The Pardoner, the Parson, and the Audience’s Dilemma
Where, then, does this leave us with Chaucer’s mirror-image preachers? I suggested above that the body’s dangers for preaching can only be rightly understood in the context of the body’s contributions to preaching. Similarly the context of holy duplicity suggests that neither Pardoner nor Parson can be completely understood without the other; perhaps no single portrait of a preacher can fully convey the complexities of the office. I began by stressing the Parson’s disembodied nature as it contrasts with the Pardoner’s excessive physicality, but as I hope the discussion above has suggested, such claims to disinterested abstraction are necessarily suspect. Looking at the Parson and Pardoner together, and in the context of debates on preaching, it is clear that Chaucer has not only embodied a crucial problem in preaching but by that very embodiment re-created for his readers the same dilemmas that preaching theory tried to address.
Those dilemmas appear most strikingly in criticism of the Pardoner. The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, as Lee Patterson has noted, “stage many of the issues central to the theological and ecclesiastical debates of late-medieval England,” including that of the preacher’s morality.84 A great deal of Pardoner criticism since the middle of the twentieth century—in effect, since the rise of exegetical criticism—has worked to understand his character as it interacts with, comments on, and manifests itself through his ecclesiastical position. Whereas earlier attention to the Pardoner’s religious standing often focused on what might be called his external qualities, such as how he exemplifies his profession or the nature of his sermon and its relationship to other sermons, recent work tends to combine this historical approach with an interest in how the Pardoner’s psyche is shaped or expressed through exegetical allusions or cultural and religious debates.85 Given the intensity of religious allusion and structure that shape the Pardoner and his speech, such readings seem entirely appropriate. I would like here to adopt their fruitful attention to religious context, but to look less at the Pardoner’s interiority than at how the presentation of his character reflects on “the nature of the cultural authority that produces him,” and in particular on the office of preacher.86 The context of preaching theory, combined with the continuing recognition in modern criticism of the Pardoner as an actor, can suggest some of the reasons why criticism of this character, and its fascination with his interiority, has been so voluminous and so varied.87
Chaucer has effectively tempted his readers into a continuing desire to know the truth of the Pardoner by presenting him as one who should, according to his office, be an actor of truth but who insists unrelentingly that his act is all a lie. The dilemmas presented by the embodiment of such a character have entranced critics for the past century, and they have done so, I suggest, because the question about the Pardoner’s interiority is one that we are both set up to ask and forever unable to answer. The battles over the relationship between the Pardoner’s “inside” and his “outside” arise not solely from differences in modern critical method, but from the very problems with preaching examined here. Chaucer by his depiction of the Pardoner—a depiction to which even the most stalwart opponents of roadside-drama excess concede an undeniable “personality”—has put us in the position of an audience observing the preacher’s public performance.88 Like that audience; we see only the face that looks in our direction. What, if anything, may lie behind it, what “face” the preacher may turn to his creator, and what his intentions may be can only be matters for speculation, but it is speculation that an audience will always engage in.89 Part of Harry Bailly’s fury at the end of the tale may stem from an obscure recognition that, as an audience member, he has been put in an untenable position of uncertainty by one of the very figures who was supposed to provide certainty. He responds by retreating to what he believes he knows about faith—that he will have “Cristes curs” if he listens to the Pardoner’s teaching—and by asserting aggressively his own desire literally to get hold of the Pardoner and establish the “truth” about one of that figure’s many uncertainties, the nature of his sexual body, in the crudest and most visible way possible.90
By “playing” the preacher, then, the Pardoner provides a reminder that all preaching is acting and that as a result our knowledge of the preacher is only ever partial.91 He may be “strange to himself,” as Patterson’s epigraph from Dom DeLillo puts it, but he is also, like every preacher, “strange” to his audience, unknowable and unfathomable. This inescapable strangeness suggests the limitations of the idealized portrait of the Parson, which seems to ask members of the audience to accept a kind of transparency that they know to be false—even as they may wish that it were true. But this is not to say that the Pardoner is in some twisted way more “truthful” than the Parson. Instead it suggests that we must look again at the ideal, wholly simple Parson. In the General Prologue it is true that there is little to interrupt readers’ view of his transparent truthfulness.92 The Parson is an exemplar of holy duplicity, as the Prologue insists over and over: his words and deeds are in perfect harmony. And insofar as that appearance of perfection has been accepted, it has been notably unproductive of criticism about the Parson as a character precisely because there seems to be no one there who inflects the message. But this view can only be sustained if we limit ourselves to the third-person General Prologue portrait. Just as theoretical texts on preaching suggest, the image of a perfectly disembodied exemplar can only be sustained outside the context of performance. At the points where the Parson ceases to be a third-person figure characterized by the narrator and speaks in a voice of his own, he inevitably complicates—without necessarily invalidating—his own status as an ideal.
As Lee Patterson has noted, “the inclusion of the teller with the tale personalizes the meanings that emerge,” and the Parson’s Tale is not exempt from this phenomenon; the Parson’s embodiment, his status as a character, is sometimes regarded as undermining his message.93 Patterson sees the “personalization” of the tales as encouraging “a dramatic reading that discounts any authoritative significance” and suggests that the Parson’s Tale only escapes this limitation by transcending the frame narrative that produces it; it “takes its origin in the very dramatic and realistic context which it will dismiss.”94 As Peggy Knapp points out, however, such a view involves a paradox: “If [the Parson’s] doctrine is true, there need be no fictions, and yet he formulates this doctrine within a fiction—he is a fiction. Either the unchanging realm (from God’s vantage point) of the revealed Word swallows the flawed, historical, uncertain world of experience, or vice versa.”95 Knapp’s point about this paradox is well taken, but I would argue that there is more room for negotiation than she, or Patterson, allows. The figure of the Parson, in effect, shows that neither the unchanging realm of authority nor the fluctuating world of experience does swallow the other; instead, these realms coexist and interact, as they must do for every preacher.96 At the end of the Parson’s Tale the figure of the individual speaker fades into textuality—but only to give way to the voice of another speaker, of Chaucer in the Retractions, a reminder that while the origins of the voice are never guaranteed, it is always a voice that comes from someone. Preaching is precisely the attempt to bring the unchanging, revealed Word into the uncertain, human world, and the duplicity required of the preacher reflects that disparity. We need not regard Chaucer’s depiction of an idealized preacher as a mere setup for yet another anticlerical critique to argue that it does in the end acknowledge the impossibility of that single-minded ideal. If the Parson’s individuality to some extent diminishes his capacity to convey authority, that same individuality whatever its costs, is simultaneously essential to his existence and effectiveness as a preacher. We can see how physicality both gives and takes away authority in the Parson’s speech, the best available proxy for his embodied performance.97 It is as an audience of his textual speech that we imitate a sermon audience; it is only through language that these characters are present, and only through their speech, as distinguished from the narrator’s descriptions of them, that they take on a life of their own. We catch a first glimpse of the Parson as a person,