On Psychoanalyzing Chaucer's Pardoner
1982. Revised 2007, 2010.
Complex and perplexing, a self-confessed hypocrite who flaunts his deceit, a gluttonous reprobate who boasts of his sins and the malicious cleverness with which he commits them, the Pardoner of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales nevertheless disarms any question of his sincerity when he admonishes the pilgrims among whom he travels, and confesses, that they should seek Christ's pardon, so much more effectual than those the Pardoner himself dispenses— "I wol you nat deceive" (lines 628-630).
The Pardoner is an official to whom the Church has given the franchise of granting indulgences in exchange for monetary donations. The Church receives funds for its building programs and other enterprises, the Pardoner makes a livelihood, and the donor, presumably, receives a shorter post-humous spell in Purgatory. Those who recall their history of medieval Europe will remember that the Church's commodification of pardons and the abuses that went along with it was one of those practices that stuck in the craw of Martin Luther and other reformers, and indeed, riled Pope Boniface IX a century before them. The Fourth Lateran Council also attempted to limit the sale of indulgences a century before that (Wikipedia).
Read apart from Chaucer's other tales of Pilgrims telling tales, the Pardoner's framing narrative, juxtaposed to ironic effect with the horror story he tells as his tale within the tale, seems like a class-A psychological study to the modern sensibility, as if a Middle-English Dostoyevski or a Christian Kafka had penned it. Some readers have indeed accounted for this effect as though Chaucer had anticipated how psychodynamics would be dramatized several centuries later. In these views, deep psychological motivations operating at cross purposes prompt the Pardoner to both freely admit how he preys upon the gullible, selling them scam relics with dubious redemptive efficacy, and yet also to turn around and attempt to market these same wares to those very same Pilgrims, before whom he has just confessed how he plays the game. Yet scrutiny of "The Pardoner's Tale," in light of counter-arguments made by other critics, better supports the hypothesis that the eerie effect the Pardoner welds over us owes more to the character's nature as a typological composite, one that calls to mind inadvertently the psychological case study we heirs of Poe and James, Freud and Jung, Woolf and Roth are so primed to see in it.
Every discussion of "The Pardoner's Tale" that I read cites G. L. Kitteredge's reading that an extreme "emotional crisis" victimizes the Pardoner, who suffers a paroxysm of agonized sincerity" that compels him to drop his cynical Elmer Gantry act so he can appeal honestly to the Pilgrims to accept Christ's forgiveness. But the outburst of good will lasts but a moment before the Pardoner collects himself and attempts to deflect attention from his admissions confessed all too frankly through an ill-spoken jest at the Host's expense, who being "most enveloped in sinne" ought to find a pardon for a grote a square deal. (Kitteredge 210-217)
Later interpreters also mention G. H. Gerould's view that the Pardoner spews off as he does about his chicanery and vacillates as he does from sales pitch to admonition to sales pitch because he is bombed off his keyster, relaxing his guard. Unlike Kitteredge and later G. G. Sedgewick, Gerould construes the Pilgrims as being unaware of the Pardoner's hypocrisy and sees his confession striking them as a revelation. Kitteredge and Sedgewick, instead, consider the Pilgrims cognizant of the Pardoner's professional villainy long before the Host turned to him, asking for a tale. Did not the Host first suggest a succulent bawdy bit just prior to the rest of the group crying out for "som moral thing that we may ler some wit," which implies they pegged the Pardoner as the kind of man all too apt to have such a ribaldry close to his lips? Both Kitteredge and Sedgewick conclude that the Pardoner's confession is "dramatically inevitable" on the grounds that the Pardoner is well aware that everyone at hand know he is a fraud and it would be impossible to deny it.
For Kitteredge, the Pardoner confesses to avoid looking like a fool, maintaining his self-respect by presenting himself as a sly knave who makes the Pilgrims aware that they are no cleverer than he is. He seeks to assure them that he not only knows he is a hypocrite and con-man, but he also knows that they are aware of it.
Although Sedgewick voices skepticism about psychoanalyzing the Pardoner, his interpretation is not far from that of Kitteredge and bases itself on psychological considerations. The Pardoner is an exhibitionist, as Sedgewick sees it. After getting backed into a corner with the demand that he tell a story of moral import, the Pardoner determines to make the best of it through giving his tale a little twist. He will tell his tale as "from the mouth of a dark horse," as Sedgewick puts it (Baum, 51)
Paul F. Baum and Bernard H. Bronson both ask whether it is reasonable to assume that Chaucer meant the Pardoner to exhibit such motivations. Baum wonders if Sedgewick's hypothesis makes a mountain out of mole hill (Baum, 51-52). Bronson points out that explanations of the Pardoner's behavior like those of Kitteridge and Gerould presume that Chaucer meant to portray the Pardoner according tenets of psychological realism formulated generations later. "To make this assumption," Bronson writes, "is to take for granted in Chaucer an orientation and technical achievement that we are wrong in expecting before the eighteen century at the earliest" (16-17).
