1—
The Pardoner as Disenchanted Consciousness and Despairing Self

To my mind the Canterbury tale that responds best to patristic or Augustinian forms of analysis is the Pardoner's. Such studies as that of Robert P. Miller, showing the relevance to the tale of the tradition of the scriptural eunuch and the sin of presumption, or those of Bernard F. Huppé and Lee W. Patterson, demonstrating the even greater importance of the complementary sin of despair, are genuinely helpful in elucidating a narrative so patently, though often so puzzlingly, allegorical.^[1] At the same time the tale is one of the most fully dramatized, the most fitted to its teller, of any in the Canterbury collection. It has appealed to dramatically inclined critics since Kittredge as an example of what is freshest and most untraditional in Chaucer's art. It would be disingenuous of me to attempt to conceal my own bias in favor of the latter kind of criticism, but I think there is something to be gained from attending carefully to the typological elements of the tale because they are instructive about the place of the institution of exegetical interpretation in the Canterbury Tales and more generally about what it might mean to say that the poem "represents" the time in which it was written.

Though no one can really deny, since Robertson's studies, that Chaucer uses typological methods—at least sometimes—many critics have been reluctant to allow the implications that patristically influenced commentators draw from this fact. I take E. T. Donaldson's comment, first published in 1958, seven years after the appearance of Robertson's "Doctrine of Charity in Medieval Literary Gardens" and four years before his Preface to Chaucer , as typical of a dissatisfaction that has continued unabated despite the increasing number of detailed

[1] R. Miller, "Chaucer's Pardoner"; Huppé, Reading of the Canterbury Tales. 209–20; Patterson, "Chaucerian Confession."

and often attractive demonstrations of the presence of typological elements in the poet's work:

In my criticism I have been reluctant to invoke historical data from outside the poem to explain what is in it. . . . I have therefore eschewed the historical approach used both by the great Chaucerians of the earlier part of this century and by those scholars who have recently been reading Chaucer primarily as an exponent of medieval Christianity. The fact that the difference between what these two historical approaches have attained is absolute—if Chaucer means what the older Chaucerians thought he meant he cannot possibly mean what these newer Chaucerians think he means—has encouraged me to rely on the poems as the principal source of their meaning.^[2]

Perhaps one reason for critical hesitation has been the rather illiberal tone of much patristic criticism, which insists that most really interesting human activities are, from a medieval perspective, no more or less than sins. To object to that tone is to risk dismissal as a historically conditioned sentimentalist, but I think what really lies behind the objection is the feeling that if the exegetical critics are right, our ancestors were, in their well-documented distrust of poetry, an impossibly reductive lot who were unable to distinguish clearly between a daisy of the field and the Virgin Mary and who preferred (perhaps rightly) to see the latter whenever they encountered the former.

Still, in the Pardoner's Tale these so-called historical elements are stubbornly present. It helps a lot to know something about a tradition of interpretation based on the idea that whereas men make words stand for things, God can make things themselves stand for other things,^[3] in dealing with what is being communicated by a passage like the following from the Pardoner's Prologue:

Thanne have I in latoun a sholder-boon
Which that was of an hooly Jewes sheep.
"Goode men," I seye, "taak of my wordes keep;
If that this boon be wasshe in any welle,
If cow, or calf, or sheep, or oxe swelle

[2] Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry, vi. See Robertson, "Doctrine of Charity," and Preface to Chaucer. Robertson's articles on exegetical criticism and related matters have been collected in his Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

[3] The locus classicus for this idea is Augustine's De doctrina christiana, book 1. My formulation here follows Aquinas's elegant summary in Summa theologia 1.1, 10, resp.

That any worm hath ete, or worm ystonge,
Taak water of that welle and wassh his tonge,
And it is hool anon; and forthermoore,
Of pokkes and of scabbe, and every soore
Shal every sheep be hool that of this welle
Drynketh a draughte. Taak kep eek what I telle:
If that the good-man that the beestes oweth
Wol every wyke, er that the cok hym croweth,
Fastynge, drynken of this welle a draughte,
As thilke hooly Jew oure eldres taughte,
His beestes and his stoor shal multiplie.
        (VI, 350–65)

At the literal level this specimen of the Pardoner's "gaude" is a blatant appeal to the cupidity, or at any rate to the decidedly secular interests, of his "lewed" audience. The bone is a kind of snake oil. Yet the imagery the Pardoner uses about and around the supposed relic—sheep, holy Jews, devouring worms, life-giving wells—seems insistently to imply much more. I do not think it is forcing the passage at all to see in it a persistent typological edge characteristic of his style. The fundamental link the passage takes advantage of is the equation between sheep and Christian souls, the helpless beasts endangered by the worm that dieth not, whom the Good Shepherd has in care. Accordingly, the ancient holy Jew takes on associations perhaps with Jacob (via the well) and almost certainly with the promise made to Abraham echoed in line 365 (Gen. 22.16–18). These associations in turn imply a complex and sophisticated series of interpretations of that promise, originally applied literally to and by the children of Israel under the old law but since figurally fulfilled at a spiritual level under the new law in the care of Christ for his flock. This fulfillment, the outcome of a complex series of, precisely, historical circumstances, is presently embodied in the Pardoner's own profession and act, which is itself a thoroughly historical thing. The Pardoner performs the Holy Spirit's work of the salvation of souls by the mercy of Christ, a divine mission that is mediated through the plenitudo potestatis of the papacy as that power came to be understood in the thirteenth century as well as by the delegation of papal authority to the agency of the man before us, who daily completes, or rather debases and frustrates, the divine project begun so long ago.

I am being deliberately impressionistic rather than "textueel" here

because what I want to establish is not a particular exegesis but that a spiritual level of meaning is being deliberately and consciously put in play by the speaker behind and around the literal offer of worldly "heele" and enrichment. It seems to me that the passage is overloaded in the direction of this kind of spiritual significance. There is something gratuitous not about the reading itself but about the Pardoner's insistence on packing it in in the very act of mocking and debasing it with his pitch. It is one thing to announce that you are a fraud and that though unrepentant you intend to expose your own fraudulent arts; it is another thing to load those arts themselves with a set of undermeanings that exhibit so complex an awareness of the truth you are abusing. The Pardoner seems to be saying not only, Look how I deceive the ignorant, but also, Look at what an important matter I deceive them about. Whatever his motives, it is at least clear that the effect is achieved by a deliberate forcing of mundane and particular matters into a general and spiritual framework while refusing to let go of the literal level, so that we see both significances at the same time and are unsure to which one to assign priority. Much of the power of the Pardoner's Tale derives from a consistent application of this method to the materials of the story. A good deal of the eeriness of the Pardoner's central exemplum comes from the fact that it reverses the invariable order of causes found in all of its analogues, from The Arabian Nights to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In those stories the gold always comes first, and the point is to show that in looking for gold men find death. But in the Pardoner's Tale we begin with a search for death and find the gold later. The Pardoner's version thrusts the spiritual implications of the quest into the situation at the outset and juxtaposes them sharply to the extreme, childlike literal-mindedness of the three rioters, who treat death like a bully from the next town.

