Intention, Memory, and the Uncanny Rhetoric of Chaucer’s Pardoner

Perhaps no other Chaucerian pilgrims have fascinated critics as much as the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. The allure of the Wife’s vitality is clear to most readers, even to Chaucer himself, who evidently saw the Wife as an authority on marriage and sexuality, referencing her in his short “L’Envoy de Bukton.” But what are we to make of the Pardoner, a figure more akin to Goethe’s Mephistopheles—a spirit of negation, who delights in bringing men into flache Unbedeutenheit, insipid meaningless—than any other pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales? In the highly subjective realm of the Tales’ storytelling competition, Chaucer would likely agree with Nietzsche’s dictum that es gibt keine Tatsachen, sondern nur Interpretationen—there are no facts, only interpretations—and he endows these two diametrically opposed pilgrims with the greatest strength of (mis)interpretative power. For Chaucer, the word ‘interpretation’ essentially meant ‘translation’ (OED), and one might think of the Wife of Bath as an elucidating translator of scripture and life and the Pardoner as a very misrepresentative one.

My reading of the “Pardoner’s Tale” has been permanently influenced by The Idea of the Canterbury Tales by the Chaucerian biographer Donald Howard. In its wonderful concluding chapter, “The Pardoner and the Parson,” he deftly situates the Pardoner in Chaucer’s world:

The corruptions [he] embodies were a real part of the world The Canterbury Tales represents. Acts of penance were part of the ritual of pilgrimages, and a pilgrimage was itself an active penance. The act of penance performed with contrition and satisfaction earned penitent “Christ’s own pardon,” which the pardoner granted best. (340)

For Howard, the “Idea” of the Tales, “unfinished in execution but complete in design,” is to show “a disordered Christian society in a state of obsolescence, decline, and uncertainty,” where truth emerges ironically through the convergence of diverse voices rather than through authorial doctrine (190, 115). Chaucer, who, if not secular, was at least resentful of the Church of England, evidently poured his religious frustrations into the Pardoner. When we first meet him in the General Prologue, we learn he is “Of Rouncivale” and “streight…comen fro the court of Rome” (I. 670-1). Of his far-reaching craft, the narrator says, “fro Berwik into Ware [i.e., from one end of England to the other], / Ne was ther swich another pardoner” (692-3). Twice in his prologue the Pardoner compares himself to a clerk (and a priest), and he has the erudition and rhetorical talent to back it up (VI. 339, 391). Equally well-traveled and well-read, his proximity to human beings must account for some degree of his uncanny imagination. I think Chaucer must have agreed with the now commonplace ‘the greater the sinner, the greater the saint’: therefore, the strongest underlying irony of the Pardoner’s occupation, despite all his pretensions, is that he works to turn his listeners into neither great sinners nor great saints, but people devoid of any moral awareness whatsoever.

Donald Howard, despite all of his enlightening conclusions in The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, nevertheless pigeonholes the Pardoner as an already damned sinner “fed by frustration and guilt” (354). He asks, “how do we know the Pardoner experiences this inner torment?”; and he answers, “Because he projects it unconsciously into his sermon” (357). This essay both adds to and reacts against Howard’s interpretation. Rather than reading the tale as an unconscious confession, as Howard does, I argue that the Pardoner’s sermon is a deliberate performance that aims to unsettle, a performance less of inadvertent self-exposure than of “motiveless malignity,” Coleridge’s well-known description of Iago in his Lectures. First, by contrasting the Pardoner with the Reeve, whose tale reveals anxieties he does not fully comprehend, I show how the Pardoner, though similar, performs with intention throughout; next, I explore his use of uncanny imagery and trained memory; and finally, I trace the strange double-effect by which he both draws in and disorients his listeners.

I. The Pardoner and the Reeve

Though much criticism of the Pardoner in the past century has focused on resolving his sexual ambiguity, I remain unconvinced, for example, by Robert Sturges’s “The Pardoner Unveiled” and find C. David Benson’s intentionally ambiguous reading more persuasive.¹ The Pardoner’s physical appearance, beardless with bulging eyes and long, waxy hair, serves to make him as physically uncanny as he is rhetorically. Still, there is something to be said for the fascination he evokes in anatomical, allegorical and psychoanalytical readings alike.