Yet if Chaucer did achieve a modern psychological depiction of conflicting internal motivations upon a relatively undetermined psyche before anyone else, we would expect to find such a major innovation in more than one instance of his work. So it is valid that Bronson asks why the other tales lack features of psychological realism if "The Pardoner's Tale" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale" are supposed to be psychological studies (Bronson, 15).
Interpreters unpersuaded by psychological solutions to the Pardoner problem deem whatever elements of psychological realism that seem present accidents. As Baum puts it, "we avoid the risk of fallacy if we ask merely whether those data afford a simplex-complex which is self-consistent and also consistent with our experience of human beings" (52-53). More bluntly, we avoid over-interpreting Chaucer if we consider that he may have goofed up while arranging his story.
Bronson posits that structural problems in the frame narrative's composition may have resulted in the Pardoner's quirky behavior. Or to be more precise, in the appearance of quirky, contradictory behavior (18ff). Chaucer wrote the Pardoner's tale of the three carousers, Bronson speculates, along with its accompanying sermon before he wrote the epilogue in which the Pardoner tries to sell his pardon to the Host and receives a sore rebuke. The tale was originally straightforward, a moral tale from a "noble ecclesiaste." After having composed this tale, Chaucer later wanted to bring out darker side of the Pardoner and his occupation. This would bring the Pardoner's episode more in keeping with common wisdom about the conniving conduct of pardoners as a class. It would also bring the tale into better congruity with the way Chaucer had portrayed this particular pardoner in the General Prologue. After writing the epilogue, Chaucer composed the Pardoner's confession, along with the lead piece that frames the situation. This would change the tale overall into an extended irony, it would strengthen the force of the epilogue, and it would paint the Pardoner in ever starker colors of hypocrisy and spiritual irresponsibility. Chaucer did this, according to Bronson, but then neglected to alter the original tale, sermon, and its ending with its appeal to the pilgrims to hurl themselves before Christ's mercies— so that the earlier material would truly fit in with the new whole. This, then, would account for the strange juxtaposition of the Pardoner's apparent sincerity against his self-revelation of his duplicity, and would account also for the contradiction between his confession of being a con followed directly by his attempt to con his audience, as though they were his normal, gullible marks. Chaucer's inadequate revision created the situation in the text which makes the tale such a tempting subject for elaborate and complicated explanations on the part of Kitteredge and the others.
Knowing from experience how writers cobble together their manuscripts, exploit second thoughts and overlook things, Bronson's hypothesis sounds rather persuasive, although lacking access to Chaucer's original drafts, it remains a strong possibility though not a conclusive probability. It does account, though, not only for the Pardoner problem but also for the stylistic difference between the tale of the rioters and the sections preceding and following it. While Baum suspects a flaw in Chaucer's execution of otherwise well realized inter-nesting tales (58), Bronson shows how and why Chaucer made it.
Supporting Baum and Bronson is how empathically R. W. Robinson points out that a great difference exists between Chaucer's world and our own, in mental climate as well as technological culture (Robinson 5-6). Chaucer's flawed performance in an age that did not place as much weight on getting all the details right as does one whose standards in this area are set by The New Yorker might not have even been noticed by Chaucer's contemporary audience. They would have preoccupied themselves with aspects of the tale that most modern readers emphasize. They may have seen nothing that seemed psychologically inconsistent. The apparent inconsistency, though, would have been glaring to more modern interpreters schooled in the concerns of literature written since the Renaissance.
It seems to David V. Harrington (54) that Chaucer's interest in psychological consistency is rather limited, that Chaucer concerns himself instead with other aesthetic effects. For Harrington, "The Pardoner's Tale" aims to express that otherwise "inexpressible emotion" felt when a person who represents and preaches high ideals lives in conscious and willful contradiction of them (34). Nothing necessitates that we ponder the Pardoner as though he were an actual person. Rather he "should be appreciated as an instrument for concrete, dramatic expression of such feeling, not as a character interesting for his own sake" (42). Unlike Baum and Bronson, Harrington does not feel that Chaucer has botched the execution of "The Pardoner's Tale." Chaucer instead works from purposes not immediately salient for a modern critic and blithely ignores purposes characteristic of later conventions of which he is necessarily ignorant.
