Wife of Bath’s Prologue and how it is intended to be a warning for BOTH men and women in medieval society.

Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies Author(s): Lee Patterson Source: Speculum, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Jul., 2001), pp. 638-680 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Medieval Academy of America Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2903882 Accessed: 15-05-2019 02:22 UTC

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Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch:

Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies

By Lee Patterson

I, too, was greatly impressed when I first read Freud. He's extraordinary. Of course he is full of fishy thinking & his charm & the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein1

Thus one virtuoso of twentieth-century thought responded to the spell cast over his culture by a virtuoso of the previous generation-his response recording a now familiar progress from the spellbound to the disenchanted. Wittgenstein's shrewdness, however, remains as yet part of only a minority tradition of skepticism about the value of Freudianism, and psychoanalysis in general, to contemporary literary critics. This essay is a contribution to that skepticism as it applies to lit- erary interpretation, a philosophically much narrower terrain than Wittgenstein's genial critique envisaged, but one in which fishy thinking is no less to be avoided. The essay falls into six sections. The first describes the enthusiastic adoption of psychoanalytic concepts into medieval studies at the very moment when they are suffering a collapse of credibility in the real world. Part 2 summarizes the fatal flaws now widely perceived in psychoanalytic and specifically Freudian methods of inquiry, especially in its cavalier unconcern with questions of evidence and validity. In part 3 I use an apposite test case that almost irresistibly attracts psy- choanalytic readings-Chaucer's Pardoner and his tale-to assess the usefulness or otherwise of psychoanalytic assumptions in literary interpretation. Parts 4 and 5 offer an alternative reading of the Pardoner and his tale that interprets the symbolic structure by reference to discourses that are not simply medieval but specifically contemporary to Chaucer. The essay concludes with some reflections on the place of theory-whether psychoanalytic or of some other variety-in medieval literary studies.

The goal of this essay is not to foreclose discussion but exactly the opposite. For an interpretive program to be taken seriously it must both examine the foun-

This essay was first written for a symposium organized at the University of Oklahoma by George Economou in March 1996, and versions have subsequently been given at various institutions, much to its benefit. It has been read by six readers for Speculum, all of whom-and especially those who found it unworthy of publication-have helped me to clarify the argument. I would like especially to thank Richard Emmerson for his detailed and perceptive comments, Michael Wenthe for his scrupulous inspection of the last but one version, and Annabel Patterson for her editorial brutality.

1 Cited by Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1984), p. 100. Wittgenstein explained Freud's power in terms of the modern commitment to the idea that the inner self has uncharted depths: the "peculiar charm" of psychoanalytic explanations, he said, derives from "the idea of an underworld, a secret cellar" (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett [Berkeley, Calif., 1966], p. 25).

Speculum 76 (2001) 638

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Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch

dations on which it rests and meet, with as full and receptive an attitude as pos- sible, the objections to which it is susceptible. I have tried neither to travesty the assumptions I question nor to score rhetorical points. I have read as widely as I could in the relevant material and seek here to present the results in a straight- forward manner, without misrepresentation. If this essay is to serve as a way of opening a discussion on the interpretive appropriateness of psychoanalysis-a conversation that is clearly long overdue-then one hopes that those who disagree with its conclusions will do the same.

1. THE FREUDIAN CHARM

We start our intellectual lives under the spell. Our vernacular culture is saturated with terms and concepts derived from psychoanalytic theory: repression, resis- tance, the unconscious, the anal personality, threatened masculinity and castration fear, a belief that our every activity is invested with libido, and above all a suspicion that everything means something other, and usually something darker, than it seems-these terms and concepts, and the way of thinking they enable and en- courage, are a central part of the shared habits of thought by which we learn, for good or ill, to make sense of our lives. More tangibly, our society devotes sub- stantial resources to mental health workers who deploy technologies of the self that derive ultimately if not directly from the Freudian system. Quite apart from the vast number of more or less professional therapists who service what has been called "the identity market,"2 there are school counselors, penologists, expert wit- nesses, social workers, and even (if they are not careful) university professors who dispense more or less expert advice that bears a real, if usually ill-defined, relation to Freudian theory. If the twentieth century has witnessed what Philip Rieff has called "the emergence of psychological man," we must remember that we are not merely observers of that momentous event but its effect.3 We are psychological men and women, shaped by structures of thought and feeling that derive directly from the work of Freud and his disciples.

But even while agreeing with the statement that the invention and spread of Freudian theory represent "the attainment of a new degree of consciousness in Western civilization," one may still ask if it is a higher form of consciousness and, in particular applications, whether it is a help or hindrance to thought.4 There are, to be sure, very good reasons for the modern triumph of psychoanalytic modes of thought and interpretation. For one thing, Freudianism functioned for the first half of the twentieth century as a liberatory alternative to far less humane modes of explaining human actions, especially geneticism (and its deadly offspring, eu- genics) and behaviorism. Particularly important in this regard is the psychoana-

2 Peter L. Berger, "Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis," Social Research 32 (1965), 26-41, at p. 37.

3 Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City, N.Y., 1961), pp. 361-92. 4 Steven Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian

Humanism to Modernity (Boston, 1984), p. 7. For a similar, highly influential account of Freudianism as modernity, see Lionel Trilling, "Freud: Within and beyond Culture," a lecture delivered to the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1955 and printed in Beyond Culture (New York, 1965), pp. 89-118.

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lytic refusal to pass moral judgment on almost all forms of behavior, especially sexual. As Freud said more than once, psychoanalysis has no "concern whatsoever with judgments of value."5 To be against psychoanalysis was, from the period of 1920 to 1960 or so, to be against reforms in child rearing, education, the treatment of sexual minorities, and many other clearly progressive causes.6 Another benign aspect of Freudian psychologism has been its ability to address (if not necessarily to remedy) aspects of modern life-especially familial and other interpersonal relationships-that the dominant individualism and privatism of modern urban life, in which the self is experienced as threatened and fragile, have made central to a sense of well-being. Thus it is that "twentieth-century societies have produced 'psychology' as a specialized form of knowledge and set of techniques."7 And as many have said, psychoanalysis has produced a humanistic substitute for religion in an increasingly secular culture. As Wittgenstein recognized, Freud restored to modernity some of the mystery that the disenchantments of rationality were threatening to strip away forever. In a world in which everything is potentially knowable to instrumental reason, psychoanalysis can satisfy a Romantic desire for a realm of deep meaning that is unknown and perhaps even unknowable. Whether it can now be seen to have achieved this without imposing a new creed, immune to empirical critique, is part of my concern.

If psychoanalysis can thus rightly be seen, in retrospect, as part of the Enlight- enment project of modernity, we are now in a position to assess its claim to sci- entific rationality and the ratification of that claim by its inclusion within the professional citadel of medicine.8 Freud always thought of himself as a scientist and of psychoanalysis as an empirical science. "I take no pride in having avoided speculation," he said, because "the material for my hypotheses was collected by the most extensive and laborious series of observations."9 He speaks often of the

5 Cited by Philip Rieff, who rightly says that "psychoanalysis is the first great system of therapy to divorce itself from some moral aim or doctrine; that suggests its historic importance" (Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, p. 368). As Freud himself said, "Psycho-analysis finds no occasion for conceal- ments and hints, it does not think it necessary to be ashamed of dealing with this important material, it believes it is right and proper to call everything by its correct name" (Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis [1915-16], in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. James Strachey et al. [London, 1953-74], 15:154). All subsequent references are to this edition, abbreviated SE.

6 See Nathan G. Hale, Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in America, 2: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985 (New York, 1995). Despite its inflammatory and misleading title, Edwin Fuller Torrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture (New York, 1992), provides a useful history of the progressiveness of Freudian thought with a wealth of specific examples, especially Margaret Mead and Benjamin Spock.

7 Barry Richards, Images of Freud: Cultural Responses to Psychoanalysis (London, 1989), p. 23. 8 For the combination of Romantic and Enlightenment features in Freud's thought, see Harry Tros-

man, "Freud's Cultural Background," in John E. Gedo and George H. Pollock, eds., Freud: The Fusion of Science and Humanism (New York, 1976), pp. 46-70. Psychoanalysis is both deterministic and liberating: deterministic (in its Romantic mode) in that it insists that all behaviors are caused by hidden, powerful forces, liberating (in its Enlightenment mode) in arguing that we can come to understand and control those determining forces: see Richard Stevens, Freud and Psychoanalysis: An Exposition and Appraisal (New York, 1983), pp. 135-37.

9 "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905), SE 7:113. See also, for example, Intro- ductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-17), SE 16:244-45.

