The Summoner and the Abominable Anatomy of Antichrist

The Summoner and the Abominable Anatomy of Antichrist Alan J. Fletcher University College, Dublin Tfurr, that lies behind F�eric Jameson's m,xim "always his­ toricize," that is, its insistence on the ineluctability of the historical mo­ ment in which all cultural products participate, has been taken self­ consciously to heart by Chaucer critics of late.1 If their acts of historically aware interpretation acquire theoretical rigor as a result, so much the bet­ ter, but still there is no escaping the unavoidable corollary, the spadework that has to be done at the same time the maxim is being applied. Ifit is left undone, interpretation may find that it marches on an empty stomach.2 Thus a critic's perusal of a text in isolation is bound to prove relatively fruitless, since from the historicist point ofview the interesting aspect ofits textual life is seen to inhere less in some notion of its transhistorical value than in its momentary, historically contingent, and evanescent signifi­ cances, its stance vis-a-vis its contemporary culture and all those other texts through which that culture was mediated. Bearing in mind the historicist mandate, then (whatever the shortcom­ ings here in my pursuit of it), this discussion will have twin aims. It will attempt to excavate layers of meaning in The Summoner's Prologue and Tale that would have been more readily available to Chaucer's contemporaries. If 1 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 9, and invoked by Lee Patterson, ed., Literary Practice andSocial Change in Britain 1380-1530 (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1990), p. 1. The currently prevailing awareness that acts of interpretation, as much as the objects they seek to interpret, are themselves historical products, is to be welcomed. 2 I take as exemplary, for instance, Michel Foucault's insistent predication ofhis theoreti­ cal inferences upon painstaking surveys ofdata. A historicizing critic will inevitably need to engage with a wealth oftexts, in fact with all those texts that can either be shown or safely assumed to constitute the textual environment ofthe text for which explication is sought. While this may remain, in practice, an unreachable counsel ofperfection, it remains, for all that, an authoritative one. 91 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the requisite spadework unearths results that seem convincing, the second aim will follow automatically. This is to issue a general caution against some recent Chaucer criticism professing itself historicist but which, in being haunted by a certain economy of labor, is reduced in its usefulness. A general case will also therefore be implicit in my commentary on a particu­ lar Canterbury Tale: theoretically informed readings of texts are all very well, but they are accompaniments to, not substitutes for, the encounter with the network of writings, many of which are still unpublished, m whose company alone individual texts assume their significance. II The working out of the preposterous conceit of the eternal abode of the friars-their infestation of the arse of the devil-preoccupies the narrative space of the Prologue to The Summoner's Tale almost to the exclusion of all else. There is little doubt but that the Prologue is fully absorbed with its joke-telling. Tolerating no narrative digression, its movement toward the anal profanity of its punch line is linear and remorselessly developed. The design of the jest, therefore, if we may regard it for a moment in purely formal terms, draws a singular attention to itself. There are, of course, many ways in which the emphatic positioning and formal focus on the joke can be resolved into larger readings of the Tale. For example, anyone sensitive to the dramatic interplay between the pilgrims may choose to regard it as the vector of the Summoner's antipathy to the Friar, an opening gambit the utter preoccupation of which is an index of the Summoner's depth of feeling; others, interested in the way the joke anticipates concerns in the Tale it introduces, may discover in its formal focus a powerful opening salvo of the thematic anality that is to reverberate throughout the Tale. Whichever way readers prefer to weight their various responses, the sheer formal emphasis on...