Coming at the end of the “General Prologue” and riding at the end of the Canterbury procession, the Pardoner seems like an unhappy burden for both Chaucer and the pilgrimage itself.² He is the most aberrant among the tale-tellers, the only character for whom Chaucer could not find a snug place. Yet while he transgresses more than anyone else, his impudent and disquieting malevolence is at least as essential to The Canterbury Tales’ structure as are religious allegory and fabliaux. The Monk, Prioress, or Friar (all wet-blankets, personality-wise) would make for good comparisons to the Pardoner in disagreeableness, but I believe the secular and choleric Reeve comes closest to him, even more than the Pardoner’s grotesque companion the Summoner. In Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, V. A. Kolve views the first five tales as a microcosm of the entire poem. Every subsequent pilgrim aligns, in a way, with either the Knight, the Miller, the Reeve, or the Man of Law:³ the fabliau of the Miller is the omega to the alpha of the Knight’s romance, and the sequence concludes with a moving, though somewhat puzzling, Christian allegory of the Man of Law (5). The Reeve’s discontented presence, which comes third, is just as essential to this order, introducing a pattern of visual language in which a partial and prejudiced vision of life appropriates for its own benefit “the imagery of Truth” (5-6). The Reeve therefore serves as a very good introduction to the Pardoner, especially when his rhetoric is at its most corrupting:

But ik am oold, me list not pley for age [because of age I do not want to play];
Gras time is doon, my fodder is now forage [dry straw];
This white top [head] writeth [reveals] myne olde yeris [years];
Min herte is also mowled [moldy] as mine heris,
But if I fare as dooth an open-ers,—
That ilke fruit is ever lenger the wers,
Til it be roten in mullok [rubbish] or in stree [straw].
We olde men, I drede, so fare we:
Til we be roten, kan we nat be ripe;
We hoppen alwey whil the world wol pipe. (I. 3867-76)

This self-presentation, which Kolve describes as “a series of swift, ugly, and humiliating similitudes, as concentrated as anything in Chaucer’s poetry,” serves the Reeve’s prejudicial vision very well (223). The comparison of man to “fruyt,” often used to convey a kind of ripening, here suggests rotting; his own heart, instead of giving him vitality, “is also mowled as myne heris.”

These distortions of organic imagery hint at what Chaucer will do in the “Pardoner’s Prologue” and “Tale,” though the Reeve cannot measure up to the Pardoner’s intellect, eloquence, and apparent ubiquity. The Pardoner, much like Chaucer himself, conflates multiple sources in his sermon, often manipulating biblical language for his own purposes, as in his “Prologue”:

For, whan I dar non other weyes debate,
Than wol I stinge him with my tonge smerte
In preching, so that he shal nat asterte
To been defamed falsly, if that he
Hath trespased to my brethren or to me. (VI. 412-16)

His venomous tongue—right after this, he compares his own speech to “venim”⁴—can seamlessly combine, in one sentence, biblical aphorism with his own vehement language. As when the Reeve says, “The streem of lif now droppeth on the chimbe [rim]. / The sely [foolish] tonge may wel rynge and chymbe [ring and chime],” the Pardoner employs sacred, scriptural language while imagining something aggressively profane, collapsing the distance between sanctified metaphor and spiritual decay (3895-6). His description of the womb of a woman, taken in part from Pope Innocent III’s On the Misery of the Human Condition, is even more discomforting:

O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod,
Fulfilled of dong and of corrupcioun!
At either ende of thee foul is the soun [sound]. (VI. 534-36)

The kind of verbal paroxysm the Pardoner indulges in here is not a lapse of restraint but an intentional overload. The pilgrims must feel very uneasy listening to this, especially after so many of the Tales have worked to exalt (often excessively) the inviolability of the female body. What unsettles us here is not the revelation of a divided psyche, but the spectacle of a person who knows precisely how fear works and applies that knowledge without moral restraint.

II. Memory and the Uncanny

We often feel closest to The Canterbury Tales when we meet a pilgrim who has, to some degree, a keen and normative consciousness, which is to say, a human being who embodies natural perspective, wisdom, and compassionate equanimity. The most enlightening (though by no means faultless) of these tale-tellers—the Knight, Franklin, Nun’s Priest, Second Nun, and chief among them all, the Wife of Bath—display Chaucer’s almost preternatural ability to create such normative figures, and yet the Pardoner, who I find his most alluring creation, is profoundly nonnormative. He shocks us with his effrontery; he draws us in with his strange sense of humor; he puzzles us with his insouciance and sophistication. He is, of course, an outsider both physically and personally, but so is the Wife of Bath, and like her, his otherness permits a kind of freedom.

