The Manciple’s Phallic Matrix

The Manciple’s Phallic Matrix Peter W. Travis Dartmouth College In the following remarks, I would like to attempt an answer to one seldom asked question: Why does Chaucer’s last poem, The Manciple ’s Tale, conclude with the voice of ‘‘my dame’’ (IX.317), the narrator ’s logorrheic mother?1 Or, put a slightly different way, why should an etiological fable about the destructive un/truth of poetic fiction achieve resolution via a mother’s mind-numbing declamations to her son that he should learn to keep his mouth shut? Certain psychoanalytic theories that view the artistic field of masculine creativity as a complex deferral of the maternal will be helpful in answering this question because they provide a critical lens that links art, masculinity, and the maternal—all of which are on display in this unsettling and enigmatic tale. Fred Botting , for example, in Sex, Machines, and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present, defines the masculine field of artistic creation as the ‘‘matrix, locus of the extremes of a distinctly masculine desire,’’ a symbolic space which ‘‘is also a mode of suppression, a means of overcoming the creative matter associated with mater, the mother.’’2 I contend that The Manciple’s Tale is an especially tortured version of this archetypal ‘‘matrix,’’ an example of a narrator’s strenuously repressing the maternal yet subliminally negotiating its inevitable return. More specifically, the Tale is a site of fierce requitals, a self-infantilizing fable of desires and denials in contention over the matter of origins and endings . There are several closely related phenomena in the Prologue and the Tale, all of them projecting from the infant’s primal relation to the mother, that support this thesis: namely, sensorimotor disorder, oral 1 Quotations from the Manciple’s Tale are drawn from Larry Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), with fragment and line numbers in parentheses. 2 Fred Botting, Sex, Machines, and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 169–70. 317 ................. 10286$ CH12 11-01-10 13:54:37 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER consumption, human aggression, language, and the demonized feminine . One of the most remarkable features of the Tale is its author’s obsession with orality and sensorimotor disorders. From the tale’s Prologue to its concluding moralitas, there is something about the Manciple that causes him to fixate on the oral cavity—the mouth sucking, spewing, engorging, swallowing and consuming. In the Prologue, for example, the Manciple forces all in his company to behold the drunken Cook’s speechless and stinking maw, yawning agape ‘‘As thogh he wolde swolwe us anonright’’ (IX.36). ‘‘Hoold cloos thy mouth, man,’’ the Manciple commands the Cook, ‘‘The devel of helle sette his foot therin!’’ (IX.38–9). There is likewise something in the Manciple that despises yet nevertheless identifies with the physical disorder and nonverbal impotence of the infant, mimed in the Prologue by the same drunken Cook—yawning, tottering, swinging his arms, ‘‘fnes[ing]’’ through ‘‘his nose’’ (IX.61–2), falling into the dungy mire—and attributed repetitively to the Manciple himself by his infantilizing mother at fable’s end: ‘‘My sone,’’ she shushes, ‘‘spek nat, but with thyn heed thou bekke’’ (IX.346). To be sure, much of the Tale’s dramatic frame involves the competitive production and ownership of food: the Cook prepares food for a living; the Manciple, the Cook’s social/sibling rival, practices ‘‘byynge of vitaille’’ (I.569). But there is, I believe, a more primal and self-contradicting level to the Manciple’s ambivalences about oral consumption and production, contradictions that are grotesquely captured in the image of the Cook, forced by the Manciple to drink wine to sober up, ‘‘poup[ing] in this horn’’ (IX.90). ‘‘To poup’’ in Middle English means ‘‘to puff, to blow,’’ as in the peasants’ ‘‘howp[ing] and powp[ing]’’ (VII.3399–4000) their wind instruments in the raucous fox chase of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Here, however, blowing out appears indistinguishable from taking in, imbibing is equivalent to vomiting. The Cook, the Manciple ’s first object of...