Church Office, Routine, and Self-Exile in Chaucer’s Pardoner

Church Office, Routine, and Self-Exile in Chaucer's Pardoner Fred Hoerner University of Texas at Austin Asttange thing h,ppens between spe,ke,- and audience during the course of The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale. Harry Bailly, on the verge of a "cardynacle" brought on by The Physician's Tale, asks the Pardoner to lighten things up with "som myrthe or japes," and so the Pardoner delivers a sample sermon full, he admits, of "false japes."1 Lightheartedly as this approach to his profession begins, the tone turns when the Pardoner scripts Bailly into the punch line by attempting to sell him a kiss of false relics. Bailly sees through the ruse, exposes the Pardoner's greedy motives, and silences him, breaking him off from the social body. Thus the request for the Pardoner to participate in the healing of communiry by speech gets inverted by his attempt to turn an intimate context into an impersonal performance that would transform the Host into one of the "lewed peple" who buy the Pardoner's "gaude." Called to the center of the "compaignye" by a social need he could have fulfilled, the Pardoner breaks himself off from that restorative social heart in his attempt to convert the living social body into the false relic ofprivate possession. This article investigates ways that the literal social inversion caused by the manipulative turns in the Pardoner's speech signals analogous institutional and psychological inver­ sions that occur when, in Max Weber's phrasing, charisma turns to routine---when the blood of Christianity's origin, the Eucharist, clots into church bureaucracy and heartfelt sermons get performed by rote. In his analysis of "Chaucer's relation to the subject of history," Lee Pat­ terson stresses a double allegiance in Chaucer's habit of simultaneously positing and undoing a foundational moment. He typically establishes for his poems a legitimating gen1 PardP389,394. All citations ofChaucer's works are taken from Larry D. Benson,gen. eel., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d eel. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Further references to The Parrumer's Prologue and Tale are cited parenthetically in the text. 69 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER esis, an originary absoluteness whose contingency and insufficiency are then re­ lentlessly exposed. 2 Aligning his analysis with H.Marshall Leicester's emphasis on the dialectic between subject and history that occurs as the pilgrims constitute their social identities "in and through" the Tales,3 Patterson sees the pilgrims as subjects on the move, manipulating historical structures "in the very pro­ cess of self-construction. "4 While I agree with Patterson that "the Pardoner relies on the language ofpenance ...for a similar act of self-fabrication,"5 an attention to the effects of institutional routine keeps the Pardoner and his audience mixed up in precisely what he claims to have gained concep­ tual distance from. The most pervasive of these "mixings" occurs in what Leicester argues is the Pardoner's "persistent typological edge";6 by inflat­ ing his every gesture in order to revel in his abuse of office, the Pardoner dramatizes cupiditas in meaning even as he sermonizes against it.That is, his avid abuse of exegetical structures-moral codes, allegory, the exemplum-turns souls into instruments of his greedy will.This verbal gluttony that the Pardoner routinely performs causes church doctrine to engulf or swallow others, feeding his pride in self-sufficiency. 7 What is really perverse, however, is that the Pardoner's will to make meaning con­ form to his own calculations emerges as an effect rather than transgression of the religious routine he serves and abuses. I propose that the gluttony, or "sin of the mouth,"8 that pervades the Pardoner's performance indicates an effect of meaning by "corporation," which, as the term puns, confuses institutional with fleshly bodies and 2 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject ofHistory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 19. 3 For Patterson's acknowledgments ofLeicester, see ibid., pp. 26-27. Both critics borrow the useful phrase "in and through" from the "scructuration" theory ofsociologist Anthony Giddens, an approach I find highly productive.See Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1979). 4 Patterson, Chaucer and...