The uncanny description of the womb as a rotting bag filled with feces and corruption is effective because it perverts the image of something we hold close to us, bringing concealed biological anxieties to light. For Freud, the uncanny is not what is unknown or simply uncertain, but something repressed (and something that should remain repressed) that steps forward.⁵ Fairy tales, according to Freud, abandon uncanny representation because of their animism. Doppelgängers, blindness, limbs, dream paralysis, and the blurred border of life and death are the key images that haunt his famous 1919 essay on the uncanny. Five centuries before Freud, the Pardoner’s rhetoric in his “Prologue” and “Tale” consciously exploits these mechanisms, first focusing on a familiar fear or anxiety, then expanding and augmenting it to blur the line between the real and the mystical. Indeed, his entire section, with its “superfluitee abhominable,” could be described as uncanny in form (471). Even his ambiguous sexuality, which has puzzled critics for the last century, fascinates us with its ambiguity.

The “Pardoner’s Tale,” stranger and more bound up with its “Prologue” than any of the other tales, resists summarization. The dream-like story—in which three undefined and overlapping rioters go on a drunken journey to kill Death⁶—moves from one event to the next with hallucinatory unreality, hardly narrating the transitions between its non-sequitur scenes while perversely lingering on the tale’s most surreal phantasms: the child, the haggard death-searching man, the recurring mother. The story more closely resembles “The Grand Inquisitor” or one of Kafka’s parables than anything else in the Tales. The apothecary’s description of rat poison is frightening both because of its meticulous prolongation (especially compared to the tale’s otherwise brief narration) and its domestic familiarity:

and thou shalt have
A thing that, al-so god my soule save,
In al this world ther nis no creature,
That ete or dronke hath of this confiture [concoction]
Noght but the mountance [amount] of a corn of whete,
That he ne shal his lif anon forlete [forfeit];
Ye, sterve [die] he shal, and that in lasse [shorter] whyle
Than thou wolt goon a paas [walk] nat but a mile;
This poyson is so strong and violent. (VI. 859-67)

There is a kind of unspoken communal anxiety about household poison. Everyone in the Pardoner’s audience likely would have, at some point, bought poison and thought about its fatal capabilities. No other pilgrim in the Tales so comprehensively depicts the frighteningly arbitrary qualities of Fortune. Sudden death occurs repeatedly in the tale. (Worth noting, the Pardoner himself seems to have no fear of dying.) It begins with the seemingly random death of a rioter’s friend and ends with the seemingly pointless triple murder. The Pardoner uses the rat poison to hint that, like the personified Death who lives in the world of his tale, his audience members’ own mortality is much closer than they would like to admit. To cultivate this notion would be very good for a Pardoner’s business. The death-searching old man is the negative of this, someone who wishes to die but cannot; he embodies an inability to die on his own terms. In verses almost Shakespearean in tone, the Pardoner discovers that the most unsettling aspect of mortality is that death arrives without warrant, obscenely premature, as in the Duke from Measure for Measure’s “Merely thou art death’s fool” speech, or Cordelia’s “Myself could else out-frown false fortune’s frown.”

Whether this is proof of the Pardoner’s Death Drive remains to me unclear. What is certain, however, is that he intends to unsettle his audience. He wants to frighten them into buying his pardons—though whether this is truly because of his “avarice” remains questionable. He says at the end of his tale:

Paraventure ther may fallen oon or two
Doun of his hors and breke his nekke atwo.
Looke which a seuretee [assurence] is it to yow alle…(935-7).\

This brazenness is far too exuberant to be “unconscious” (Howard 357). Intention—i.e. the degree to which the Pardoner’s frightening effect is deliberate—thus becomes the key difference between the Pardoner and other disquieting pilgrims such as the Reeve and the Prioress. Unlike them, he wants to trumpet his own corruption. If the romance-like tales of the Wife, Knight, and Squire function by putting realistic personalities into a thoroughly unrealistic world, the “Pardoner’s Tale” unsettles because it puts a profoundly unrealistic personality into a realistic world. The Pardoner’s intentional misapplication of eucharist symbolism, the tearing of Christ’s body at the beginning of the tale and the poisoned bread and wine at the end, offers the most deftly discomforting of these moments.

