree in order to restore her husband's eyesight according to an old remedy for blindness (E 2368–75). She authorizes her error by inventing an extraordinary proverbial recipe that, nevertheless, satisfies January.

There are also a number of French fabliaux in which the husband is fooled and dethroned in this way, by convincing him to accept a bizarre context of interpretation, thus misleading his intellect—hoodwinking him—and getting him to accept his replacement by another man. For example, in "Du Prestre ki abevete" ("The Priest Who Spies," MR, vol. 3, pp. 54–57), a priest makes a husband believe that the view through the hole in his door is false, because when the priest looks through it, he claims to see the husband and wife copulating, although they are really eating dinner. When the husband goes out to test the view through the hole, the priest seizes his opportunity, and the husband is none the

wiser for having witnessed his own cuckolding. In "Du Vilain de Bailluel" ("The Rustic from Bailluel," MR, vol. 4, pp. 212–16), the husband is encouraged to believe that he is lying on his bed dead and thus can do nothing about the spectacle across the room of his wife making love with the priest.

In Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," the clerk Nicholas fools the old husband, who should know better (for God promised never again to destroy the world by water), into believing in and making ridiculous preparations for a second, this time flash, Flood—and all this after the husband has just prided himself at length on his ignorance and lack of curiosity:

  This carpenter to blessen hym bigan,
And seyde, "Help us, Seinte Frydeswyde!
A man woot litel what hym shal bityde.
This man is falle, with his astromye,
In some woodnesse or in som agonye.
I thoughte ay wel how that it sholde be!
Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee.
Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed man
That noght but oonly his bileve kan!
So ferde another clerk with astromye;
He walked in the feeldes for to prye
Upon the sterres, what ther sholde bifalle,
Til he was in a marle-pit yfalle;
He saugh nat that. But yet, by Seint Thomas,
Me reweth soore of hende Nicholas.
He shal be rated of his studiyng."
(A 3448–63)

The jealous old husband's pride in his own stupidity heightens the comedy of his fall from the divine grace he believed was especially his—believed firmly enough to spend the night hanging in a trough in the rafters waiting for a second Flood, from which God would save him, like another Noah, with his wife (and his boarder, in lieu of sons). In Chaucer's "Summoner's Tale," on the other hand, it is the ill husband, Thomas, who misleads the "fatherly" friar's understanding by encouraging him to believe that the gift hidden in such a private place, which must be equally divided among the friars in the convent, must be very precious indeed. The friar should know better than to go feeling around Thomas's anus, but his own greed

and Thomas's misleading suggestions encourage his total misinterpretation of the signs, which he understands in the context of a dying man's legacy—until Thomas rectifies this misinterpretation with a fart that proclaims, by providing its own unmistakably pungent context, what kind of "gift" Thomas intended.

In all the passages thus far discussed, the fabliau plot involves one or more "child" characters' mocking or dethronement, through their actions and words, of an authoritative, inhibiting "father," who may also be represented by one or more characters, but most commonly by a jealous old husband or a lascivious, middle-aged priest. There are, however, consolations to be had from fictive dethronements of a more abstract kind, in which the power or authority to be subverted and mocked is vested, not in a character, but in a prescribed code of language or conduct or in a literary genre or topos. The satisfactions to be had in breaking such rules will be the subject of the next chapter.