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"data" and "factual evidence" upon which he has based his explanations and asserts throughout his work that "the intellect and the mind are objects for sci- entific research in exactly the same way as any non-human things."10

But in recent decades psychoanalysis as a scientifically reliable system of thought has lost much of its intellectual status, and in the second part of this essay I will lay out the main arguments for its demise. This doubt has spread even to the popular press. The cover story of the November 29, 1993, issue of Time magazine was entitled "Is Freud Dead?" and the June 15, 1998, issue of Der Spiegel-its cover story entitled "Die Psycho Falle"-features a visual lineup of similar mag- azine covers from the United States, France, and Germany.11 The most persistent attempt to counter this widespread disillusionment is to argue that Freud's claims to the scientific status of his theories stemmed from what Paul Ricoeur has called

his "scientistic self-misunderstanding," and that psychoanalysis should therefore be understood not as an empirical science but simply as a hermeneutic, a method of interpretation.12 But such a tactic has to accept (as does Ricoeur) the fact that because "psychoanalysis is itself a work of speech with the patient," then the most it needs to produce is a narrative that the patient finds acceptable, whether it is accurate or not.13 The hermeneutic rescue of psychoanalysis, in other words, de- nies Freud his claim to have discovered the causes of human behavior and settles

for meanings "discovered" by the analyst: in the attempt to rescue psychoanalysis as a therapy, it destroys it as a general theory of human behavior. The fact is, if psychoanalysis is to provide a reliable paradigm for understanding human behav- ior-especially premodern behavior, and all the more the behavior of characters created by premodern writers-then it must not be denied its claim to scientific truth. As Freud himself said, "I have always felt it as a gross injustice that people have refused to treat psycho-analysis like any other science."14

10 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), SE 22:159. Freud continues with an ar- gument that practitioners of psychoanalytic criticism might find unpalatable: "It is not permissible to declare that science is one field of human mental activity and that religion and philosophy are others, at least equal in value, and that science has no business to interfere with the other two. ... A view of this kind is regarded as particularly superior, tolerant, broad-minded and free from illiberal prejudices. Unfortunately it is not tenable.... It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant" (p. 160).

1 Der Spiegel 25 (1998), 199. 12 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven,

Conn., 1970). 13 The citation from Ricoeur is from Freud and Philosophy, p. 369. The hermeneutic interpretations

of Ricoeur and Jiirgen Habermas are subjected to a withering analysis by Adolf Griinbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), pp. 1-94. See also the comments by the psychoanalyst Robert R. Holt, Freud Reappraised: A Fresh Look at Psychoan- alytic Theory (New York, 1989), p. 337, and by the textual critic Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, trans. Kate Soper (London, 1976). For Timpanaro, the hermeneutic rescue of Freud manages only to transform "psychoanalysis into a pastiche of Husserl or Heidegger, orienting it towards a mysticism that evokes Jung much more than Freud" (p. 17). Tim- panaro later characterizes Ricoeur's version of Freud as "a strange brew of Freudianism and religion, in which the more imbued with mystery an interpretation, the better it pleases" (p. 181)-a version of Wittgenstein's point (n. 1, above).

14 An Autobiographical Study (1925), SE 20:58. The other way of protecting Freudianism from its own claims is to declare that the practices and results of empirical science are no longer operative in the brave new world of postmodernism: see Paul Robinson, Freud and His Critics (Berkeley, Calif.,

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Moreover, even the hermeneutic model-which is now therapeutically domi- nant-requires a dialogue between analyst and patient in which the patient's con- tribution is acknowledged as essential. As the object-relations analyst Heinz Kohut has said, "If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true-that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound."15 But while this may be true for real people in contemporary therapy, such a dialogue is impossible with persons, either real or fictional, who can only give evidence of their psyches in fixed texts. George Pig- man, who is both a literary critic and a practicing analyst, has pointed out that "patients can object to interpretations and thereby further understanding; texts and documents cannot. [As used by literary critics], applied psychoanalysis is therefore barred from the feature of the psychoanalytic process which gives the greatest confidence in the validity of interpretations and reconstructions."16

Yet despite the adjustments within the therapeutic community, the now large literature criticizing the truth claims of Freud and his followers, and the reasonably well informed discussions in the popular press, the news of the demise of psycho- analysis as a reliable mode of inquiry seems not to have reached the small circle of academic literary and cultural criticism. Here psychoanalysis in its various guises-whether as orthodox Freudianism or in Lacanian or post-Lacanian revi- sionary forms-remains not just a powerful influence but a paradigm for inter- pretation and a largely unquestioned source of authority. According to a survey done in 1977-78 of the most heavily cited twentieth-century authors in the arts and humanities, Freud was by far the most common name to appear.17 Over twenty years later the situation has not changed: in the decade of the 1990s, at least 921 books, and who knows how many articles, have been published that deal explicitly and centrally with psychoanalysis and literature, to say nothing of

1993), and Marcus R. Bowman, "On the Idea of Natural Science as a Resistance to Psychoanalysis," Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19 (1996), 371-402. Both these authors use the familiar psychoanalytic strategy of psychoanalyzing their opponents, while the topic at issue is defended not by appeals to evidence but by the assumption that it is true. As Karl Kraus said as long ago as 1913 in exasperation with his psychoanalytically besotted friends, "If I tell them they can kiss my ass, I must have an anal predilection.... They have caught me!" (cited and translated by Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, trans. Carol Cosman [Princeton, N.J., 1995], p. 16).

15 Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago, 1984), pp. 93-94; cited by G. W. Pigman III, "Applied Psychoanalysis Today," Criticism 34 (1992), 299-315, at p. 308.

16 Ibid., p. 309. For similar demurrals, see Gail S. Reed, "Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis Appropri- ated, Psychoanalysis Applied," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 54 (1985), 234-69, and Peter Lamarque, "On the Irrelevance of Psychoanalysis to Literary Criticism," in Peter Clark and Crispin Wright, eds., Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science (Oxford, 1988), pp. 257-73.

17 Allan Megill, "The Reception of Foucault by Historians," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), 117-41, at pp. 139-40. Freud was cited 966 times, with the next name being that of Roland Barthes, cited 678 times. It should be pointed out that Lenin led the list with 1,737 citations; but if Soviet journals were excluded, his name virtually disappeared. Jung's name appeared 338 times, and Lacan's 210.

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all the critical writing in which psychoanalytic categories remain implicit and therefore invisible to search engines.18

It might be thought that medieval studies, with its traditional commitment to empiricist methodologies and its mistrust of explicitly nonhistoricist interpretive paradigms, would be resistant to this trend. But medieval literary critics have long been anxious not to be perceived as intellectually backward, and the most obvious way to avoid that stigma is to display familiarity with some form of what the literary academy currently designates as theory. In a recent review article Louise Fradenburg announces that "psychoanalysis is simply in medieval studies now" and provides a bibliography that includes some 45 items that explicitly depend upon psychoanalytic theories.19 One could easily add to the list.20 There are few critics, especially those dealing explicitly with questions of gender and sexuality, who do not at least implicitly accept the Freudian account of sexual formation.

I have now turned, obviously, to a field-specific interrogation of Freudianism- very field-specific, since I do not address the use of Freudian theory in literary studies in general but rather as a fairly recent development within medieval studies. In literary studies generally, or in literary theory, there has been more interest, perhaps, in psychoanalysis as a kind of hermeneutics, as a model for doing inter- pretation rather than as a model of behavior. But in medieval studies there has been a rush backwards, as it were, to Freud's beliefs about human sexuality and its dominance as a force in character formation and pathology. An example from Chaucer studies, taken almost at random, is the discussion of the Miller's Tale by Elaine Tuttle Hansen, who argues that the tale commodifies women, expresses a "horror" of their sexuality, and bespeaks a profound if unrecognized homoso- ciality/homosexuality.21 The presuppositions that enable this condemnatory read- ing derive ultimately, if unwittingly, from Freud. According to Hansen, grabbing

18 This figure was arrived at through a keyword search of the database of the WorldCat (http:// newfirstsearch.oclc.org).

19 "Analytical Survey 2: We Are Not Alone: Psychoanalytic Medievalism," New Medieval Litera- tures 2 (1998), 249-76.

20 In addition to the titles provided by Fradenburg, a sample of recent books that apply psychoan- alytic categories of interpretation to cultural materials includes Jane Chance, ed., Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (Gainesville, Fla., 1996); E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia, 1993); Gregory B. Stone, The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (Philadelphia, 1994); Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality, Medieval Cultures 11 (Minneapolis, 1997); Catherine S. Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer (Gainesville, Fla., 1997); Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia, 1999); Clare A. Lees, ed., Medieval Mascu- linities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures 7 (Minneapolis, 1994); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2066, New Middle Ages 4 (New York, 1997); John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Medieval Mothering, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1979, New Middle Ages 3 (New York, 1996), pp. 63-75, 183-99; Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, N.C., 1998); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Dur- ham, N.C., 1999); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures 17 (Minneapolis, 1999); Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1999); and Paul Strohm, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (New Haven, Conn., 1998).