I intend to argue that such a failure or refusal to distinguish carefully and consistently between literal and spiritual levels of meaning and discourse is at the center of the Pardoner's Tale. I will maintain with the patristic critics that the allegorical relation of letter and spirit is the single most important determinant of the tale's meaning. I also want, however, to return to the Pardoner the agency that patristic readings generally deny him and to maintain that he himself is the source of this effect. What exegetical criticism detects in the tale and makes an external doctrinal structure that contains and explains a Pardoner unaware of it is in fact the Pardoner's interpretation of

himself, consciously undertaken and offered by him to the pilgrims. The Pardoner is the first exegetical critic of his own tale, obsessed with the spiritual meanings he sees beneath the surface of everyday life. He feels the burden of these meanings himself and attempts, as we shall see, to impose them on others. The Pardoner has long been recognized as the most self-conscious of the Canterbury pilgrims. Part of that self-consciousness involves an awareness of his own condition, and I do not mean simply that he attempts to hide his physical eunuchry—I am not at all sure that he does. The Pardoner's conduct of his tale indicates that among the things he knows about himself and is concerned to make others see are the things Robert P. Miller knows about him: that he is the eunuchus non dei , the embodiment of the vetus homo, the Old Man whose body is the body of this death and who is guilty of sinning against the Holy Ghost.

From the beginning there is something conspicuous and aggressive about the Pardoner's failure to conceal his various evils and deficiencies, well before he "confesses" some of them in his tale. The general narrator, the Host, and the "gentils" all see through him at once, and it seems likely that they can do so because the Pardoner makes it easy for them. A. C. Spearing has pointed to the obvious fakery of his authorizing bulls from popes and cardinals, and Kellogg and Haselmeyer report that the abuse of carrying false relics is "so rare that no contemporary manual even discusses it."^[4] Since the relics themselves—pillowcases and pigs' bones—convince no one, it seems fair to say that both the Canterbury frame and the historical background of the tale contribute to the impression the performance also creates that this particular Pardoner goes out of his way to stage his abuses and make them even more blatant than those of most of his historically attested compeers. The same is true of his physical and sexual peculiarities. I take it that such things as his immediate echoing of the Host's "manly" oath "by Seint Ronyan" and his announced preference for jolly wenches in every town though babies starve for it (449–53) have in common the tactic of calling attention to the sexual oddity the General Prologue notes so emphatically by deliberately shamming exaggerated virility. This is a form of camp in which the hypermasculinity is as much a put-on as the mock demonism of what

[4] Spearing, Pardoner's Prologue and Tale , 7; Kellogg and Haselmeyer, "Chaucer's Satire of the Pardoner," 228.

Patterson calls his "gross and deliberate parody of sinfulness" ("Chaucerian Confession," 162). The Pardoner's manner courts an interpretation that his confession simply confirms and heightens: what interests me most is that the consistent drift of the interpretation he suggests is theological in character. His prologue continually circles back to typologically charged images like the dove sitting on a barn of line 397 or more direct comparisons such as "I wol noon of the apostles countrefete" (447). Although the performance here may be interpreted as a joke, the humor derives from the disproportion between the ultimate issues that are constantly being raised and the cheap faker who raises them—and it is the Pardoner himself who keeps pointing up the discrepancy.

Nor is it clear, even at this early stage, that the Pardoner is only joking. He seems obscurely troubled that his performances can "'maken oother folk to twynne/From avarice and soore to repente'" (430–31), and, as Patterson has pointed out ("Chaucerian Confession," 164), he insists somewhat too strongly that he does it only for the money. His oddly serious warning about the dangers of false preaching (407–22) reveals how the act has a complexity for him that belies his insistence that he himself preaches only for gain and "al by rote." These more serious aspects of the Pardoner's self-presentation—what he seems to be saying about himself and the world— become clearer in the sermon section of the tale (463–660).

The sermon provides an intense, almost hallucinatory vision of a world dominated and consumed by sin, in which gluttony "Maketh that est and west and north and south,/In erthe, in eir, in water, men to swynke/To gete a glotoun deyntee mete and drynke!" (518–20). The presentation of sin as everywhere, and everywhere having its effect on the world, is heightened by the tendency to assimilate the effects of all sins to each individual sin and to combine sins:

Hasard is verray mooder of lesynges,
And of deceite, and cursed forswerynges,
Blaspheme of Crist, manslaughtre, and wast also
Of catel and of tyme.
        (591–94)

Such passages in isolation might simply be considered exaggeration appropriate to any preacher striving to move his hearers to repentance.

But the Pardoner's way of exaggerating is more complicated. It is one thing to say, as both the Parson (Parson's Tale X, 818) and the Pardoner do, that the world was corrupted by gluttony, or to say that original sin contained all other sins in itself potentially; it is another thing to say that the original sin was gluttony (Pardoner's Tale VI, 508–11). A standard theological point is turned around here by deliberately overliteralizing the spiritual interrelation of all sins to one another, in keeping with the general tendency of the sermon to treat matter rather than spirit as the root of all evil: "O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod,/Fulfilled of dong and of corrupcioun!" (534–35).

The Pardoner consistently and gratuitously forces details that invite disgust at the corruption of the physical, from his description of his reliquaries "Ycrammed ful of cloutes and of bones" (348) to the sheep that need healing "Of pokkes and of scabbe, and every soore" (358) to the brilliant way we are brought too close to the drunkard: "Sour is thy breeth, foul artow to embrace" (552, emphasis added). Especially in the description of gluttony, but also elsewhere in the sermon, the Pardoner moves well beyond mere asceticism to an obsessive insistence on the brutal and ugly condition of the flesh, especially of its burden, the sheer labor of keeping this death-bound and filthy bag alive: "How greet labour and cost is thee to fynde!" (537). This kind of thing gives a peculiarly literal (and powerful) emphasis to the frequent and quite orthodox refrain that sin is a living death and that the sinner "Is deed, whil that he lyveth in tho vices" (548, cf. 533, 558).

Though there is evidence here that the Pardoner hates the flesh in general, and no doubt his own body in particular, I do not think that this sense of actual physical corruption, weakness, and impotence is at the root of the Pardoner's character and problem any more than I think that he wishes to conceal his own physical impotence. It should be noted that the ascription of the Fall to gluttony is funny, and deliberately so. It gets its effect from taking the stock rant "Corrupt was al this world for glotonye" (504) and treating it as if it were literally true, and the Pardoner's qualifying asides ("it is no drede," "as I rede") show that he knows this, that he is parodying a certain sort of preaching at the same time as he is preaching. Such parodying of sermon styles is satirical, a mocking condemnation of the inadequacy of literal forms and institutions to contain or even define the reality of sin, and the Pardoner does it throughout his sermon:

Bihoold and se that in the firste table
Of heighe Goddes heestes honurable,
Hou that the seconde heeste of hym is this:
"Take nat my name in ydel or amys."
Lo, rather he forbedeth swich sweryng
Than homycide or many a cursed thyng;
I seye that, as by ordre, thus it stondeth;
This knoweth, that his heestes understondeth,
How that the seconde heeste of God is that.
       (639–47)

This passage makes fun of a style of thinking and moralizing whose literalness renders it preposterous. It pursues classification, labeling, and external order at the expense of dear ethical priorities and gives us an image of the preacher as a demented scholastic. A complementary figure is Stilboun, the "wys embassadour," who is himself a moralist and a preacher but also a Johnny-one-note who can only nag over and over that his principals "Shul nat allyen yow with hasardours" (618, cf. 613, 616). I think the Pardoner means these various examples, and the entire sermon, as comments on the kind of preaching, theology, and pastoral care that goes on in the church he represents. Even the snakeoil pitch to the "lewed peple" uses its typological elements to juxtapose and contrast what pardoning ought to be doing with what it actually does. We are perhaps so used to thinking, with the older historical critics, of the Pardoner as an embodiment of the notorious abuses of the fourteenth-century church that we tend not to consider that he has attitudes toward them—as well he might, for who should know them better?

