"I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie"
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie"
The Pardoner's Tale
Geoffrey Chaucer
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Conversations about medieval gender appear drawn to touch upon the Pardoner, adding to the sense that he is oversexed, yet following on the work of queer readings of Carolyn Dinshaw, Glenn Burger, and Will Stockton, I argue that it is the the text’s ability to sustain so many different readings and operate across so many genres of embodiment (eunuchs, queers, hermaphrodites, etc.), that announces its trans-operative mode of treacherously relating across existing barriers of identification and historical context.[1] This willingness to operate across dividing lines is an integral aspect in how the Pardoner frames the cut up bodies in his Prologue and Tale, recollecting the persistent political danger of parts. Unlike the Physician, who hardly thinks of his own contingency and saving his own skin, the Pardoner is weary, however, admitting that his pardons and relics, “my body to warente.”[2] The critical work of recollection is not merely salvaging the past but rebuilding a continuum that allows operatives a new lease on the future.
This ontological indeterminacy is a part of the riddle the Pardoner establishes with his relics in his prologue when he tells the pilgrims that “any woman…that hath ymaked hir housbonde cokewold,” to stand back because “Swich folk shal have no power ne no grace / To offren to my relikes in this place.”[3] Scholars have noted this as a mode of shaming or making fun of the sexually inconstant, yet it also marks those who, like Pardoner, may be insatiably promiscuous in their associations.[4] Indeed, his relics, like his Tale, may do no good for those unrestricted by conventional barriers of sex, because they may not need the lessons that the Pardoner offers: if you have a problem, let it scar. By bringing the discarded from a forgotten site of burial to the social status of relics, scarred fragments of the body and society are allowed new life giving associations.[5]
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While progressive thought eschews part for the sake of the whole, the Pardoner’s approach to relics shifts cultural values to consider alternative modes of wholeness. Taking the case of one relic, “a sholder-boon / which that was of an hooly Jewes sheep,” which otherwise might have been discarded as trash and forgotten (like other Jewish bodies expelled from England), the Pardoner promises that if this bone is put in a well, first it has the power to make “hool anon” an animal whose body plagued by a “worm.”[6] Furermore, it will make “hool” a body covered in “pokkes,” “scabbe,” or a “soore,” and if a master is willing drink the water himself, “His beestes and his stoor shal multiplie.”[7] Taken literally, this inverts the Physician’s drive towards division by using fragmented bodies to return other bodies to wholeness. Metaphorically, the bone redefines to wholes in their own right. This alternative would not deny the violent history of scarred bodies but multiply the number and forms of lives for the divided, segregated, and forgotten
While scholars have emphasize the Pardoner’s double speak in his prologue where he admits questions over the sincerity of his pardons and relics, after the Tale when he again defines them as relics, the relics have again shifted and the pilgrims seem to generally go along with the change.[8] This shows both the reconstructive power of narrative and the indeterminacy of body parts. “Pigges bones” can be constructed to be effectively indistinguishable from a saint’s bone when encased as a relic.[9] The insistence on lie/truth, real/unreal distinctions depends on the ahistorical belief that things properly remain what they are, animals stay animals, humans are human, just as women are women and men are men; or else falls into progressive binaries that assert the final shift between natural and manufactured bodies.[10] This dynamic artifice is not the nullification in meaning but the trans-operative inconstancy of the body and social significance.
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This reconstruction is not done without dangers of treachery, however, as the Pardoner makes clear in his Tale. The Pardoner bills the lesson of his Tale as being on greed and false-witness, but a close examination testifies that the treachery underlying it may come, as for the Pardoner, from being hyper-relational. In the Tale, three friends sit drinking when they overhear a bell signaling a passing funeral procession. The party finds out that the departed was their friend, an “old felawe,” and his killer is none other than “Deeth.”[11] The theme of forgotten division is already evident by the loss of this who had long sat among them, whose passing they had hardly noticed. The community seeks to rectify this absence by swearing together, “we thre been al ones… bicomen otheres brother, / And we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth.”[12] Soon after they encounter an old man, who literally seeks death (to die), who directs them to a bag of gold if they wish to find death. After a series of betrayals for the gold, all of them end up killing one another.
The premise that one can “kill death” may be the humor the Host demanded, but is the tale also responds to the Physicians Tale of cut-throat solutions by begging the question: isn’t the work of a surgeon another attempt to conquer mortality through bloody knife work? If operations save the futurity of the whole by sacrificing the part, who gets to determine who is the whole and who is the part? In the final bloody scene, each man is effectively equal in moral and social value, but each determines they he must be most deserving of the futurity the gold would provide and all their lives are cut off. In short, as in the Physicians Tale, violence is what happens when one too quickly attempts to reestablish a sense of collective wholeness without taking head the actual and potential divisions in a community. The trans-operative body is never fixed but in a constant state of alliance and betrayal as it cuts across all manner of social barriers and compacts.
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After the Tale has concluded, the effectiveness of the Pardoner’s narrative skills recaptures the attraction of his fellow pilgrims as he calls them, “Com forth anon, and kneleth heere adoun, And mekely receyveth my pardoun.”[13] Not everyone, however, are open the responsibilities and treacherous implications of claiming the power of parts. When called on to be the first to be to first to “kisse the relikes,” the Host shrinks back. “Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech, And swere it were a relyk of a seint,” he claims, “Though it were with thy fundement depeint!”[14] The Host is not willing to associate with trans-operatives on their own reconstructed terms. Instead, the Host reasserts his privilege as a normative male authority to lay hands on the Pardoner. “I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond / In stide of relikes or of seintuarie,” threatens the Host, “Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie; / They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!”[15] In calling for further violent operations on the Pardoner, invoking a history of castration that the Pardoner may already be tied, the Host rejects the lessons of his scars.
The story told from the wound can be hard to hear, notes Arthur Frank.[16] For this progressive male authority, there is not turning divided bodies into relics. Cutting up bodies turns them into shit and marks them for decomposition in the past. Yet the trans-operative is nothing without his social relations and the Knight, who perhaps better hears the lesson of Pardoner’s scars, comes to his aid and reestablishes peace in the community. Yet as the pilgrims move on, they carry the scars of actual and potential divisions with them. These operations mark the weight of violent times on the body of eunuchs, slaves, women, the disabled, transsexuals, and other operatives whose bodies are forgotten or erased from history, demanding that we recollect their fragments and stories so that we never foreclose the possibilities that come from “thinking too much about gender.”
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[1] The Pardoner’s Tale produces an extensive bibliography of fascinating scholarship. In particular, this reading has been greatly influenced by Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory; Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. London: Duke University Press, 1999; Burger, Glenn. Chaucer’s Queer Nation. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2003; and Stockton, Will. Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2011. [2] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 338.
[3] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 381-384.
[4] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 102-139. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 121-136; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 140-156; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118.
[5] For an excellent historical examination of relics see: Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. N.Y. Zone Books, 2011.
[6] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 350-357.
[7] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 358-365.
[8] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 63-80; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 133-136; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 114-156; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118.
[9] Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 700.
[10] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 74-75; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 127-133; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 119-159; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118.
[11] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 670-678.
[12] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 692-701.
[13] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 925-926.
[14] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 946-950.
[15] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 952-955.
[16] Arthur Frank. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 101.
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