Howard’s reading is very useful here, but limited in some ways. He argues that the Pardoner’s sermon, his “monstrous verbal rape,” functions similar to a dream-vision, those poems with which Chaucer began his career, disclosing what self-pretense conceals: “from the reader’s point of view, it [unconsciously] reflects the Pardoner’s inner conflict. The three rioters are a projection of himself” (347, 357). I want to question, though, if we can be so sure that this uncanniness is not a part of his design.

That a tale can work in this dream-disclosing way does seem to be true for the Reeve, a rich old man terrified of his own mortality and very offended by the drunk Miller’s fabliaux in which a carpenter is cuckolded. In the Reeve’s narration, there emerges a very visible sexual anxiety. In the tale, right after he unlatches the students’ horses, the old miller Symkyn grinds—“grynde” had the same sexual connotation for Chaucer as it has for us—the student’s corn in a scene that both evokes mechanical copulation and ironically foreshadows the revenge that will be paid unto him, measure for measure (4032):

This miller gooth agayn, no word he seyde,
But dooth his note, and with the clerkes pleyde,
Til that hir corn was faire and wel y-grounde. (I. 4067-9)

The students must run after their horses in the meadow, and Symkyn is able to steal their “flour.” Later in the night, as Kolve points out, “the clerks…let their own libidinous horses run free in the bedroom of darkness” and de-‘flour’ the miller’s young wife as revenge (Kolve 251). Whatever the tale’s intended effect on its audience, it nonetheless reveals the Reeve’s preoccupation with cuckoldry and impotence, what Kolve calls “the act of a man revealing himself through the material and manner of his story telling” (220). Does the Pardoner, like this, really lose control of his own narration?

We dislike the Reeve because he is depraved and does not know it; we dislike the Pardoner because he is depraved and does. With the Reeve, Chaucer brings us into the uncertain and negative realm of human limitation, but with the Pardoner, he shows us the much more terrifying uncertainties of human intention. Unlike the Reeve’s attempts to “quite” the Miller or the “quite”-ings of the Friar and Summoner, the Pardoner, excepting his interjection in the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” picks no other single pilgrim as target for his malevolence. The whole pilgrimage (of which the reader could be counted a part) is the subject of his diatribe.

The Pardoner’s intentionality is clearest in his relationship to practiced memory. He can recite his whole sermon—prologue and tale—“by rote” (i.e., from the heart);⁷ he tells us as much at the beginning of his prologue (332). The Pardoner quotes many passages, and—after describing the excruciating deaths of the three rioters—he ends the prolonged nightmare with a single half-line sentence: “And lo, sires, thus I preche,” meaning that this is likely, in some shape or form, a performance he has given before (915). The importance of memory in Chaucer may elude modern readers. Retention systems of the ancient world, in which people trained their memories intensely, survived into the Middle Ages, during which “medievals made their memories vast storehouses of visual images, disposed upon structured ‘places,’ systemized and concrete” (Howard 147).

Even today, when we memorize a poem, we recognize the power of the internalized word to take possession of us. The Pardoner is a perverted vision of medieval memory, what may happen when someone internalizes too many bad sermons. I quote from Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, on which I lean heavily for my own conception:

The proof of a good memory lies not in the simple retention and regurgitation even of large amounts of material. Rather, it is the ability to move it about instantly, directly, and securely that is admired…One is not born with this structure, nor is it passively gained; one constructs it oneself during one’s education. (21-2, 38)

Memory for the medievals, Carruthers says, is different from both the unconscious—and dream—image (73-5). The phantasm of reminiscence and recalling is an act of interpretation, “an act like reading” (29). I don’t believe the Pardoner is, as Howard suggests, letting his repressions fly, nor is he an Iago-like master of improvisation. (He is more Edmund than Iago in that regard.) More often than not, his uncanny conflations do not betray but obey him. The Pardoner’s sermon, recited “by rote,” is not a lapse of control but a performance of it; his recitation is not an unconscious reservoir that leaks symbolic material, but a disciplined and purposive arranging, recombining, and redeploying of images for rhetorical effect.

We are told twice that the Pardoner carries his pardons and his fake religious relics in a “male,” once in the General Prologue and once by the Pardoner himself, with sadistic effrontery, when he tries to sell “gyltas” to his fellow pilgrims at the end of his sermon:

Pardoner’s Tale:
But sirs, o word forgat I in my tale,
I have relikes and pardon in my male,
As faire as any man in Engelond,
Whiche were me yeven [given] by the popes hond” (VI. 919-22).