Patristic criticism, the newer historicism, has been so successful in showing that the Pardoner fits into various typological patterns of sinfulness that it does not consider that he has attitudes toward these as well. But the two historical views need not lead to the contradiction Donaldson deplored if we see that they are both features of the Pardoner's own enterprise in the tale rather than conflicting views from outside it. To put his expert typological practice together with his experienced awareness of the degenerate times in which he lives and works is to uncover the Pardoner's disenchantment. His parodic presentation of doctrinal classification, moral exhortation, and religious institutions like the cult of relics and pardoning itself consistently enforces his contempt for the available instruments of salvation as they are used in the real life of the all-too-corporeal corpus mysticum around him. It does so, moreover, by measuring these things against

the spiritual standards of typological meaning, the allegorical truths that they should, but do not, embody. In every case what ought to be a manifestation of divine power, mercy, care, and love is shown to be cheapened and undone by human stupidity or malice, unthinking literalism or calculating self-interest. What the Pardoner is making fun of is the way the putative transcendence of the institutions of the church is continually reduced to a set of merely human practices. His disenchantment thus makes him a proponent of the older historical view of the tale as a satire on the corruption of the clergy. The satire is the Pardoner's, and his own best example is himself.

This last point is important. Though part of what drives the Pardoner's mockery is his outrage that the things of God should be so cheap, so easily subverted by the merely human, he does not mock—or preach—as a defense of the divine. One of the unusual rhetorical features of the sermon is the way it keeps associating the sins it describes with the Pardoner, showing that he is guilty of them. The most striking instances of this tendency are the passages where the Pardoner demonstrates his experienced familiarity with the sins he purports to condemn, as in the description of the drunken dice game (651–55) that Donaldson calls "so knowingly graphic as to exceed the limits of art" (Chaucer's Poetry, 1093) or the discussion of abuses of the wine trade and the difficulty of getting an honest drink (562–72). There is nothing concealed or private about the Pardoner's complicity in these vices; rather, he brings himself forward as an instance of them, and this reflexive element gives a particular bite and appropriateness to the concentration in the sermon on the increased sinfulness and consequentiality of sin in high places. "A capitayn sholde lyve in sobrenesse" (582), but this one does not, as he shows. Given the context, who else can the Pardoner be talking about here but himself, and why else is that remark in the sermon? Similar references to himself lurk in "Redeth the Bible, and fynde it expresly/Of wyn-yevyng to hem that han justise" (587), or:

It is repreeve and contrarie of honour
For to ben holde a commune hasardour.
And ever the hyer he is of estaat,
The moore is he yholden desolaat.
      (595–98)

All these images are in effect types and figures of the Pardoner himself, and he in turn is a type and figure of everything about the church—its

institutions, its preaching, its corrupt ministers—that fails to come to grips with the reality of sin in the world. That reality is, as I have already suggested, very real to the Pardoner. He portrays the wretchedness and misery of the human condition with immediacy and insight. He demonstrates how traditional patterns of classification, description, and exhortation fail to catch or contain the more intimate and existential presence of sin, death, and the burden of the flesh, which he sees in others and feels in himself. He has nothing but contempt, a deeper sense of contempt than we have yet examined, for the consolations of religion, but he takes very seriously the things they are intended to console. "For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. 3.6). On the one hand there is the horror of existence; on the other there is the church that fails to address or ameliorate that horror—the church that has become a dead letter, and one that kills. Caught between them and embodying them both is the Pardoner:

"Ther walken manye of whiche yow toold have I—
I seye it now wepyng, with pitous voys—
They been enemys of Cristes croys,
Of whiche the ende is deeth"
        (530–33)

The emphasis in the sermon section of the tale divides fairly evenly between these two perspectives (though both are always present), falling on either side of our most immediate and least hyperrhetorical view of him, the passage on the wine of Fish Street and Cheapside. Before that section he primarily develops his heightened view of life's ugliness and the universality of sin. After it he concentrates on the self-condemning mockery of the forms of religious ministry. This division points to and helps explain the development of the Pardoner's consciousness in the tale, the way something happens to him here. What happens is that as he manipulates the conventional materials of the sermon to reflect his own obsessions, he becomes more conscious of himself and more aware of both his power and his powerlessness. The power derives from the way he makes himself into a symbol, generalizing his own sinful and death-bound condition to the world around him. He makes the extent and the seriousness of what he stands for (what he makes himself stand for) more explicit as he dramatizes the evil God cannot or will not eliminate. His own presumption, for that is what it is, has the power of making a wasteland of the world. His powerlessness derives from the fact that what he symbolizes (what

he makes himself symbolize) is emptiness and privation. His despair, for that is what it is, makes his inability to save others or himself the most salient fact of existence.

Cupiditas, of course, means far more than avarice. In the deep Christian and Augustinian sense in which it is the root of evils and the contrary of caritas it refers to a consuming desire for that which one is lacking—it means wanting in both senses, or rather, in a particular way. Medieval Christianity understands privation itself as a fundamental fact of the human condition. Saint Augustine images it as the state of a pilgrim far from the blessedness of his home (De doctrina 1.4.4). Given this basic lack, two responses are possible. To use (utor) the things of this world as a way to get beyond them to God is, paradoxically, to grant them their independence, to open up the possibility of using them in charity, of cherishing them (De doctrina 1.33.37). The enjoyment (fruor ) of the world and others that is cupiditas only looks like enjoying them for their own sakes—it really means wanting to enjoy them for oneself, wanting to engulf them and make them the instruments of one's own will. In traditional terms despair is presumption: to say that God cannot forgive you, deliberately and consciously to refuse His forgiveness, is to place limits on His power and mercy, to usurp a judgment that belongs to Him. In its largest sense cupiditas is this desire to replace one's lack and one's dependency on the divine with a willed, self-sufficient refusal of them, and the inevitable frustration of this willing produces the heightened, outraged consciousness of dependence and insufficiency and the consequent hatred of God, self, and others that the Pardoner displays. This is the condition that the Pardoner suffers and wills; it is the condition that he half conceals or avoids in the prologue and that he embodies in the sermon. The extent to which his despair breaks loose in the sermon is indicated by the notorious fact that he forgets at the end of it that he has not yet told us how many rioters there were. I interpret this lapse as a sign of the extent to which he has become caught up in the sermon and lost control of the form of his tale in the act of dramatizing his condition, the universality of that condition, and its effects in the world. It is this heightened consciousness that he carries into the exemplum he is at last ready to tell.