21 Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), pp. 223-36.

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the red-hot iron from the forge is Absolon's attempt to reassert his masculinity, and his desire to hurt Alison implies a connection among homosexuality, homo- phobia, and misogyny. But this reasonable explanation of a fabliau's typically coarse revenge is expressed as follows: "the boy-child [Absolon] has in this case felt, although not seen, the lack that seems to mark the place of women's sexual organs, and his response indicates both guilt and fear for his own as yet unproven difference and dominance, his phallus."22 This reading depends, then, upon Freud's theory that oedipalized men are by definition appalled by female sexuality. Thus for Hansen the Miller's Tale "effects the conventional association or confla-

tion of (female) genital and anal functions, of women's sex (or sex with a woman) and dirt, decay, and dissolution."23

My point here is to suggest that this and similar readings of medieval texts, while they may be invigoratingly consistent with the political temper of the times, may also be intellectually misleading-for at least three reasons. First, they ignore the now ubiquitous skepticism about the truth claims of the very theories they take as presuppositions. Second, they extend what is now accepted as a dialogic method of therapy to a one-way analysis of fictional characters who must stand mute before their analyst. And third, they rise to the defense of their method by attacking another method of understanding literary texts from the past-histor- icism.24 What they actually attack, however, is a parodic version of historicism, a

22 Ibid., p. 230. 23 Ibid., p. 227; italics added. A similar reading of the Miller's Tale is offered by Karma Lochrie,

"Women's 'Pryvetees' and Fabliau Politics in the Miller's Tale," Exemplaria 6 (1994), 287-304. This argument depends in the first instance upon Gayle Rubin's classic essay, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), pp. 157-210. Rubin reinterprets Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship in terms of the Freud- ian account of "the Oedipal complex [as] a machine which fashions the appropriate forms of sexual individuals" (Rubin, p. 189). Both Lochrie and Hansen thus rely on two assumptions: that Freud's account of the creation of sexual identity by means of the Oedipus complex is true; and that, in Rubin's words, "the paleolithic relations of sexuality are still with us" (p. 191)-i.e., that the political economy of the sex/gender system that Rubin derives from Freud is a universal constituent of human societies, be it late-medieval England or the contemporary United States.

24 Many people have offered workable definitions of historicist methodology; my own attempt may be found in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, Wis., 1987), pp. 3-74. An excellent summary of recent work, with examples, may be found in Kiernan Ryan, ed., New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader (London, 1996); see especially pp. 43-44. A classic defense of psychoanalytic literary criticism can be found in Peter Brooks, "The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism," in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ed., Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, University Paperbacks 960 (London, 1987), pp. 1-18, and Psychoanalysis and Sto- rytelling, Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory 10 (Oxford, 1994). Brooks acknowledges that any psychoanalytic criticism worthy of the name must take the Freudian account of the mind as a privileged model that reveals the central truth of human behavior. This means, in Brooks's words, accepting "the psychoanalytic view of humans as radically determined by sexuality.... Human desire emerges subject to the 'laws' dictated by the castration complex and the Oedipal triangle-emerges, that is, as desire inhabited by loss and prohibition" (Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, p. 25). In "'Be Not Far from Me': Psychoanalysis, Medieval Studies and the Subject of Religion," Exemplaria 7 (1995), 41-54, Louise O. Fradenburg defends the relevance of psychoanalysis to medieval studies by asserting that "psycho- analysis takes us to the heart of our histories of loss and desire, to the heart of the history of culture, or 'civilization,' as a history of the production and regulation of pleasure and loss" (p. 44)-a statement that is another version of Brooks's account. But neither Fradenburg nor Brooks confronts the critiques

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Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch 645

naive positivism that believes in the absolute "alterity" of the past. Such a histor- icism has not been thought possible since at least Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Weber, let alone Foucault, Jameson, and E. P. Thompson.25 Constantly to invoke D. W. Robertson and a few of his students as proof of the benightedness of medieval historicism is misleading in a double sense: it is blind to the very different kinds of historicism that medieval literary scholars now practice, and it dismisses the very real contribution to our understanding of the Middle Ages that Robertson made, since he taught us much about the ubiquity of the medieval tradition of exegetical reading.

Another line of defense-as-attack is to psychoanalyze historicists as reverent if mournful seekers after a hopelessly lost past, a strategy that reduces the many different motives that inspire historical scholarship to compensation for a psycho- analytically posited "lack."26 This move endows the analyst with the assurance that she understands others better than they can understand themselves. The charge, however, not only begs the question but depends on an assumed identity of memory and history. As a psychic phenomenon, memory is a mental function confined to personal experience; as a disciplinary practice, history is an episte- mological effort directed toward the experience of others, all of whom are (for the medievalist) dead. We cannot now remember the medieval past but only learn about it. And even as a collective phenomenon, memory both extends back only a short way into the past and has to do, as is well illustrated by the monumental

of psychoanalytic theory that have appeared over the last twenty-five years. A defense of psychoanalysis as an aid to historical understanding is provided by Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (New York, 1985), but Gay does little to counter the arguments of David E. Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (New York, 1980). For a thorough critique of Gay's version of Freud that is itself sympathetic to psychoanalysis, see John E. Toews, "Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and for Our Time," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991), 504-45.

25 This accusation has been most persistently made by Louise Fradenburg, from her initial creation of the straw man of historicist backwardness in "Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress's Tale," Exemplaria 1 (1989), 69-115, through to her most recent work in "We Are Not Alone: Psychoanalytic Medievalism." There she posits an opposition between those unnamed scholars who "still insist on the radical alterity of the past, the incommunication of epistemes, and the uselessness of generalizing about the 'local' and the 'specific"' and the psychoanalytic medievalists who avoid those errors and thus possess "a better understanding of the ethical and political commitments of medievalist practice" (pp. 262-63, my italics).

26 See again Fradenburg, "Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress's Tale," and her "Be Not Far from Me"; Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 82-88, 100-107; and Biddick's Shock of Medievalism, which founds itself on Fradenburg's claims. Even Peter Gay admits that "the days are gone when the followers of Freud can discredit rational criticism by psychoanalyzing the critic" (Freud for Historians, p. 7). Yet on the very next page he refers to historians who reject psychoanalytic methods as "anxious and therefore hostile" (p. 8) and later asserts that "the unflagging ardor of the counterattacks is therefore a symptom rather than a necessary response" (p. 17). The same tactic appears in Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 16-32. As Freud himself said, "One of the first applications of psycho-analysis was to teach us to understand the opposition offered to us by our contemporaries because we practised psycho-analysis" (New Intro- ductory Lectures, SE 22:145).

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project led by Pierre Nora, primarily with the definition of the modern nation.27 As for the recent argument that historicism is doomed to "the task of replicating, however hopelessly, medieval culture's self-understandings," while psychoanaly- sis, from a superior posture, explores "the ways in which medieval culture might have misunderstood itself," one must ask how to recognize a misunderstanding without already knowing what correct understanding might be.28 Like old-fash- ioned Marxism, psychoanalysis wants to believe that it has a pipeline to the truth, the only difference being that the Marxist's long-abandoned "false consciousness" is here replaced by the psychoanalyst's gentler "misunderstanding" or (Zizek's use of Lacan's term) "misrecognition."29

To mention Slavoj Zizek will alert my readers to the fact that what follows-a summary of the arguments against psychoanalysis both as method and as expla- nation-is focused almost exclusively on Freud. It could be objected that I am aiming at the wrong target because the current psychoanalytic theory of choice is that propounded by Jacques Lacan or what is termed "post-Lacanian psycho- analysis," particularly as proposed by Ziiek. But Lacan rightly insisted that his entire project was a "return to Freud," and as Malcolm Bowie has said, in what is probably the best guide to this obscurantist writer, Lacan's "loyalty to Freud is intense, and the originality he seeks is that of an inspired and devoted reader, one who can think fruitfully only from inside someone else's text."30 This is not to say that Lacan's relation to Freud is not complex and shifting, nor that he does not finally differ from Freud in ways important to psychoanalytic theory, perhaps most significantly in locating within the ego itself a powerful irrationality-he refers to it at one point as an "organization of the passions"31-and in his promotion of language as an impersonal force that constructs subjectivity. But the entire Lacan- ian project is located within the context of the Freudian model of the formation of the personality. Lacan's four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis are the unconscious, repetition, transference, and the drive; subjectivity is formed through infantile experience; and the lack that constitutes desire is a function of the fear of castration created by the Name of the Father. Like Freud, Lacan presented his work as at once scientific (despite his disdain for evidence) and universalist. Ad- mittedly, given his replacement of Freud's id, ego, and superego with his ontolog-

27 Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de memoire, 3 vols. in 7 (Paris, 1984-92). There are clear if unremarked affinities between Fradenburg's claims and Nora's project, with its emphasis on the sadness of the postmodern that has lost a living connection to the past and its promotion of the postmodern historian who both "meditate[s]" on his "personal liaison" with the past and makes it "not the obstacle, but the means of his understanding" (cited by Jeremy D. Popkin, "Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier," American Historical Review 104 [1999], 725-48, at p. 731). But both Fradenburg and Nora are stating positions that are hardly postmodern: they have been familiar since at least the Romantic historiography of Michelet and the historical hermeneutics of Dilthey.