If we are not to take Chaucer's figuration of the Pardoner as a psychological portrait, how should we take him? Not devoid of psychological import, certainly, if we mean psychology to be insight into observable aspects of human behavior and common sense inferences we may make from them. Harrington sees the narrative pace of "The Pardoner's Tale" emulating the stage in its rapid enjambment of contradictory energies in the figure of one man, presenting through compression the characteristics of the roving ecclesiastical hypocrite. Not the portrait of an individual containing within himself ambiguities, paradoxes and blatant inconsistencies. The character portrays an entire group of men associated with the Pardoner's profession just as the Knight represents all knights, the Miller all uncouth millers and the Wife of Bath all women of a certain sort. More generally, the Pardoner represents all Churchmen who corrupt their religious office. It is not insignificant that we know the Pardoner only as a pardoner of Rouncival and never by any name, reinforcing the character's generic nature.
Although Jill Mann, in her study of how estates literature relates to Chaucer, focuses solely on the "General Prologue" (Mann, "Introduction" and "Scientific Portraits— the Pardoner"), her comments on the satirical types used in serious and popular writing preceding Chaucer and contemporary with him matter in determining how Chaucer and his immediate audience interpreted the character. Mann identifies the "General Prologue" as characteristic of the genre of estates satire, encompassing "any literary treatments of social classes which allow or encourage a generalized application" (Mann, 3). Characters in this literature explicitly represent a whole set of people, not any unique and idiosyncratic individuals. An estate was the social role a person of the medieval period occupied. The intersection of class and occupation within a society where both were rigidly fixed defined people more thoroughly than would prove possible once Rennaisance-era economics brought more people into the cities, not infrequently leaving ancestral roles behind them, with certain townsmen and investors in overseas enterprises testing long-held boundaries that previously arrested social mobility. Mann does not deny that Chaucer's cast of narrators gives any usually striking sense of themselves as single persons, and several portraits of them may include individualistic elements, but the more generalized nature of Chaucer's depictions would have been what he himself would have had in focus (Mann 16).
Mann finds three features of Chaucer's Pardoner that parallel the estates satire of his time. They often depict pardoners as villains (148-150), derogatorily as homosexuals (145-148), and as sellers of false relics (150-152). Mixing the social stereotype of a pardoner as a dastard with satirical traditions of depicting the sale of false relics would come natural to Chaucer, since the literature often portrayed relics being sold by various occupations related to the Church, though not always by pardoners. While the Pardoner's homosexuality might seem to add an element of psychological complexity to the Pardoner's portrayal, it instead reflects the homophobia of Chaucer's time. Chaucer uses what his ideology regards as sexual perversion as a metaphor for pardoners' spiritual perversion (Mann 147).
The pardoner-type does not essentially involve proscribed sexual behavior. Insinuating that his pardoner is impotent as well as sexually debased and effeminate, Chaucer makes him at once repulsive and pitiable to his audience. The Pardoner is said to sing as loud as a trumpet ("General Prologue," line 676) and to preach loud and resonant ("Pardoner's Tale," lines 42-43), but in a voice as taunt and thin as a goat's ("General Prologue," line 690). Besides a cruel, mocking humor, Chaucer's portrait also possess a certain pathos. The Pardoner tries so hard, believes that he presents himself so well, yet all the time the incongruity between his eloquence and the delicate, brassy sounds his throat makes is glaring. The Pardoner grooms and garbs himself in the latest (and most effervescent) fashion, seeking to present himself as a Mod "noble ecclesiate," yet cuts a ludicrous figure, signified by Chaucer's sardonic tone, "Him thought he rood al of the newe jet," not genuinely stylish, as the Squire, but preposterous ("General Prologue," lines 677-684). Mann argues that Chaucer depicts his pardoner as a stereotypical homosexual so his audience would find him repugnant from the first time they heard him described. But in the end, they might also pity them, if just a little, much as Dante manages to evoke condemnation and pity for his sinners, when the Pardoner attempts to cover up for himself by sighing about a wife he never married ("Wife of Bath's Tale," lines 169-174) and when the Host attacks him right at his weakest spot, the question of his masculinity ("Pardoner's Tale," lines 664-667). Like Dante, Chaucer exposes the pernicious nature of sin and also the pathos of the sinful condition, as their age saw it.
Yet Chaucer owes debts besides those to estates satire. According to Walter Clyde Curry, popular works on the medieval science of physiognomy also influenced the poet (Curry, 56). Now depreciated as a pseudo-science, physiognomy persisted in modern times. Hegel devotes a chapter to it in the monumental Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) and Nazis intellectuals made use of it, as they did everything else, to buttress their cockamamie racial theories. Physiognomy attempted to deduce such internal characteristics of people as their personality or moral condition through examining such features of their physical appearance as the bulges of their skulls. According to the literature of Chaucer's time, the Pardoner's "glaring yën… as a hare" indicates a mien given over to incessant craving and sensual overindulgence, and one source describes his loud, effeminent voice— "as small as hath a goat"— as indicating a man "imprudent and most dangerous" (Curry 57).