Gen Pro:
For in his male he hadde a pilwe-beer [pillow-case],
Which that, he sede, was our lady veil:
He sede, he hadde a gobet of the seyl [sail]
That sëynt [St.] Peter hadde, whan that he wente
Up-on the see, til Jesu Crist him hente.
He hadde a croys [cross] of latoun, ful of stones,
And in a glas he hadde pigges bones (I. 694-700)

“Male,” often simply glossed as bag, is used by Chaucer two other times in the Tales, both times by the host Harry Bailey and both times metaphorically. These instances also act as bookends. Referring to the onset of the contest, Harry says, “unbokeled is the male,” when the Knight finishes his tale (I. 3115). At the end of the pilgrimage, outside the shrine at Canterbury, Harry asks the Parson: “Unbokel, and shewe us what is in thy male,” meaning his memory (X. 26). Carruthers explains that a “male” was one of the symbolic models for medieval memory:

The Middle English word male (Modern English ‘mail’) is a ‘travelling-bag’ or ‘pack’ of leather, for leather-makers constructed them…One could carry various items in a male, including clothing and othergear…But they also held valuables, especially gold…had at least some internal compartments…[and were sometimes] like a sacculus, divided into internal compartments for ease of sorting and changing money. (49)

Chaucer, she goes on to say, has the first recorded invocation of this metaphor: the “male,” the same strongbox that the Pardoner carries, as “the organized compartments of [a] memory [opening] to disclose its store of riches” (49-50).

I would like to suggest that the word carries this same double-meaning for Chaucer’s Pardoner, the rotting bones and pardon papers emblematizing his own memorized harangues and contemptuous persuasions. The trinkets are, like the Pardoner himself, seemingly unthreatening and inconsequential, yet they have a strange power that, like the Pardoner himself, seemingly unthreatening and inconsequential, yet they have a strange power that, like his sermon, simultaneously draws in and frightens some part of ourselves.

III. The Pardoner’s Honesty

And yet, he is the least allegorical of all Chaucer’s pilgrims. His intimacy and verisimilitude of personality immediately draw us in. From the outset, the Pardoner tells us all his vices; we want to listen because we are being made privy to a secret. Unlike so many of his fellow pilgrims, who lie either to others or to themselves, he seems to remain true to his word, to not betray “soothfastnesse.” His apparent candor is again comparable to the Wife of Bath’s.

He wants to expose both himself and everyone else. Their vices, he suggests, are simple: “Plsaunce of folk and flaterye / To been avaunced [advanced] by ypocrisye [hipocracy], / And som for veine glorie, and som for hate” (410-2). He differs so drastically from the other unsettling pilgrims because he seeks not to change the listener’s perception of him, but rather their perception of themselves, as though he’s trying to expose the uncanny and enigmatic capabilities of man, presenting himself (somewhat subtly) as a mirror of “ye.” To further this effect, amid his interpretations of the biblical Samson and Attila, King of the Huns, he begins to conflate the pronouns “I” and “ye.”

But herkneth, lordings, oo [one] word, I yow [ye] preye,
That alle the sovereyn actes, dar I seye,
Of victories in the olde testament,
Thurgh verray [true] god, that is omnipotent,
Were doon in abstinence and in preyere;
Loketh the Bible, and ther ye may it lere. (573-8)

This exulting aside reflects the Pardoner’s hermeneutical agility very well. His irony is obvious, and yet “ye” (the listeners) must reflect inwardly about their own moral insufficiencies. We judge the Pardoner and, in doing so, must judge ourselves, as if we can hear his paradox: “I know this to be sin, and yet I participate in it because people are capable of that. There is no difference between you and me.” This all-too-palpable mockery comes in another comparison to Samson:

A lecherous thing is win, and dronkenesse
Is ful of striving and of wrecchednesse.
O dronke man, disfigured is thy face,
Sour is thy breeth, foul artow [art thou] to embrace,
And thurgh thy dronke nose semeth the soun
As though thou seydest ay ‘Sampsoun, Sampsoun’;
And yet, god wot, Sampsoun drank never no win.
Thou fallest, as it were a stiked swin;
Thy tonge is lost, and al thyn honest cure;
For dronkenesse is verray sepulture
Of mannes wit and his discrecioun (551-61).