28 "Be Not Far from Me," pp. 45, 47. 29 Slavoj Ziiek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), pp. 55-84. 30 Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 7. For other accounts of Lacan's theories

within their Freudian framework, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, 1973), and Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Levine, Literature, Culture, The- ory 1 (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).

31 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), p. 19.

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ical triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, Lacan is more truly a metaphy- sician (or theologian) than a psychologist. But if the Freudian foundations on which his work rests are unreliable, then his own enterprise (however we define it) can hardly stand as an accurate account of human behavior.32 As for Zizek, his neo-Lacanian psychoanalysis of culture has a political and sociological interest that is lacking in Lacan himself. But his unqualified commitment to Lacanian categories renders his work equally dependent-at one remove-on Freud.33 It is with Freud that psychoanalysis begins and ends (as Freud himself rightly predicted it always would), and it is thus with Freud that the literary critic must come to terms. In any case, as the psychoanalyst Robert Holt has said, "When the foun- dations of our house are tottering, it makes no sense to argue about rival designs for new wallpaper."34

2. THE CASE AGAINST PSYCHOANALYSIS

For the last quarter of a century much of Freud's work, and hence psychoan- alytic theory as a whole (as opposed to the many varieties of psychotherapy now on offer), has been subject to a devastating critique. According to Frederick Crews, the one anti-Freudian known at least by reputation to literary scholars, "there is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas."35 Those are strong words, but they are supported by a substantial and growing body of work that has demolished, both systematically and in detail, the theoretical and institutional house that Freud built. This work can no longer be ignored or evaded by literary critics.36

32 Criticisms of Lacan as severe as those leveled against Freud are not far to seek: see, for instance, FranSois Roustang, The Lacanian Delusion, trans. Greg Sims (New York, 1990); Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst, Mass., 1990), pp. 185-207; and an article posted on the Web by Norman N. Holland, "The Trouble(s) with Lacan" (1998), at http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/lacan.htm.

33 Ziiek's Lacanian commitments are everywhere visible in his work, but perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in the essay "Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes," in The Plague of Fantasies (London, 1997), pp. 86-126.

34 Freud Reappraised, p. 338. 35 Frederick Crews, "The Verdict on Freud," Psychological Science 7 (1996), 63-68, at p. 63; Crews

is reviewing Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (Amsterdam, 1991). Crews's own contributions to this critique may be found in Skeptical Engagements (New York, 1986); Crews et al., The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (New York, 1995); and Crews, ed., Unau- thorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (New York, 1998).

36 Many of the most troubling doubts about psychoanalysis are expressed by psychoanalysts them- selves. For example, Donald P. Spence begins his book The Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis: Dis- placement of Evidence by Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), with the following statement: "As psy- choanalysis prepares to enter its second century, we are forced to realize that it is not much closer to being a science than it was when Freud first invented the discipline.... Rather than representing an earnest and possibly fallible attempt to tell a true story about the world, psychoanalytic theory may function much more as a shared fantasy that binds its followers in a common belief system and protects them from uncertainty and doubt" (pp. 1, 4-5). For other accounts of the current state of psycho- analysis by practicing analysts, see Marshall Edelson, Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis (Chicago, 1988); Holt, Freud Reappraised; and Paul Kline, Psychology and Freudian Theory: An Introduction (London, 1984).

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To begin with, psychoanalytic theory makes universalist and absolutist claims that call for a large body of evidentiary support that it has never been able to provide. Freud insisted that all neuroses are caused by sexual dysfunctions that originate in infancy, and his emphasis upon both the primacy of early childhood and the sexual nature of identity formation remains central to psychoanalytic thinking. As he said in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), "The theory of the psychoneuroses asserts as an indisputable and invariable fact that only sexual wishful impulses from infancy . . . furnish the motive force for the formation of psycho-neurotic symptoms of every kind."37 Similarly, Freud used his (admittedly failed) analysis of Dora to claim that "sexuality . . . provides the motive power for every single symptom, and for every single manifestation of a symptom. The symptoms of the disease are nothing else than the patient's sexual activity.... I can only repeat over and over again-for I never find it otherwise-that sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general."38 Again, Freud repeatedly insisted that the Oedipus complex is a universal phenom- enon: "Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has become more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents."39 And for Freud the Oedipus complex entailed as well the inevitability of the castration complex, a condition whose resolution determines gender identity.40

Freud actually went so far as to claim that the central events of infantile expe- rience were already present in the little boy as an ancestral inheritance, so he did not need to experience them at all for them to have their effect upon him: "These scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced in childhood, and of being threatened with castration are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a phylogenetic heritage.... A child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual truth with

37 SE 5:605-6; my italics. 38 "A Case of Hysteria," SE 7:114-15; the italics in the phrase "the patient's sexual activity" are

Freud's, while the others are mine. 39 "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), SE 7:226 n (a footnote added in 1920; my

italics). Freud concluded Totem and Taboo (1913) by "insist[ing] that ... the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex" (SE 13:156). For discussions of the way in which post-Freudian psychoanalysis has revised and rerevised (but never discarded) the theory of the Oedipus complex, see Bennett Simon, "Is the Oedipus Complex Still the Cornerstone of Psychoanal- ysis? Three Obstacles to Answering the Question," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Associa- tion 39 (1991), 641-68, and Bennett Simon, "'Incest-See under Oedipus Complex': The History of an Error in Psychoanalysis," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 40 (1992), 955-88. In The Sublime Object of Ideology Zizek says: "Let us take one of the commonplaces of the Marxist- feminist criticism of psychoanalysis, the idea that its insistence on the crucial role of the Oedipus complex and the nuclear-family triangle transforms a historically conditioned form of patriarchal family into a feature of the universal human condition: is not this effort to historicize the family triangle precisely an attempt to elude the 'hard kernel' which announces itself through the 'patriarchal family'- the Real of the Law, the rock of castration?" (p. 50; italics in original).

40 See SE 20:38 and Allen Esterson, Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud (Chicago, 1993), p. 137.

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prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors .... Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodelled in the imagination.... We are often able to see the schema triumphing over the experience of the individual."41 Moreover, Freud claimed that the mind never forgot any experience, that everything was recover- able: "All of the essentials are preserved; even things that seem completely for- gotten are present somehow and somewhere.... It depends only upon analytic technique whether we shall succeed in bringing what is concealed completely to light."42 Similarly, for Freud all dreams, including those that cause anxiety, were "a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish."43 And so on: all of the central tenets of the psychoanalytic system were presented by Freud as both universal and empirically demonstrable. As his collaborator Josef Breuer put it, Freud was "a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations."44

This way of proceeding has created predictable problems for both Freud and his disciples. Evidence supportive of Freud's theories is almost entirely derived from the analytic session itself, "clinical" material which-as Adolf Griinbaum has shown in detail-is so contaminated by the presuppositions and suggestive- ness of the analytic session as to be useless for purposes of confirmation.45 What extraclinical evidence exists argues strongly against Freudian theory. The central tenets of the psychoanalytic system, the Oedipus complex and the theory of in- fantile sexuality upon which it is based, are without evidentiary support of any kind. Empirical studies have shown that young children of both sexes feel closer to the mother than the father and that as children mature, each sex tends to identify with the same sex parent, not out of fear of the other but out of affection and a desire for emulation.46 As for the retention of all experience within memory, empirical studies have shown that memory is in fact a highly malleable mental function by means of which people construct personal pasts to accord with present

41 "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," SE 17:97, 119. For a discussion of this Freudian belief, see Frank Cioffi, "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," in Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi, eds., Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), pp. 471-99, at p. 481. For Freud's Lamarckian materialism, which led him to believe that acquired characteristics can be inher- ited, see Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

42 "Constructions in Analysis" (1937), SE 23:260. 43 Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE 4:160. 44 Breuer's characterization is cited by Esterson, Seductive Mirage, p. 5. 45 Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis, pp. 95-172; Griinbaum, Validation in the Clinical

Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Madison, Conn., 1993). 46 See, e.g., Spence, Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis, pp. 22-23; Robert N. Emde, "Individual

Meaning and Increasing Complexity: Contributions of Sigmund Freud and Rene Spitz to Develop- mental Psychology," Developmental Psychology 28 (1992), 347-59 (Emde stresses that extensive research "has shown that gender identity is not an outcome of the Oedipus complex. Core gender identity is established earlier, usually in the second and third years of life" [p. 352]); and especially the important and tenaciously empirical work by Margaret S. Mahler, in Mahler et al., The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York, 1975). As an example of the far harsher judgments passed by nonpsychoanalytic critics of Freud, see H. J. Eysenck, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1985), p. 35.