Some conflict in detail exists between Curry's conclusion and Mann's. The details of the Pardoner's portrait signify a stereotypic homosexual, says Mann. A eunuch from birth, says Curry. Today we would consider this a huge difference, less so for Chaucer, who in either case was depicting a character whose distorted sexuality would be immediately apparent to his intended audience.
As a character, the Pardoner represents the contradiction that occurs when avarice wears holy garb (Harrington); the estate of Pardoners, linked with chicanery and corruption in the public mind (Mann); and a spiritual perversion connoted by what that public viewed as an unnatural sexuality and/or impotence (Curry). Chaucer's peculiar creative achievement lies in how dynamically he animates his composite of all three typological codes, dramatizing a notion fuller than his sources.
Congruent to Curry's reading, Walter P. Miller, in his study of the literature concerning eunuchs contemporary to Chaucer, the Pardoner embodies the decadent and tortured state of reprobates— of those who find little satisfaction in their sin, are aware that Grace is offered them, yet reject it, committing the one unpardonable sin in the Christian cosmology, the refusal to repent (57-58). In the Pardoner appears the tragic figure of someone commissioned to bestow pardons who has cut himself off from the pardon he himself needs. Through a few deft moves Chaucer pulls the Pardoner out of mere social satire to show him against the cosmic backdrop of Augustine theology (43).
Miller sees in the Pardoner a typos for the unregenerate nature, the old man of Paul of Tarsus that Augustine also made part of his understanding of original sin and its effect on human nature (55-56). As a eunuch, the Pardoner is like a tree that cannot bear fruit, of the kind the gospel says take it out to be burned, sterile in regard to good works (57-58). Yet the Pardoner proves a fruitful fleecer of the flock, multiplying his coinage, gathering more in one day than the hardworking Parson, a faithful shepherd, would receive in a year ("General Prologue" lines 703-708).
Even the story the Pardoner tells, which seems to be his only sermon and memorized long before, concerns itself with the nature and destiny of the old man which not only appears in the story as the shady fellow, ancient of days, who speaks with the three tavern youths, directing them to the gold florins, where they meet their deaths, but also as the three youths themselves, who, like the Pardoner, make much ado over their youthfulness and consider themselves all the rage. They, like the Pardoner, are new only in superficial appearance (Miller 56).
Combining type on top of type and writing on top of his prior writing as he better understood his character, Chaucer created a multiple-layered figure which does not function in The Canterbury Tales as a simple allegory but takes in the theological as well as the social, the physical as a marker of the moral, a pre-Reformation protest against religious abuse, and the pre-modern policing of sexuality, including with all these the raucous comedy of the Pilgrims' interactions amongst themselves. The Pardoner is a complex character, but not complex in the psychodynamic sense that would evolve from Renaissance drama and the birth of the novel.
Yet we may speculate that Chaucer's accidents may well have been fruitful. Who knows whether Shakespeare or other authors, removed from the epistemé[2] of the medieval mind by modernizing currents beginning to take hold in European culture, may have read into Chaucer qualities of mind that Chaucer did not put there, but which they themselves discovered through a propitious misreading while they were creating the modern mind by the seat of their pants. Accidents of structure in "The Pardoner's Tale" may have permitted these misreadings that Kitteredge would replicate in the light of psychological dramatics later authors contributed to the tradition. So Kitteredge and those following his precedent a little too uncritically may have been onto something, even if it was rediscovering a wheel others had long ago fashioned.
[1]Personally, number me among those who lack much patience for these sweeping pronouncements about what authors are capable of performing. Criticism's subjects ever precede it chronologically. The same works in a tradition that later strong authors seek are often those that set criticism's present perceptions. At times they even fully anticipate them, even if they do not so frequently translate them into expository terms. And in setting his timeline after Shakespeare's invention of psychological motivation, Bronson is just off.
Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) provides the best known argument for the claim that psychological realism originates with Shakespeare. Contending internal motivations, transformation through over-hearing oneself, an understanding of human nature that is more existentialist than essentialist, features which differentiate psychological realism from more static and external treatments of character appear frequently among the mature Shakespeare's protagonists and not rarely among supporting characters. Although Shakespeare is not above using typological characters, his treatment of them is much more like a James or a Woolf or a Sartre would do than how Boccaccio, Chaucer or even Dante, despite his psychological perspicacity, handled them.
[2] "Epistemé" is Michel Foucault's word from L'Archeologie du savoir. I use it in a softer, less totalizing sense than Foucault. In my sense an epistemé is the set of practices and assumptions which govern the metaphysical content and implications drawn from it within the world view characteristic of culture and era. It does not govern all knowledge and perception that occur within that time and place.