Rather than attempting to categorize the elusive Pardoner, this reading has sought to complicate and deepen the understanding of his imaginative power. In this diatribe against drunkenness—delivered in a tavern, just after he himself has drained a draught of ale, and likely before an audience that has done the same—the Pardoner addresses the “man” in the intimate second person: “disfigured is thy face, / Sour is thy breeth, foul artow to embrace.” Again, he conflates a domestic object (ale) with death. Again, he references scripture. The man cries “Sampsoun, Sampsoun” in drunken bravado, though, uncomfortably and ironically, he couldn’t be farther from him. Little wonder, then, that the host Harry Bailey, a Christian innkeeper, will angrily step in.

In much of the Tales, there is a sense of a “soothfastenesse” that is only innately perceived. Paradoxically, the highly prejudiced pilgrims often think themselves out of truths instead of into them, a process which the Pardoner, with his strange and alluring performance, is deliberately trying to engineer. If Chaucer’s goal in the Tales is to delve into the full texture of human personality without dispelling the fundamental unknowability that defines his key characters, then the Pardoner’s goal is the exact opposite, exploiting uncertainty while perverting what is certain. He would like his audience to think they are simple and depraved, malleable and easily perverted. His business relies on it. In Othello, Shakespeare uses the word “honest” over fifty times, playing with it variously, but most often to describe Iago, the great irony being that he never tells the truth, even in his soliloquies. That he appears honest allows him to easily pervert the play’s other characters. In reading the Pardoner, one must know they are stepping into a web of lies masquerading as honesty; to overcome his rhetorical force, one must believe in neither his intimacy nor his own vision of himself. No single, unifying motive presents itself for the Pardoner’s intentions either. At the end of his tale, precisely when we wish him to explain himself, “no word ne wolde he seye” (957). Silence—with which Iago ultimately confronts Othello and Job faces the Voice in the Whirlwind—is at least as narratively stark a feature as any other in the “Pardoner’s Tale.” As for Chaucer’s motive behind writing the Pardoner, we feel similarly without answer.

Footnotes

1. Benson writes: “The poet undoubtedly hints at sexual disorder of some sort as one part of the Pardoner’s general corruption, but the excessive modern preoccupation with the pilgrim’s sexuality distorts Chaucer’s method of characterization by demanding certainty where none exists” (337-8). ↩︎
2. Only his unattractive and vulgar companion, the Summoner, another corrupt church official, can stand him. They ride at the back singing “Com hider, love, to me!” in melody and bass accordingly. ↩︎
3. The tale of the fourth pilgrim in this sequence, the Cook’s, left unfinished by Chaucer, hardly sustains comparison to the other four. ↩︎
4. “Thus spitte I out my venim under hewe [hue] / Of hoolynesse, to semen [seem] hooly and trewe” (421-2). ↩︎
5. In Freud’s own words, “etwas dem Seelenleben von alters her Vertrautes, das ihm nur durch den Vorgang der Verdrängung entfremdet worden ist… Unheimlich ist, was im Verborgenen hätte bleiben sollen und hervorgetreten ist.”
   D.W. Robertson, a conservative Chaucerian, would object to this use of Freud. Robertson maintains that to conceive of Chaucer’s poetry as anything other than allegorical (and Christian allegory, at that) is to misapprehend the nature of medieval thought and audience (Preface to Chaucer 52–55). Taking Howard’s cue in rebuttal, I argue for the “multiplicity” of medieval audiences (Idea 6). If anything, I hope the Pardoner is proof of this.
   The 20th century notion of the uncanny is not very different from the older critical notion of the sublime, which itself is not very different from how Howard describes the medieval conception of the grotesque—“the disordered, incongruous, and startling element and experience, the demonic element” (338)—that Howard argues partly inspired the Pardoner. Freud himself memorably remarked that whenever he goes, poets have been there before him. ↩︎
6. The three rioters are only characterized by superlatives: “proudeste,” “worste,” “yongeste” (716, 776, 804). We do not know which one has the “knave” servant in the beginning nor which of them talks with the old man nor which of them maliciously suggests they pull straws. The effect of this indistinctness is clear; it is all of them at once. ↩︎
7. This does not have the same negative connotation for Chaucer as it does for us. ↩︎