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conditions.47 Finally, recent studies of the mind in sleep have shown that dreams have a very different cause from Freud's wish fulfillment, that their meaning is for the most part quite clear, and that their bizarreness is an effect, not of various "censoring" mechanisms protecting consciousness from a horrifying truth, but of the physiology of the brain during sleep.48 As Malcolm MacMillan has said, in concluding his exhaustive survey of the fate of Freudian theories when subjected to the empirical standards that Freud himself claimed to have applied, "Psycho- analysis as a theory of personality has little to recommend it.... Do processes like condensation and the summation of stimuli occur? Is there such a mechanism

as repression? Is there a transformation of the primary process into the secondary? Is there an Oedipus complex out of which a super-ego forms and from which the ego is provided with defused energy? Is the development of adult sexuality, char- acter traits, and object-choice as Freud described them? Is female sexuality as Freud pictured it? From these points of view, psycho-analysis is not so much a bad theory, but a theory in search of some facts."49

Perhaps even more important to literary critics than this evidentiary absence, however, is the characteristic mode of argument by which psychoanalysis pro- ceeds. Psychoanalytic theory has always been able to absorb into its system and to explain in its own terms whatever counterevidence may be presented. Freud himself famously jettisoned his theory that neurotic patients had been seduced in infancy and replaced it with the less visible, and infinitely resourceful, notion of unconscious fantasy-a revision that succeeded in removing seduction from the real world (where it could be tested by evidence) and in relocating it within the patient him or herself (where it could be discerned only through psychoanalytic reconstructions of otherwise forgotten mental events). Freud had initially told his collaborator and friend Wilhelm Fliess that the seduction theory was "the key that unlocks everything, the etiological formula."5 But even at this stage it is unclear whether Freud was actually hearing such stories or already reconstructing them by applying his theory to the narratives his patients were reciting.51 When

47 See Elizabeth Loftus, Memory: Surprising New Insights into How We Remember and Why We Forget (Reading, Mass., 1980); Alan Baddeley, Human Memory: Theory and Practice (Boston, 1990); Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Al- legations of Sexual Abuse (New York, 1994); and Crews et al., Memory Wars.

48 For recent work on dreaming, see Anthony Shafton, Dream Reader: Contemporary Approaches to the Understanding of Dreams (Albany, N.Y., 1995); Inge Strauch and Barbara Meier, In Search of Dreams: Results of Experimental Dream Research (Albany, N.Y., 1996); Michel Jouvet, The Paradox of Sleep: The Story of Dreaming, trans. Laurence Garey (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Arthur W. Epstein, Dreaming and Other Involuntary Mentation: An Essay in Neuropsychiatry (Madison, Conn., 1995); and J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (New York, 1988). A quick overview of this work will reveal the dubious value of applying Freud's model of dreaming either to real dreams or-as is some- times still done-to works of fiction.

49 Macmillan, Freud Evaluated, p. 548. 50 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, ed. and trans., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm

Fliess, 1887-1904 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 45-46. 51 See Crews et al., Memory Wars, pp. 57-58, and works cited there. The best discussion of this

founding moment in the creation of psychoanalysis is provided by Esterson, Seductive Mirage, pp. 11- 31; see also Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (New York, 1995), pp. 195-213.

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he then decided that his claims of wholesale sexual abuse were implausible, he relocated them within the unconscious where they were available only to the psy- chotherapist. As he said, "We must not be led astray by [the patient's] initial denials. If we keep firmly to what we have inferred, we shall in the end conquer every resistance by emphasizing the unshakeable nature of our convictions.... Since minor deviations from a normal vita sexualis are much too common for us

to attach any value to their discovery, we shall only allow a serious and long continued abnormality in the sexual life of a neurotic patient to carry weight as an explanation."52

Hence Freud insisted that corroborative evidence from the patient's life was not merely unnecessary but an actual impediment: "It may seem tempting to take the easy course of filling up the gaps in a patient's memory by making inquiries from the older members of his family; but I cannot advise too strongly against such a technique.... One invariably regrets having made oneself dependent upon such information; at the same time confidence in the analysis is shaken and a court of appeal is set up over it."53 Freud did not abandon his hypothesis that children were sexually excited and seduced by their parents and then threatened with-or endured-castration. On the contrary, he avoided the court of appeal of real-life evidence by reworking the theory to accommodate it in a form resistant to em- pirical testing.

This process of calibrating the theory to ignore or absorb recalcitrant evidence rather than rethinking its central premises-perhaps the most characteristic qual- ity of psychoanalytic thought-gives an impression of immense explanatory power while concealing empirical emptiness. Two further examples should make this important methodological point clear. Freud argued, as we have seen, that "in every case of neurosis there is a sexual aetiology" and that "anxiety is always libido which has been deflected from its [normal] employment. 54 But what about war neuroses, which certainly seem to have nothing to do with sexuality? Freud's answer is that the desire for survival is itself libidinal because it is a form of

"narcissism, which brings the libidinal cathexis of the ego into line with the ca- thexes of objects and emphasizes the libidinal character of the instinct of self- preservation. "5 In any case, as he says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "me- chanical agitation [i.e., the concussion caused by exploding shells] must be recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation."s6 By thus expanding the

52 "Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses" (1898), SE 3:269. And Freud continues: "Moreover, the idea that one might, by one's insistence, cause a patient who is psychically normal to accuse himself falsely of sexual misdemeanours-such an idea may safely be disregarded as an imaginary danger." Quite apart from the astonishing blindness to the power of suggestion that the analyst's "unshakeable" conviction could have on a patient that this comment reveals, one need only substitute "critic" and "text" for "analyst" and "patient" to see how vulnerable psychoanalytic criticism is to the danger of finding sexuality in a text that it already knows must be there.

53 "An Infantile Neurosis," SE 17:14 n; see Cioffi, "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," p. 480 (italics added).

54 "Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses," SE 3:268. The brackets are in the original. 55 "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" (1926), SE 20:129. 56 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE 18:33. In a footnote Freud compares explosive concus-

sion to swinging and railway travel, a startling trivialization of the experiences of millions of men during the Great War.

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notion of libido to include virtually all feelings, Freud was able to maintain his hypothesis that, regardless of the occasion for the appearance of neurosis, its eti- ology is always a displacement of libidinal energy. Hence Freud looks forward confidently to the time when "the libido theory could celebrate its triumph all along the line from the simplest 'actual' neurosis to the most severe alienation of the personality."57

The second example concerns Freud's familiar assertion that all dreams are disguised wish fulfillments. When Freud is presented with a dream that seems not to meet his criterion, he simply proclaims that the patient had the dream in order to fulfill her wish to thwart Freud's own theory of wish fulfillment. In a typical masterstroke of rhetorical subtlety, he then extended this lesson to his larger au- dience: "Indeed, it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled."58 Given this preemptive strike, there is no recourse, as Karl Kraus lamented: "They have caught me!"59

We have here reached the central issue of interpretation, the issue that above all connects Freudian psychoanalysis to literary criticism. It is clear that Freud's method of dream interpretation-like his interpretive method as a whole-is pre- emptive. The theory posits the meaning of dreams, feelings, and behaviors, and the task of the analyst is to read them so that they yield their preordained signif- icance. Much has been written on the familiar mix of arbitrariness and dogmatism that characterizes psychoanalytic interpretation. Sebastiano Timpanaro, for ex- ample, has devoted three long and brilliant chapters to one of Freud's interpre- tations in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The famous misquotation of a Virgilian line made by the young man in the train is, Timpanaro shows, determined not by unconscious anxieties about his mistress's late menstrual period but by the peculiarly difficult syntax employed by Virgil, a difficulty that caused medieval scribes to make the same mistake. There is, Timpanaro modestly says, "nothing brilliant" about his demonstration, "nor is it even particularly intelligent . . ; but it is the simplest and most 'economical' explanation possible." As for Freud's interpretation, "beneath the brilliance of the intellectual fireworks, few procedures can be reckoned so antiscientific," for it depends upon a "captious and sophistical method, resistant to any verification, quick to force interpretations [and] to secure pre-ordained proofs."60

57 Introductory Lectures, SE 16:430. 58 Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4:158. 59 See above, n. 14. For a subtle reading of The Interpretation of Dreams that examines its rhetorical

power, see Alexander Welsh, Freud's Wishful Dream Book (Princeton, N.J., 1994). Welsh sees the subject of the book as being not the psyche but Freud's own ambition.