The Pardoner's conduct of the exemplum itself demonstrates that it is not well fitted to express his disenchanted sensibility. It is hard to

imagine that any exemplum would be since the form itself is an example of the institutionalized literalism he despises. The traditional form of the Pardoner's exemplum argues the proposition, If you are avaricious you will die, in the most literal, and therefore unbelievable, way. It presents a clarified picture of the operations of divine justice that both the Pardoner's experience and his very existence—his continuing success as a fraud, "yeer by yeer"—utterly deny. The exemplum is precisely one of those worthless forms of spiritual teaching, too far removed from the reality of life and sin, that the Pardoner mocks in his sermon. That is one reason he modifies the early parts of the exemplum in an attempt to get the letter of the story to express something about spirit, and the well-attested oddness of the resulting effect shows the inaptness of the form to the purpose.

The peculiarities of the Pardoner's telling are gathered around, and focus on, the Old Man. The first part of the tale is in fact designed to prepare a context for him, and that is why it brings death into the foreground. It has become fairly commonplace by now to see the three rioters and the Old Man as aspects of the Pardoner, and I agree with this notion in general.^[5] The problem remains, however, of situating this division in the activity of the Pardoner himself and seeing how he uses it and what he uses it to say. The feeling of miasma in the opening scene arises, as I have previously suggested, from the semiallegorical treatment of an ordinary tavern scene so as to stress its spiritual overtones:

"Sire," quod this boy, "it nedeth never-a-deel;
It was me toold er ye cam heer two houres.
He was, pardee,  an old felawe of youres ,
And sodeynly he was yslayn to-nyght,
Fordronke, as he sat on his bench upright.
Ther cam a privee theef men clepeth Deeth,
That in this contree  al the peple sleeth,
And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo,
And wente his wey withouten wordes mo.
He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence.
And, maister,  er ye come in his presence,

[5] See, for example, Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales, 357–58; Condren, "Pardoner's Bid for Existence," 200.

Me thynketh that it were necessarie
For to be war of swich an adversarie.
Beth redy for to meete him everemoore;
Thus taughte me my dame; I sey namoore."
    (670–84, emphasis added)

The italicized phrases outline points at which the Pardoner's sophisticated typological perspective imposes on the innocent one of the youth. Because of what is at issue, "felawe" points to the fellowship of all men in sin and before death, "this contree" moves toward "this world," and the final warning urges the need for a different kind of readiness and preparation from what the boy seems to have in mind. And who is "my dame"? Nature? The church? The child speaks more than he knows.

At one level these characters are an image of the Pardoner's audience, of the "lewed peple" who live in ignorant literal-mindedness in a world that is more charged with spiritual significance and consequence than they can imagine. They treat reality as if it were an exemplum and respond to the offense against human integrity, self-sufficiency, and community that death is ("Er that he dide a man a dishonour," 691) as to an external threat, an isolated event, something merely physical. It has also become common to point out that the rioters' quest is a blasphemous parody of Christ's sacrifice, which slew spiritual death for the faithful once and for all.^[6] That is true, and it is another instance of the typological processing that the Pardoner goes out of his way to give the tale. But it also seems to me that he regards this aspect of the rioters with a certain ambivalence, even sympathy. There is something attractive in the youthful idealism that so confidently forms a band of brothers to slay death. The rioters do not seem really evil in the early parts of the tale; they are too innocent for that. A student of mine once compared them to fraternity boys, as much for their trivial dissipation as for their idealism, and the Pardoner's earliest characterization of them is not that they were sinful but that they "haunteden folye" (464). The Pardoner seems momentarily attracted to their quest because it does correspond to something in him. A literalized version of a desire to do "Cristes hooly werk," to slay death and save souls by offering

[6] For example, Stockton, "Deadliest Sin," 47; Adelman, "'Som wit,'" 97.

them Christ's pardon, is nostalgically revived in the rioters' quest (that is, revived as something lost but still desired) and at the same time is placed as naive and overconfident folly. The rioters, unlike the Pardoner, have no idea what they are up against.

What they are up against is the Old Man, who is, as his name suggests, the truth of the experience of the vetus homo as that experience is embodied in the consciousness of the Pardoner. He is what their quest leads to and what they might become if they did not live in an exemplum. The best explication of the psychology behind this figure is Kierkegaard's, who provides, in The Sickness unto Death, a phenomenology of despairing consciousness that in its play with the categories of literal and spiritual applies directly to Chaucer's text:

Literally speaking, there is not the slightest possibility that anyone will die from this sickness or that it will end in physical death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this inability to die. . . . If a person were to die of despair as one dies of a sickness, then the eternal in him, the self, must be able to die in the same sense as the body dies of sickness. But this is impossible; the dying of despair continually converts itself into a living. The person in despair cannot die; "no more than the dagger can slaughter thoughts" can despair consume the eternal, the self at the root of despair, whose worm does not die and whose fire is not quenched. . . . The inability of despair to consume him is so remote from being any kind of comfort to the person in despair that it is the very opposite. This comfort is precisely the torment, is precisely what keeps the gnawing alive and keeps life in the gnawing . . . : that he cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot reduce himself to nothing.
            (Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 17–19)

The proudeste of thise riotoures three
Answerde agayn, "What, carl, with sory grace!
Why artow al forwrapped save thy face?
Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?"

This olde man gan looke in his visage,
And seyde thus: "For I ne kan nat fynde
A man, though that I walked into Ynde,
Neither in citee ne in no village,
That wolde chaunge his youthe for myn age;
And therfore moot I han myn age stille,
As longe tyme as it is Goddes wille.
Ne Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my lyf.
Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf,
And on the ground, which is my moodres gate,

I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late,
And seye 'Leeve mooder, leet me in!
Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn!
Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste?
Mooder, with yow wolde I chaunge my cheste
That in my chambre longe tyme hath be,
Ye, for an heyre clowt to wrappe me!'
But yet to me she wol nat do that grace,
For which ful pale and welked is my face."
       (716–38)

The Pardoner uses the Old Man as a spokesman for this sophisticated despair. The Old Man's desire to exchange age for youth (720–26) points to the Pardoner's envy of the innocence of the rioters and of his "lewed" congregation and suggests that what he wants to be rid of is not physical decay but consciousness. Although he sounds suicidal (727–33), the Old Man is not so in the ordinary sense. Because he feels himself eternal, physical death is beside the point. What he wants is to be swallowed up—"Leeve mooder, leet me in!" (731)—to become nothing, to escape from the restless consciousness of his privation, his cupiditas. This is that sickness unto death of which Kierkegaard speaks: "perpetually to be dying, to die and yet not to die, to die death" (Sickness unto Death, 18).

