"It may nat be": Chaucer, Derrida, and the Impossibility of the Gift

Chaucer's most likely source for his Summoner's Tale, Jacques de Baisieux's fabliau Le dis de le vescie a prestre, tells of a dying priest who promises to bequeath to two corrupt friars a "jewel" so precious that, while he were alive, he would "not let another have it for two hundred marks."¹ The friars are crushed when the priest reveals that the precious jewel "locked in [his] possession" is his bladder.² The tale concludes shortly after the friars learn of their misfortune. As T. W. Craik notes, however, The Summoner's Tale diverges from its source and portrays not only the revelation of the friar's unwelcome gift—in this case a fart—but also the aftermath of the gift's reception, which includes the friar's reporting the gift of the fart to the town's lord, whose squire then proposes a solution to the task of dividing the fart into twelve parts.³ This coda represents a marked departure from the rest of the tale, the plot of which mainly concerns the friar's attempt to obtain money from Thomas. It seems, in many ways, a non sequitur. Why Chaucer concludes his tale with such a bizarre scene has been the subject of much critical attention.⁴

The purpose of the coda, I argue, comes into focus through the word inpossible, which the lord of the town uses to describe the division of the fart: "Who evere herde of swich a thyng er now? / To every man ylike? Tel me how. / It is an inpossible; it may nat be."⁵ While few critics have drawn attention to the word, according to the Middle English Dictionary, Chaucer was the first English writer to use the word inpossible—also in the form impossible—as a noun. The occurrence is not isolated: similar expressions appear in both The Franklin's Tale ("[T]his were an inpossible" [V.1009]) and The Wife of Bath's Prologue ("For trusteth wel, it is an impossible / That any clerk wol speke good of wyves" [III.688-89]). The Middle English Dictionary lists this particular usage under the noun's primary meaning: "something which cannot be or be done; impossible thing, impossible action, etc." Although the MED suggests that Chaucer's usage of the word predates the next usage in this context by thirty years,⁶ the Oxford English Dictionary lists a similar occurrence in Usk's The Testament of Love (c. 1387-88). The next listed occurrence of the word as a noun, however, is not until c. 1440.⁷ Thus, while Chaucer may not have been the first to use impossible as a noun, he was certainly among the first.⁸ This usage of impossible might have been novel, but the thirteenth-century Latin noun impossibile—more commonly seen in the plural, impossibilia—was well established. It is perhaps from this Latin word that Chaucer's impossible derives. That is, Chaucer employs impossible not in the modern sense, but to refer to a now-obscure scholastic exercise that Roy J. Pearcy defines as "a proposition, advanced by a self-acknowledged sophist, which violates the dictates of common sense or is clearly incapable of demonstration, but which is nevertheless vigorously defended or 'proved' by a series of such paralogical arguments as the sophist's ingenuity can devise." For example, a sophist might begin with the proposition, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Siger von Brabant does in a classic example of an impossible, that "the Trojan war is still in progress," and then use logic to prove his clearly impossible claim.⁹ The goal of these exercises was to train students to identify errors in logic that could lead to erroneous conclusions.

Pearcy's reading of the word "inpossible" is appropriate in this context. Thomas's order to divide his fart among twelve friars, with each getting as "muche as oother" (III.2134), resembles a sophist's presentation of an impossible—as does the friar's own presentation of the problem to the lord. As Pearcy notes, the problem of the...