60 Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip, pp. 29-61, 41,42-43, and 14 (see n. 13 above). In his two-volume account of psychoanalytic theory, The Non-Authentic Nature of Freud's Observations, Uppsala Studies in Education 47-48 (Uppsala, 1993), Max Scharnberg describes the Freudian interpretive procedure as follows:

1. Start with a preconceived interpretation. 2. Pick up a few details here and there on the criterion that they can be used or misused to support

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In support of its empirical pretensions, psychoanalysis systematically confuses meanings with causes. As the British philosopher Frank Cioffi remarks, "We did not interpret dreams, symptoms, errors, etc., because it was discovered that they were meaningful, but we insisted that they were meaningful in order that we might interpret them."61 It may well be that the interpretation will tell us something important about the interpreter, or the patient, or the method of interpretation; but it can tell us nothing about the cause of the dream or symptom. This confusion of etiology with interpretation, or of reason with cause, is at the very heart of the psychoanalytic procedure, and it led Wittgenstein to describe psychoanalysis as "speculation-something prior even to the formation of an hypothesis." Witt- genstein argued that the power of the Freudian system was not the correctness of its account of the mind but the fact that Freud provided "the sort of interpretation that is wanted," interpretations that have "the attraction which mythological ex- planations have, explanations which say that this is all a repetition of something that has happened before."62 One sympathizes with Dora when, after Freud has interpreted a jewel case that appeared in one of her dreams as the female genitalia, she says, "I knew you would say that."63

Freud's famous case histories have been subjected to careful investigation by later researchers.64 The characteristic mode of argumentation they display has led Cioffi to characterize psychoanalysis not as a protoscience, a theory still awaiting its evidentiary basis, but as a pseudoscience that "involves the habitual and wilful

the interpretation. 3. Connect them with the interpretation by means of the principle of similarity. 4. Ignore all data which cannot be used as pseudo-support of any interpretation. 5. If data which contradict the interpretation have inadvertently been obtained, suppress them and conceal them from the reader. (2:17)

The best precedent for Freud's hermeneutic is the exegetical method of the Middle Ages. In both cases the exegete knows beforehand what the text means-the double law of charity, the Oedipus complex- and her task is to explain how the text can mean what she knows it must mean. This analogy between the preemptive hermeneutic of medieval exegesis and psychoanalytic procedures has been pointed out by Cioffi, "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," p. 498, and by Spence, Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis (who argues at length that "psychoanalysis is as much a medieval as a modern science" [p. 47]).

61 "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," p. 498. 62 Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, pp. 43-44, 47. 63 "A Case of Hysteria" (1905), SE 7:69 (my italics). In a footnote to this comment Freud easily

trumps Dora: "A very common way of putting aside a piece of knowledge that emerges from the repressed."

64 See, for a sample of these investigations, Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (New York, 1985); Cioffi, "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," pp. 471-99 (on Dora); Henri F. Ellenberger, "The Story of 'Anna O': A Critical Review with New Data," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1972), 267-79; Esterson, Seductive Mirage, chaps. 3-5; Stanley Fish, "Withholding the Missing Portion: Power, Meaning, and Persuasion in Freud's 'The Wolf-Man,'" Times Literary Supplement, August 29, 1986; John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of ung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (New York, 1993); Karin Obholzer, The Wolf- Man: Conversations with Freud's Patient-Sixty Years Later, trans. Michael Shaw (New York, 1982); Frank J. Sulloway, "Reassessing Freud's Case Histories: The Social Construction of Psychoanalysis," Isis 82 (1991), 245-75; and Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman, "Psychoanalytic 'Evidence': A Cri- tique Based on Freud's Case of Little Hans," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 131 (1960), 135-48.

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employment of methodologically defective procedures (in a sense of wilful which encompasses refined self-deception).... [Hence] there are a host of peculiarities of psychoanalytic theory and practice which are apparently gratuitous and unre- lated, but which can be understood when once they are seen as manifestations of the same impulse: the need to avoid refutation."65 For example, if a child has an overbearing superego, Freud argued at one point that this is the direct effect of a strict father; but at another point the same phenomenon was explained as a re- action against a too lenient father. As Cioffi says, Freud is able "to render any outcome whatever an intelligible and apparently natural result of whatever cir- cumstances preceded it."66

Since this point is central to the literary use of psychoanalytic interpretive pro- cedures, it is worth quoting in full a discussion of psychoanalytic testing by the research analyst Sibylle Escalona:

Suppose one wished to investigate the psycho-analytic idea that, at about the ages of three and four, little boys characteristically experience hostile and aggressive feelings towards their parents and more specifically their fathers, and that these hostile feelings are based on the wish to possess the mother and replace the father in the family con- stellation. Suppose also that you create an experimental situation which would activate the child's feeling towards his parents. For instance, the father might exert his authority by sending the child off to his own room when the child wants to remain with the parents. If, to substantiate the core of the oedipal hypothesis, the child were required to display frank anger against his father, or frank possessiveness towards his mother, things would be reasonably simple. However, no one would seriously believe that oedipal con- flicts are at work only when the child obligingly acts out both his wish and his anger at the obstacle of wish-fulfillment. Instead, we assume that the child tends to defend himself against becoming aware of-or openly reflecting-aggression because it engenders anxi- ety. Thus, if the child gives daddy a good-night hug and insists that he, rather than mummy, tuck him in, this behaviour may also confirm our original hypothesis. His desire to have the father put him to bed rather than the mother could be the result of a fearful state, i.e. as long as the father is with him the little boy can be sure the father is not doing anything to harm him. On the other hand, or also simultaneously, it may be an act of aggression towards the father in that it separates him from the mother for the time being. Or yet again, it may be because the little boy fears that if the mother puts him to bed her seductive powers will prove too much for him; he will then express his possessive love for the mother and try to take his father's place, and the omniscient father will punish him for it. The example could be spun out indefinitely, and it is safe to say that there is nothing our little experimental subject could possibly do, from with- drawal, to sudden intense interest in phantasy play, to asking for a cake, that cannot be regarded in the light of the assumption that he is reacting to an oedipal conflict situation. This being so, it is self-evident that nothing the little boy can do will confirm the original hypothesis, since the hypothesis would still be applicable if he had done the opposite

65 Cioffi, "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," pp. 472-73. 66 Ibid., p. 485. As Cioffi shows in another essay, what makes a theory pseudoscientific rather than

nonscientific is that its statements are subject to falsifiability but are presented and maintained in a context in which testing is rendered impossible. A pseudoscience will seek to prove itself by citing positive instances while making it impossible to distinguish between positive and negative ("Psycho- analysis, Pseudo-Science and Testability," in Gregory Currie and Alan Musgrave, eds., Popper and the Human Sciences, Nijhoff International Philosophy Series 19 [Dordrecht, 1995], pp. 13-44, at p. 17.

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instead.... Psycho-analytic theory is greatly in need of validation, yet it is the kind of theory incapable of validation.67

Finally, it must be stressed that the variants of psychoanalytic theory that have developed over the years, and especially that associated with Jacques Lacan, are not only not free from the flaws of method and conceptual vagueness that are fatal to Freudianism but actually invoke them as a badge of honor. Lacan shows little interest in empirical validation in preference to unconstrained theorizing. His foundational account of prelinguistic identity formation by means of the "mirror- stage" relies, as one of his defenders acknowledges, on a "very limited fund of observation data," data that genuinely empirical studies have subsequently shown to be false.68 Indeed, Lacanianism's popularity in academic circles derives not from its truth-value, which remains not just undemonstrated but indemonstrable, but from its fit with other modes of "anti-humanist"-indeed irrationalist-thought that are taken to be progressive and even liberatory.69

For a long time Freud had a reputation for what Ernest Jones called "flawless integrity" and Steven Marcus a "profoundly moral . . . intellectual commitment and adherence to the idea of science."70 These reverential hopes must now also be abandoned. So, too, must Freud's continual claims to have gone where no man dared go before: we now know that many of the central Freudian concepts- including the unconscious and the centrality of sexuality to the mental life-were common currency in late-nineteenth-century medical circles.71 Freud's suppression of evidence in the case histories, his self-glorification (including the tale of his famous self-analysis, which in all likelihood never took place), his misbehavior as

67 Sibylle Escalona, "Problems in Psycho-Analytic Research," International Journal of Psycho-anal- ysis 33 (1952), 11-21; cited by Cioffi, "Psychoanalysis, Pseudo-Science and Testability," pp. 20-21; emphasis added. See also Morris N. Eagle, "The Epistemological Status of Recent Developments in Psychoanalytic Theory," in R. S. Cohen and L. Laudan, eds., Physics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Griinbaum, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 76 (Boston, 1983), pp. 31-55.