To wish to exchange a chest of worldly goods for a hair shirt (734–38) is, in effect and typologically, to wish to be able to pay money for the gift of repentance, to wish that the literal version of pardoning were the true one. Besides demonstrating decisively that avarice is not at issue here, this wish indicates that the Pardoner understands that his situation is willed. He would have to repent to get any relief, and he will not, though he knows this intransigence is the source of his wretchedness. He also knows what his obdurate willing makes him:

"But, sires, to yow it is no curtcisye
To speken to an old man vileynye,
But he trespasse in word or elles in dede.
In Hooly Writ ye may yourself wel rede:
'Agayns an oold man, hoor upon his heed,
Ye sholde arise;' wherfore I yeve yow reed,
Ne dooth unto an oold man noon harm now,
Namoore than that ye wolde men did to yow
In age, if that ye so longe abyde."
      (739–47)

If the sermon is the place in the tale where the Pardoner most clearly expresses his anger, this passage, like the rest of the Old Man's speech, is the place where he most clearly gives vent to his self-pity. But his language also shows that he understands his condition spiritually and exegetically, that he interprets himself in traditional terms as the vetus homo, and that he uses the identification to express the self-hatred that is complement to the self-pity. The Pardoner's voicing of the unambiguous passage from Leviticus makes it move toward self-condemnation—from "Respect your elders" to "Rise up against the Old Man."^[7] This typological meaning is especially clear if the speech is understood and applied where it belongs, outside the tale and in relation to the Pardoner, who goes so far out of his way to show how he trespasses in word and deed.

The encounter with the Old Man is the place in the tale where the Pardoner most openly discloses his own condition and where his voice is least detached from the surface of the story, least qualified by irony and manipulation. It is the point at which he completes the process of putting himself into his tale, and the apparent result is that he has nowhere to go. The Old Man can point the way to death, but as soon as he does so, he vanishes from the story "thider as I have to go" (749). The rioters cannot hear what the Old Man has to tell them, that physical death is only a figure for the spiritual, for something that is eternally within them and in which they live without knowing it. They can only enact the literal and mechanical poetic justice of an exemplum about avarice—or so it seems. Although there is some truth to the idea that the tale becomes more narrow and limited and loses much of its atmosphere of mystery after the departure of the Old Man, it seems to me that his pointing finger remains to haunt the tale in the "signes and

[7] Leviticus 19:32. "Coram cano capite consurge, honora personam senis: et time Dominum Deum tuum. Ego sum Dominus" (Vulg.). "You shall rise up before the hoary head, and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord" (RSV). What allows the play of meaning is the Pardoner's peculiar translation of coram as "agayns." The word literally means something like "in the presence of." The older senses of against can have such meaning (see OED, s.v. against 1–5), but coram is translated "before" in both versions of the Lollard Bible, which is roughly contemporary with the Canterbury Tales: "Before the hoor heed arys and onour the persone of the oolde, and drede the Lord thi God; Y am a Lord" (early version, before 1382); "Rise thou bifor an hoor heed, and onoure thou the persoone of an eld man, and drede thou thi Lord God; Y am the Lord" (later version) (emphasis added). Forshall and Madden, eds., Holy Bible, 1:339–40. Cf. Lindberg, ed., MS. Bodley 959 , 2: 57–58 ad loc.

othere circumstances" the Pardoner imposes on the simple exemplum plot.

On the one hand the Pardoner traces the psychological progress of the rioters. Their idealism quickly turns into its contrary and generates a world of cynicism and suspicion in which "Men wolde seyn that we were theves stronge,/And for oure owene tresor doon us honge" (789–90) and every man's hand is against every other's. Such an image suggests the basic sense of the world that generated the idealism in them, the impulse to kill death, in the first place and thereby identifies the underlying protodespair of the rioters. This sense is most evident in the youngest, whose decision to murder his fellows is presented as an accession of self-consciousness. Like his companions he begins with a heightened awareness of the beauty of the world ("thise floryns newe and bryghte" [839, cf. 773–74]) that distracts him from brotherhood and the quest for death. This unself-conscious pleasure quickly shades into cupiditas, the desire to possess the object beheld, in order to complete an existence he suddenly perceives as lacking without it:

"O Lord!" quod he, "if so were that I myghte
Have al this tresor to myself allone,
Ther is no man that lyveth under the trone
Of God that sholde lyve so murye as I!"
       (840–43)

The account of how the fiend suggested to him that he should buy poison is theologically careful, not for the sake of the theological point but to mark a shift from external temptation to an inner motion of the will that discovers the preexisting depravity of the soul: "For-why the feend foond hym in swich lyvynge/That he hadde leve him to sorwe brynge" (847–48). By the time the youngest rioter gets to the apothecary, his imagery has begun to resonate with that despairing sense of wasting away that is the Pardoner's own: "And fayn he wolde wreke hym, if he myghte,/On vermyn that destroyed hym by nyghte" (857–58). The Pardoner seems to try to bring the rioters up to the point at which they might begin to discover the vetus homo or outcast old Adam in themselves and so begin to share the consciousness of the Old Man.

On the other hand the Pardoner plays with the imagery and structure of the tale so as to suggest in a different way what is "really" going on. His typological imagination seizes on certain details of the story to

allude to the spiritual plot of the tale that its literal unfolding obscures. The "breed and wyn" (797) that ultimately kill the rioters, whatever the precise interpretation put on them, are surely an example of a deliberate introduction of sacramental imagery. Similarly, the apothecary's description of the poison has the by-now familiar overloaded quality of physical details forced onto a spiritual plane:

The pothecarie answerde, "And thou shalt have
A thyng that, also God my soule save,
In al this world ther is no creature
That eten or dronken hath of this confiture
Noght but the momance of a corn of whete,
That he ne shal his lif anon forlete."
        (859–64)

The reference, I take it, is to John 12.24: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." The standard commentaries identify the grain as the eucharist by which the faithful soul ought to live and spiritual fruit arise. Similarly, the "large botelles thre" (871, cf. 877) that the youngest rioter fills with his poisoned wine refer to the saying of Jesus: "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins (Mark 2.22; cf. Matt. 9.17, Luke 5.37). Jerome takes this verse as referring to the transition from the old law to the new. Until a man is reborn and puts aside the vetus homo, he cannot contain the new wine of the gospel precepts. The Glossa ordinaria, following Bede, reads the wine as the Holy Spirit that transformed the apostles from old to new men but whose spiritual precepts destroy the scribes and the Pharisees of the old law and the proud generally. Since in the story it is evident that the rioters must be the old bottles that are burst, the pattern of typological action in the tale seems clear and consistent: the new law of salvation, the eucharist as the sacrifice of Christ, is poison to these veteres homines. This reading, or something like it, is the Pardoner's exegesis of the tale. The peculiarity of this exegesis—it is hardly usual to present the instruments of Christ's mercy as poison—reflects the Pardoner's own experience of the promise of salvation and his more spiritual sense of himself as the Old Man. What is at stake here can be

described in terms of the Kierkegaardian analysis of offense, which traces the willed, despairing refusal of divine grace and forgiveness to the insult such free pardon offers to the independence and autonomy of the self. "It takes a singularly high degree of spiritlessness," Kierkegaard points out, "not to be offended at someone's claim to forgive sins. And . . . an equally singular spiritlessness not to be offended at the very idea that sins can be forgiven" (Sickness unto Death, 116).^[8] Thus the typological action of the tale, like all its other details, must be read on two levels. At the literal level, as it applies to the rioters, the justice of the tale has a certain Old Testament savagery, and what offends the rioters—literal death—is linked to physical punishment meted out by a vengeful God for palpable transgressions. But how much more offensive it is to be offered salvation despite one's worst efforts, and how much worse to alienate oneself from a loving and merciful God whose power is such that He lays down His own life for man's sins. It is this offense that makes what literally poisons the rioters a spiritual poison to the Pardoner: it heightens his sense of what he has cut himself off from.^[9]