68 Bowie, Lacan, p. 22. As Bowie says, Lacan "starves his hypothesis of the clinical data that could test its organizing power, and produces neither map nor message" (p. 25). For empirical evidence about how infants actually respond to mirrors, see Margaret S. Mahler and John B. McDevitt, "Thoughts on the Emergence of the Sense of Self, with Particular Emphasis on the Body Self," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 30 (1982), 827-48, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Michael Lewis, "Mirror-Image Stimulation and Self Recognition in Infancy," a paper available at http:// askeric.org/Eric/. I am indebted for these references to Norman Holland, "The Trouble(s) with Lacan" (n. 32 above). As Holland says, "There is no evidence for Lacan's notion of a mirror stage. Indeed what evidence we have runs rather the other way.... Perhaps Lacan knew no better in 1936, but why do present-day Lacanians go on quoting this mish-mash of conjecture and false assertions?"

69 See Ferry and Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, pp. 3-67, 185-227. 70 Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York, 1953-57), 1:327, and

Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis, p. 11. The most recent and thorough demonstration of Freud's self-interest in misrepresenting his "data" is provided by Han Israels, Der Fall Freud: Die Geburt der Psychoanalyse aus der Liige, trans. (from the Dutch) Gerd Busse (Hamburg, 1999); an extensive summary of Israels's indictment is provided by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, "How a Fabrication Differs from a Lie," London Review of Books 22/8 (13 April 2000), 3-7.

71 See especially Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York, 1970); Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York, 1997); and Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind.

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an analyst, his insistence that his co-workers share a total commitment to his dogma or else face exile and obloquy, and even his championing of cocaine and his own addiction-all of this would seem mere ad hominem critique were it not for the fact that the contemporary institution of psychoanalysis follows so closely in its father's footsteps.72 It remains resistant to the empirical procedures that characterize other medical practices; it continues to idolize its founder; it treats criticism as disloyalty; and it refuses to examine its own disciplinary history.73 These fundamental problems in a theory that claims to explain human behavior, and in a medical institution that claims scientific status, are apparently either unknown to, unacknowledged by, or regarded as irrelevant to the literary critics, perhaps especially in medieval studies, who have jumped on what they think is a bandwagon but is in fact an ambulance or perhaps even a hearse. The irony is that psychoanalysis has the reputation of being cutting edge in literary criticism even as it has disappeared from those fields for which it was designed-the un- derstanding of human behavior and the management of mental pathologies.74

3. PSYCHOANALYZING THE PARDONER

This section reexamines a well-known medieval text, Chaucer's Pardoner's Pro- logue and Tale. In part it constitutes a palinode on my part, a retraction resembling Chaucer's own selective rejection of some of his works. I wish to show the allure of psychoanalytic interpretation, an allure to which I myself once succumbed, but also its limits, specifically the way its seeming persuasiveness can foreclose access to relevant medieval materials and contexts. In the General Prologue to the Can-

72 For the dubious existence of the self-analysis, see Spence, Rhetorical Voice, chap. 5. For Freud's misbehavior as an analyst, two instances are cited by Sulloway, "Reassessing Freud's Case Histories," from the correspondence with Fliess, one in 1888, the other in 1898: "I have at this moment a lady in hypnosis lying in front of me and therefore can go on writing in peace"; "I sleep during my afternoon analyses" (cited p. 157). For Freud's enthusiasm for cocaine, Fliess's theory of the physiological con- nection between the nose and the genitals, and its hideous effects upon their patient Emma Eckstein, for which Freud refused to take responsibility, see E. M. Thornton, Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy (London, 1983); Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, pp. 327-29; Crews, Skeptical En- gagements, pp. 48-52; and Clark Glymour, "The Theory of Your Dreams," in Cohen and Laudan, eds., Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, pp. 57-71, at pp. 64-69.

73 As the psychoanalyst Robert Holt says: "American psychoanalysis has lived for so long within a snug cocoon of myth that it seems unable to go through the predictable pains of metamorphosis into a viable progressive discipline. The protective threads it has wound around itself include warding off all criticism as resistance, idolatry of Freud, and faithful internalization of all his faults as a scientist and writer" (Freud Reappraised, p. 341). To be sure, contemporary psychoanalysts are aware of their credibility problem: the American Psychoanalytic Association has established a Subcommittee on Stra- tegic Marketing, hired a public relations consultant and Washington lobbyists, and is conducting focus groups in order, according to the chairman of the subcommittee, "to try and define the messages we should be giving for public use" (New York Times, December 9, 2000, pp. B7 and B9).

74 For a psychoanalyst's account of this irony, see Alan Stone, "Where Will Psychoanalysis Survive?" Harvard Magazine 99/3 (1997), 35-39. Stone, a former president of the American Psychiatric Asso- ciation, sees the future of psychoanalysis in "the arts and humanities" and points out that in the Harvard course catalogue for 1997 there are forty "classes whose descriptions mention either Freud or psychoanalysis.... All of them are in the humanities, particularly literature; no course is being given in the psychology department, and next to nothing is offered in the medical school" (p. 38).

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terbury Tales the narrator explains the Pardoner's odd appearance with the com- ment "I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare" (691).75 For the modern reader, for whom sexual identity is the crucial determinant of selfhood, this line immediately places sex at the center of the picture. Two other aspects of the tale encourage interpreters to keep it there. One is the Old Man whom the three rioters of the tale meet in their quest to kill death, a figure who describes himself in eerily Oe- dipal terms.

Ne Deeth, alias, no wol nat han my lyf. Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf, And on the ground, which is my moodres gate, I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late, And seye "Leeve mooder, leet me in!"

(727-31)

Equally tempting are the false relics that the Pardoner carries "biforn hym in his lappe" (1.686). After he has finished his tale, he turns to the Host and asks him to make an offering and kiss these relics. The Host responds with an outburst famous for its scatological violence:

I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.

Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie; They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!

(952-55)

Thus the Oedipal dream of a return to the mother (as expressed by the Old Man) is here punished by the paternal threat of castration-a psychoanalytic schema as neat as any Freudian could want. Not surprisingly, recent criticism has read the Pardoner almost exclusively in such terms.

A number of years ago I developed an interpretation of this text that was es- sentially historical-that is, it depended upon late-medieval religious beliefs-but also invoked psychoanalytic terms.76 I read the Old Man as a figure for the Par- doner's own despair; that condition is typically represented in medieval writing as always dying but never dead. As for his Oedipal speech, I explained it by way of the literary history of the Oedipus legend, which in the Middle Ages became linked with the theological condition of despair via the figure of Judas. In due course I shall briefly rehearse the main points of that interpretation, but I want now to acknowledge that I did not then sufficiently control my own use of psy- choanalytic terminology, largely because psychoanalysis provided a temptingly prefabricated interpretation that showed how a medieval text could satisfy mod- ern (and younger) preoccupations. I now know that there is a wealth of further

75 All citations from Chaucer are to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Bos- ton, 1987). All further citations will be included in the text by line number; I have on occasion altered the punctuation.

76 Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, Wis., 1991), pp. 367-421; the essentials of this reading were first presented in "Chaucerian Confession: Penitential Literature and the Pardoner," Medievalia et humanistica 7 (1976), 153-73, and, with the added psychoanalytic twist, in a paper at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in 1985.

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medieval material that the familiar psychoanalytic paradigm hid from my view, material that can help us to understand both the Pardoner and the Old Man with much greater historical specificity.

The reading of the tale that has now achieved almost classic status is the thor- oughly psychoanalytic interpretation offered by Carolyn Dinshaw in Chaucer's Sexual Poetics.77 According to Dinshaw the Pardoner enacts "the modern psycho- analytic version of the myth of loss and wished-for reconciliation"; his being is "essentially defective, lacking, fragmented": "the lacking Pardoner demonstrates the pain that must attend the subject's development. .. when it is seen to depend on a necessary absence-the necessary loss of plenitude initially associated with the mother's body and a definition of the woman as lack." This lack is expressed in the Pardoner's use of relics (relics are, according to Dinshaw, historically not usually associated with pardoners and therefore should be read symbolically);78 his relics are fetish objects that substitute for his missing manhood: "As free- floating body-parts, they are both reifications of his own fragmentariness and substitutes for his own masculine lack."79 But "the Pardoner's relics cannot really produce that desired integrity, and he knows it.... They both represent lack and substitute for wholeness; they signify absence even as they suggest presence."80

Although Dinshaw sounds like Lacan, and explicitly invokes Melanie Klein, this reading depends ultimately on Freud's account of fetishism. For Freud, the fetish is a sexually arousing object that substitutes for the mother's missing penis- it is created, in short, by the castration anxiety that both establishes and charac- terizes subjectivity. The fetish is a "disavowal" of a reality that the fetishist ac- knowledges in another part of his ego: that penises-including his mother's and, by implication, his own-can be missing.81 The Lacanian turn to Dinshaw's ar- gument is to include in this economy of castration language itself, arguing that

77 Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison, Wis., 1989). Dinshaw's chapter has been often reprinted and cited as providing an authoritative account of the tale: e.g., Derek Pearsall, ed., Chaucer to Spenser: Critical Reader (Malden, Mass., 1999), pp. 65-106, and Bruce R. Smith, "Premodern Sexualities," PMLA 115 (2000), 318-29, at p. 324.