All this psychological and theological sophistication finally has little effect, however, on the exemplum. If in the course of his tale the Pardoner has embodied his sense of himself and the world and put his "venym under hewe of hoolynesse" (421–22) into literal bottles of poisoned wine—spirituality under hue of venom, as it were—that embodiment remains eccentric, sporadic, and largely veiled, more deeply felt by the Pardoner than argued in the story. The large-scale patterns of spiritual reference that critics have detected in the tale are all there, more or less, and they are there because the Pardoner puts them there; but they remain largely implicit and structural, carried by typological allusions to be caught only by the learned.^[10] Indeed, the very fact that the Pardoner makes the tale more typological as he proceeds shows his increasing sense that he cannot get it to say what he

[8] For the bread and wine and other eucharistic symbolism in the tale, see Nichols, "Pardoner's Ale and Cake." For John 12:24–25, see Glossa ordinaria, PL 114, col. 402, and Aquinas, Catena aurea, ad loc. For the synoptic passages, see Glossa ordinaria, col. 188; Bede, In Marci Evangelium Expositio, PL 92, col. 152; Jerome, Commentaria in Evangelium S. Matthaei, PL 26, cols. 57–58.

[9] See also Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 70–71, 83–87.

[10] That is, by the literate: interpreting readers, not listeners.

wants more directly. He seems to be trying to make the story bear more weight than it comfortably can, to push its symbolic significance too far.

It seems likely that the Pardoner feels the futility of this forcing, for when he comes to what should be the rhetorical high point of the exemplum, the description of the death agonies of the rioters, he tosses it away with a "What nedeth it to sermone of it moore?" (879) and a reference to a medical textbook (889–95), which, however lurid its account of the symptoms may be, is not reproduced in the tale.^[11] I take the feeling of anticlimax here as an indication of the Pardoner's impatience with the conventional poetic justice of the ending. As it stands, the exemplum does not solve or settle anything he feels to be important. The rioters are gone, but sin, death, and the Pardoner remain:

O cursed synne of alle cursednesse!
O traytours homycide, O wikkednesse!
O glotonye, luxurie, and hasardrye!
Thou blasphemour of Crist with vileynye
And othes grete, of usage and of pride!
Allas, mankynde, how may it bitide
That to thy creatour, which that the wroghte
And with his precious herte-blood thee boghte,
Thou art so fals and so unkynde, allas?
        (895–903)

It is notable that this moralization of the exemplum, for all its appropriately heightened rhetorical tone, does not arise directly from the events of the tale and only arrives at the "right" moral ("ware yow fro the synne of avarice!" [905]) after several lines of impassioned condemnation of "mankynde" for the same old tavern vices. These vices are generally appropriate to the occasion in the sense that the rioters are guilty of them, but their introduction here breaks the continuity and focus of the conclusion of the tale, and it is difficult to know what to make of the intensity with which they are denounced after the flat tone of the account of the rioters' demise. It is as if the Pardoner

[11] Compare the cool dispatch of the account of the murder of the poisoner, "Right so they han hym slayn, and that anon" (881). The oddity is noted by Margaret Hallisy: "Chaucer's cool reference to Avicenna at a crucial point in the Pardoner's Tale seems odd: why this understated allusion rather than a detailed description of the poisoned wretches' sufferings?" ("Poison Lore," 54). She provides a sample of the density of Avicenna's thirty-three-page list of the symptoms of poisoning (55–56).

were looking for something on which to vent strong feelings and casting about for a pretext. What the passage does accomplish is a return of the image of a world pervaded by sin generated in the sermon section of the tale. Juxtaposed to this image, more directly and immediately than before, is the Pardoner's self-presentation, which bitterly and cynically compares his mercenary activity (on which he harps) with what it is supposed to pardon (904–15).

Throughout the tale it has been the Pardoner's explicit project to make an example of himself, to unmask and explain his practices. In the course of the telling, as I have tried to show, his attitude toward himself and his profession, his self-hatred and self-condemnation coupled as always with his hatred and contempt of others, has emerged with increasing clarity and intensity, at least for him. His self-presentation throughout the tale constantly stresses his culpability, and as the tale proceeds he seems to take this culpability with increasing seriousness, to regard himself as truly exemplary and symbolic of the evil, corruption, and sinfulness of the world—finally, perhaps, as a type of the Antichrist. When the action of the tale is understood as such a development, as a psychological progression within the narrating consciousness of a self with a certain structure of character, the epilogue begins to make sense as part of a psychological narrative.

By the end of the story the Pardoner seems dominated by his tale: he rejects it at a literal level but remains racked by the heightened and frustrated consciousness of himself that the experience of telling it generates in him. This frustration leads him to force the issue of sin and spirit—the issue of himself—beyond the tale into the real world of the pilgrimage. The real moral the Pardoner has come to draw from the real exemplum of the tale, himself, emerges as he completes that exemplum:

And lo, sires, thus I preche.
And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche,
So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve,
For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve.
       (915–18)

These famous lines represent not a "paroxysm of agonized sincerity"^[12] suddenly arrived at but a simple and direct statement of half of what

[12] The phrase is Kittredge's, Chaucer and His Poetry, 117 . See also his "Chaucer's Pardoner," esp. 122–23.

the Pardoner has been saying all along. They gain their full energy only after the presentation of the other half that immediately follows, in which he seems to say, What you need is Christ's pardon—what you get is mine:

But, sires, o word forgat I in my tale:
I have relikes and pardoun in my male,
As faire as any man in Engelond,
Whiche were me yeven by the popes hond.
If any of yow wole, of devocion,
Offren and han myn absolution,
Com forth anon, and kneleth heere adoun,
And mekely receyveth my pardoun;
Or elles taketh pardoun as ye wende,
Al newe and fressh at every miles ende,
So that ye offren, alwey newe and newe,
Nobles or pens, whiche that be goode and trewe.
It is an honour to everich that is heer
That ye mowe have a suffisant pardoneer
T'assoile yow in contree as ye ryde,
For aventures whiche that may bityde.
Paraventure ther may fallen oon or two
Doun of his hors and breke his nekke atwo.
Looke which a seuretee is it to yow alle
That I am in youre felaweshipe yfalle,
That may assoille yow, bothe moore and lasse,
Whan that the soule shal fro the body passe.
I rede that oure Hoost heere shal bigynne,
For he is moost envoluped in synne.
Com forth, sire Hoost, and offre first anon,
And thou shah kisse the relikes everychon,
Ye, for a grote! Unbokele anon thy purs.
        (919–45)

When these lines are read in context, it is hard to match them anywhere in Chaucer for sheer venom. There is direct venom against the pilgrims, to be sure—"Paraventure ther may fallen oon or two" sounds like a wish—but most of the Pardoner's contempt for them arises from their failure to see and respond to what he here says he is. The passage recapitulates in concentrated form all the aggressive methods of dramatized self-condemnation the Pardoner has used throughout the tale—his conspicuous avarice, his ridiculous bulls, his rag-and-bone relics, even the hints of perverse sexuality in the obscene

invitation "Unbokele anon thy purs"—and tries to ram them down the pilgrims' throats. In doing so, moreover, it gives greatest stress to the symbolic significance of these offered insults. Over and over the speech says, I am what the pope licenses, what the church supplies for your spiritual needs; I am the instrument of Christ's mercy, the representative of the Holy Ghost among you; I am what you kneel to, whose relics you kiss; I am that cupiditas that is the root of evils, the Old Adam, the obscenity of the eunuchus non dei that invites to fruitless generation; See what I make of the instruments of salvation—what do you make of a church that licenses me, of a world in which I am possible, of a God that allows me to exist?

This message is also what the Pardoner has been expounding all along. As an instance of what Kierkegaard calls the demonic form of despair, the Pardoner posits himself as a malignant objection to God and his creation.^[13] He presents himself as a proof against the goodness of existence and wills his own misery and evil as a protest against God; he forces into the open what was before only implicit in his self-dramatization, trying to make the pilgrims see it. This message, finally, is what lies behind the Pardoner's typologizing of himself. His consistent practice is to convert the literal, the everyday, the phenomenal, to a sign for spirit. It is his idealism, in the technical sense, and it accounts for the feeling his tale notoriously gives of a world in which the power of the word over reality is nearly total. Having made these transformations, he then insists that the spiritual meaning of an old man, a bottle, or a pardoner is what these things are and how they must be treated. This insistence is, in another sense, his literalism and his delusion. But it is also an expression of his own spiritual state, of his presumption and despair. The Pardoner's greatest self-condemnation is his moment of greatest pride, the moment when he attempts to force on the pil-

[13] "Rebelling against all existence, [demonic despair] feels that it has obtained evidence against it, against its goodness. The person in despair believes that he himself is the evidence, and that is what he wants to be, and therefore he wants to be himself, himself in his torment, in order to protest against all existence with this torment. . . . Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author's writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error—perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production—and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No, I refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second-rate author" (Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 73–74).

grims his own symbolic, typological vision of himself. What he wants here is to get them to take that vision for reality.

What he gets, however, is a set of responses that measures his excess and places it in a world at once more real and more ordinary than the one he has constructed in the course of telling his tale. The Host's answer to the Pardoner's final speech contains touches that seem to recognize the latter's spiritual perspective and perhaps testify to its immediate rhetorical and emotional power: "'Nay, nay!' quod he, 'thanne have I Cristes curs!'" (946). But I think that what makes the already angry Pardoner even angrier—and silences him—is not that the Host reveals a sexual defect the Pardoner has been at pains to suggest and exploit but that he responds to a spiritual attack with a merely literal one. The Host's answer is not directed to the eunuchus non dei, only to a gelding. This response shows that he has missed the point of the Pardoner's self-presentation. His brutal literalism cuts through the tissue of spiritual allusion and moral self-dramatization in the Pardoner's final speech, reducing the Pardoner, his relics, and his "coillons," if he has them, to mere matter, and matter that is not even blasphemous, only insulting. The Host's explosion begins to restore a perspective that has been largely lost in the course of the tale's development when the Pardoner's voice is the only one before us—the perspective of the ordinary world.

There is a mood that sometimes comes on interpreters of the Pardoner's Tale in which the histrionics, pervasive irony, and symbolic pretension of the tale, the way it reaches for deep and ultimate meanings, seem open to the skeptical response, Isn't this tale, after all, just a piece of entertainment? Isn't the end just a joke, isn't the Pardoner just a fund-raiser?^[14] This way of viewing the tale is valuable because it pinpoints the distinction the tale as a whole makes between the Pardoner's idea of himself—the way he presents himself—and a more detached view taken by the end of the poem and associated with the community of the pilgrims, namely, society. The Host may not know exactly what the Pardoner is doing, but he can tell that it is more than a joke. At first he responds in kind to its aggressive violence, what he rightly calls its anger: he can feel that the Pardoner is imposing some-

[14] See John Halverson's levelheaded and persuasive summary of this strand in the criticism, "Chaucer's Pardoner," 191.

thing on him. After his initial outburst, however, the Host begins to put the situation in perspective. Perhaps he is a little shaken by his own reaction and the extent to which he has been drawn into the Pardoner's mood. At any rate he begins to back off: "I wol no lenger pleye/With thee, ne with noon oother angry man" (958–59). At this point other social forces intervene to break the mood further and contain it, as the Knight, observing that "al the peple lough" (961), urges a reconciliation: "'And, as we diden, lat us laughe and pleye.'/Anon they kiste, and ryden forth hir weye" (967–68).

The conclusion of the tale frames the Pardoner's performance as a social gaffe, a joke in bad taste that has gotten out of hand. It does so by showing how society closes ranks to repair the breach in decorum, the violation of the tale-telling contract the Pardoner has committed. The kiss of peace at the end is, of course, hollow, a mere social form that lets things move forward smoothly. It allows the group to pretend that nothing seriously untoward has happened and leaves the Pardoner in frustrated possession of his unhappy consciousness. This ending may well increase our sympathy for him, but the group is nonetheless correct in its assessment of the situation, for the most effective criticism of the Pardoner's presumption is precisely that it is presumptuous in an ordinary sense. It is preposterous that any man should carry the symbolic weight the Pardoner gives himself. If he takes all our sins on his shoulders by committing them and scapegoats himself like Christ to dramatize the pervasive presence of spirit in ordinary life, his behavior is likely to make us reflect that Christ did not sacrifice himself out of self-hatred and that not everyone who climbs up on a cross is a Christ or a type of Christ, or even a type of the Antichrist. Even the New Testament seems to indicate that two out of three such people are likely to be common thieves.

The way the end of the tale is framed so as to bring the Pardoner's typological consciousness into contact with an actuality that contains him and reveals his limitations suggests that, far from being an example of Chaucer's belief in, and commitment to, typological methods, the tale represents a critique of typology as a way of thinking about the world. We need to make a distinction between typological methods, which in the poem are simply one set of rhetorical techniques among many, open to anyone who has a use for them, and a typological imagination. Chaucer uses the former occasionally (in fact rather

rarely in his own voice in the Canterbury Tales ), and he has various pilgrims use them for particular purposes in their tales. Unlike Dante, however, he does not seem to have the latter. The Pardoner is the one pilgrim who really does seem to have a typological imagination, a mind that habitually views the smallest details of life in the world sub specie aeternitatis, and the text's presentation identifies the violence this cast of mind does to experience. Because the Pardoner demands that the world must be more "perfect" in his own terms than it is, he is constrained to see and suffer it "out of alle charitee" as worse than it is, simpler, blacker, and less flexible. From this perspective what a historically comextualized voice-oriented reading actually finds in the Pardoner's Tale is a representation of the temptation to pride and the illusion of power that typological thinking encourages. The tale shows how such thinking may all too easily neglect that it is only God who makes things into signs for other things at the level of eternal truth. The critique that the text conducts identifies typology as a potentially defective form of metaphor or image making that can be led to collapse the necessary distinctions between symbol and referent, literal and spiritual, mind and world. Less abstractly put, the text's framing shows that as a tale the Pardoner's Tale is bad because the Pardoner fails to see and sustain the crucial difference between fiction and reality, between a tale and the world in which it is told, and tries to force something he has made onto the world. The end of the tale shows that the typological imagination, by taking a God's-eye view, can all too easily deceive itself into playing God—a form of presumption that does not require divine intervention to discover its limitations.

The Pardoner is, as I have already suggested, the first exegetical critic of his own tale. He distorts his own sermon and exemplum by allegorizing and literalizing them beyond what they will bear. There is in this distortion, perhaps, a lesson for much subsequent exegetical criticism, which, like the Pardoner himself, is too frequently docetist in tendency. That is, this kind of criticism often implies that doctrine is more important than people, that the living temporal-historical experience of real souls has nothing to say for itself, or, typologically and symbolically put, that Christ could not really have deigned to sully his spirit, his divinity, by incarnating it in a real human person. This view is ultimately as unfair to Saint Augustine and the Middle Ages as it is to Chaucer. It can become a form of historical and critical pride, and

it seems to me to be no accident that in its purest form exegetical criticism is associated with an attempt to cut off medieval consciousness from our common humanity, to say, as does Robertson, for example, that medieval man (the generic gender reference is telling in this context) had no personality because "he" talked about it differently from the way we do.^[15] By neglecting, as it often does, the agency of the historical actors who used the institutionalized historical discourse of typology and by making them its unreflective agents, such a view runs the risk of historical irresponsibility: it makes our ancestors simpler and purer, and therefore less human, than we are—and than they were. But I am beginning to sound like the Pardoner myself, and since I do not plan to burn Professor Robertson at the stake, let me say rather that exegetical criticism, if it loses its sense of proportion, can, like the Pardoner, get a little rude.

I have meant this preliminary interpretation of the Pardoner's Tale to exemplify a certain way of reading the text, and now that it is completed, it can perhaps be summarized so as to differentiate more clearly between the kind of voice-oriented methods I propose and a more traditional Kittredgean dramatic reading. So far my interpretation of the Pardoner is based on taking the things he states or implies about himself in the course of his performance as elements in a deliberate self-presentation rather than as things he inadvertently gives away about himself while concentrating on telling a story. In the tradition of dramatic criticism of the tale it has been common to ascribe various "natural" or psychological motives to the Pardoner, such as a desire for recognition of his intellectual superiority, for acceptance in the community from which his physical lack appears to exclude him, for pity, for revenge, and even for death.^[16] All these and many other simple or complex combinations of motive that have been suggested seem to me to be functional equivalents or particular expressions of the fundamental dialectical relation between presumption and despair. There has been a problem for a long time about integrating psychological explanations of the Pardoner's character and performance with exegetical interpretation and the theology of the tale. Where the theol-

[15] Robertson, Chaucer's London, I-II. For a less temperate comment on this position, see Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 131.

[16] See especially the excellent treatment in Howard, Idea, 357–80.

ogy has seemed relatively clear (only two explanations of the Pardoner's spiritual state have been brought forward, and both of them, presumption and despair, are right), the Pardoner's motives have received a broad range of interpretations, most of which, as characterizations of the sort of person who might be imagined to tell this tale, seem attractive and plausible even when they appear to contradict one another. What ails the Pardoner spiritually has been a lot clearer than what he is trying to do in his tale. I think one reason for this problem is that the Pardoner's psychology is theological and is presented and enacted as such by him in the tale.

Halverson and Howard have argued convincingly that the Pardoner's sexuality is his secret, that we do not know that he is a homosexual or even a eunuch, only that some features of his appearance and performance suggest those possibilities.^[17] It is precisely such ambiguous features that the Pardoner manipulates for effect; we only get to know them as part of his deliberate self-presentation and self-interpretation. I think the same is true of his "real" motives. Though it is tempting, suggestive, and often valuable to speculate about such things as his feelings of alienation or intellectual superiority, his deformity, or his self-deception, it is unproductive and misleading to treat them, individually or in combination, as if they were causes of his performance. He himself does not treat them thus, and we have no access in the text to privileged information (such as, in a different way, exegetical criticism attempts to provide) that is somehow apart from what he actually does and says, for which our only evidence is predsely the text. Such naturalistic explanations, psychological or psychosomatic, are really only typologies of behavior based on different systems of classification from the one the Pardoner uses, and at best they suggest what the human consequences of the psychology of despair might be outside the poem. Inside the poem, however, the details of self-presentation are controlled by a prior structure, an interpretation that is the Pardoner's own. His categories are something like literal and allegorical, or carnal and spiritual, and they take precedence. Other kinds of motivation may be present somewhere in the Pardoner, but if they are, they too remain his secret. Whatever they may be, he transposes them to, and presents them as, spiritual types. His attitude

[17] Halverson, "Chaucer's Pardoner," 195–96; Howard, Idea, pp. 343–45.

toward "ordinary" human motives, including his own, is the same as his attitude toward metaphor, and toward fiction generally: all such things are the chaff whose phenomenality both conceals and can be made to reveal the poisonous kernel of spiritual truth that is at the center of his world.^[18]

Even if the patterns of presumption and despair do control what happens in the unfolding of the tale insofar as they give an accurate description of it, and even if those patterns are in some sense the self the Pardoner enacts, they do not necessarily constitute an essence. What we have in the tale is the representation not of an entity but of an activity, whose agent retires behind his own self-representation and keeps his secrets. The psychological speculations of dramatic criticism are responses to this sense of motive withheld behind the Pardoner's self-presentation. There is always an excess, something left over that establishes a gap between the subject, conceived as the position from which the activity emerges, and the self, which is, so to speak, its content. In this sense the analysis conducted here is preliminary. Though I have tried to give an accurate account of the self the Pardoner presents and the terms in which he presents it, I have not yet attempted to characterize the Pardoner's subjectivity, the structure of the space within which his self-representation occurs and of which it is a subset. Eventually I will argue that that subjectivity is best described as a form of disenchantment, which I will try to explain as the general structure one of whose historical contents, in the era from Saint Augustine to Kierkegaard, is sometimes called despair. But before we reach that point in Part II, we must first examine the self-subject split in the Wife of Bath's Tale, in part because features of that text make the topic more accessible there, but in part as well because the issue of gender difference has an important bearing on the development of the argument. For the time being it will suffice to have established the importance and relevance of disenchantment in the limited sense I have given it so far as the perspective that allows the Pardoner as agent to emerge from behind the more general institutional and historical framework of exegetical interpretation. It is, I have argued, his disenchanted deployment of that framework that makes him stand out as the teller of

[18] In this he is oddly like Kierkegaard, who in The Sickness unto Death exhibits a similar programmatic tendency to interpret the psychological as an epiphenomenal and particular case of the spiritual. I will have more to say about this in Part II.

his tale. His insistence that there is no such thing as disinterested language and that even—or especially—doctrine, as it is encountered in concrete life, did not fall from the sky but is always being used by someone, mostly for ends like his, is what brings him forward in all his pride and despair, questioning and mocking in a voice of his own that disquiets us yet.