78 In this (mistaken) assumption, Dinshaw is relying upon Alfred L. Kellogg and Louis A. Hasel- mayer, "Chaucer's Satire of the Pardoner," in Alfred L. Kellogg, Chaucer, Langland, Arthur: Essays in Middle English Literature (New Brunswick, N.J., 1972), pp. 212-44, at p. 233 n. 51. For pardoners and relics, see Siegfried Wenzel, "Chaucer's Pardoner and His Relics," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989), 37-41 and n. 152. Unfortunately, Dinshaw does not use Kellogg's excellent "An Augus- tinian Interpretation of Chaucer's Pardoner," Speculum 26 (1951), 465-81, reprinted in Chaucer, Langland, Arthur, pp. 245-68, which provides a good account of the subtle psychologizing available to medieval Christianity.

79 Dinshaw misses a Freudian opportunity here: in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud reads one of his own dreams as showing that he thought that his children wished to turn his sexual organs into relics; see Eysenck, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, p. 146.

80 Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, pp. 161-64, 167-68. 81 See "Fetishism" (1927), SE 21:152-57, and An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940), SE 23:202-

3. Freud argues that the particular object chosen as a fetish depends upon whatever the child "saw at the moment at which he saw the female genitals, or it is something that can suitably serve as a symbolic substitute for the penis" (SE 23:203). Given his vantage point from the ground up, the boy thus usually becomes a foot or shoe fetishist, although occasionally he uses hair, since his horror at the sight of the mother's missing penis fixates his gaze on her pubic hair.

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the Pardoner's sexual absence signifies linguistic absence.82 "Defined by absence," "lack," and "incompleteness," the Pardoner reveals "the nature of language it- self," that it too is castrated and lacks full significance. Hence Chaucer explores through him "a hermeneutics of the partial, or, for short, eunuch hermeneutics."83 Dinshaw thus takes as a given the Pardoner's eunuchry, reading it as both literal and symbolic.84 But what would a reader in fourteenth-century England have assumed about this figure, whom the narrator introduces as either a gelding or a mare? Did such terms imply literal or symbolic effeminacy? And if symbolic, sym- bolic within what system of signification?

Let us start with the issue of gelding. In the very early Middle Ages castration is prescribed as a punishment for various crimes, usually sexual and occasionally including sodomy, as in Justinian's law code; it reappears in the same context in the later Middle Ages in Italy, although the usual punishment prescribed for sod- omy was burning.85 But in later medieval England castration as a punishment for any crime is very rare, if not in fact entirely absent. Froissart reports the castration of Edward II's reputed lover Hugh Despenser, but this is no more historically verifiable than the claim that Edward was himself killed by having a hot poker inserted in his anus. In the cultural imagination there clearly was a link between sodomy and castration. In the Roman de la Rose Genius wants all sodomites castrated, and the eccentric English work known as the Mirror of Justices says that at the present time (i.e., 1285-90) the punishment for rape was hanging, but

82 This argument was first made, in relation to Chaucer's source for the relevant passage in the Roman de la Rose, by R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983), pp. 128-58.

83 Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, pp. 158-59. 84 In a later essay, however, she has argued that the Pardoner must be taken, by ourselves and his

fellow travelers, as queer, a concept whose existence in the Middle Ages remains to be demonstrated: "Chaucer's Queer Touches/A Queer Touches Chaucer," Exemplaria 7 (1995), 75-92. Queer readings of the Pardoner-prefigured by Donald R. Howard in The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, Calif., 1976), pp. 339-80, and further encouraged by Monica E. McAlpine, "The Pardoner's Ho- mosexuality and How It Matters," PMLA 95 (1980), 8-22-have now become common: see Glenn Burger, "Kissing the Pardoner," PMLA 107 (1992), 1143-56; Steven E Kruger, "Claiming the Par- doner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale," Exemplaria 6 (1994), 115-39; Allen J. Frantzen, "The Pardoner's Tale, the Pervert, and the Price of Order in Chaucer's World," in Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, eds., Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), pp. 131-47; and Robert Stuart Sturges, Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (New York, 2000). All of these readings assume that Chaucer's account is designed to direct the reader's attention to the Pardoner's homosexuality. On the other hand, the proposal that a contemporary audience would have seen the Pardoner's feminization as an effect of his excessive sexual dealings with women-i.e., of his too active heterosexuality-is presented with strong evidentiary support by C. David Benson, "Chaucer's Pardoner: His Sexuality and Modern Critics," Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982), 337-49, and Richard F Green, "The Sexual Normality of Chaucer's Pardoner," Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982), 351-58. Unfortunately, the queer readings of the Pardoner do not confront this evidence.

85 For Justinian's Code, see John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980), p. 172; for the Italian legislation in the later Middle Ages, see James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), pp. 472-74, 533-35; for castration as a penalty for sodomy, see Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1979), p. 83.

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that prior to the reign of Edward I rape was punished "by tearing out of eyes and loss of testicles, because of the appetite which entered through the eyes and the heat of fornication which came into the reins of the lechers."86 In the Placita

Corone, a law book written about 1274, a convicted rapist can be castrated and blinded, unless his wife speaks out, for "she can claim her husband's testicles as her own property."87 But even this quaint ruling seems to function more in the realm of fiction than fact: the editor of the Placita points out that rape was in fact punished by fine alone, and that both castration and blinding "had almost cer- tainly ceased to be inflicted long before 1274-1275."88 There may have been private instances of castration for sexual offenses against women in the thirteenth century-Matthew Paris reports one, and in 1275 Parliament passed a statute defining rape as a capital offense, perhaps to foreclose the possibility that castra- tion and/or blinding would be imposed as a punishment-but there is no evidence that this punishment was carried out in any judicial or even semiofficial way in England after 1300 at the latest.89 Indeed, mutilation as a whole seems to have disappeared in England in the thirteenth century, and even the gruesomely detailed execution for treason by drawing and quartering did not include castration.90

As a physical phenomenon, then, the castrate or eunuch would seem to have been rare in late-medieval England. It may be that Walter Clyde Curry is right that Chaucer drew for his portrait of the Pardoner on the medical physiognomist

86 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la Rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris, 1974), lines 19626-86, pp. 520-21; William Joseph Whittaker, ed. and trans., The Mirror of Justices, Pub- lications of the Selden Society 7 (London, 1895), p. 141. I am indebted for the information about castration as a punishment in England in this and the following sentences to Prof. Richard F Green.

87 J. M. Kaye, ed., Placita Corone, Selden Society, Supplementary Series, 4 (London, 1966), p. 9. 88 Ibid., p. xvi; see also p. xxxiv. 89 For Matthew Paris, see H. R. Luard, ed., Chronica majora, 7 vols., Rolls Series 57 (London,

1872-83), 5:34. For the 1285 statute, see The Statutes of the Realm, ed. Alexander Luders et al., 9 vols. in 10 (London, 1810-22), 1:87; see also 1:29 (1275) and 2:27 (1382). In France I have found one case, of the Aulnay brothers who had adulterous liaisons with the daughters-in-law of Philippe IV: S. H. Cuttler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 3rd ser., 16 (Cambridge, Eng., 1981), p. 118. See also Richard F. Green, "The Pardoner's Pants (and Why They Matter)," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993), 131-45, at pp. 143-44 n. 26. Professor Green has also directed me to a case reported from Kent in 1314 in which a raped woman is granted the right to herself put out the eyes and cut off the testicles of the man who assaulted her, specifically because he was married. If he had been single, his punishment would have been to marry her. "By advice of counsel" the woman withdrew her appeal and there is no mention of any punishment: see F W. Maitland, L. W. V. Harcourt, and W. C. Bolland, eds. and transs., Year Books of Edward II, 5, Publications of the Selden Society 24 (London, 1910), pp. 134- 35. For a well-known twelfth-century example of extrajudicial castration, see Giles Constable, "Aelred of Rievaulx and the Nun of Watton," in Derek Baker, ed., Medieval Women, Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 1 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 205-26.

90 A survey of castration in the Middle Ages that argues for its disappearance as a judicial form of punishment in northern Europe by the thirteenth century is provided by Peter Browe, Zur Geschichte der Entmannung: Eine religions- und rechtsgeschichtliche Studie, Breslauer Studien zur historischen Theologie, N.F., 1 (Breslau, 1936). I have unfortunately been unable to consult Piotr O. Scholz, Der entmannte Eros: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Diisseldorf, 1997); Susan Tuchel, Kastration im Mittelalter (Diisseldorf, 1998); and Gary Taylor, Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (New York, 2000).

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Polemon, although how Chaucer came upon this arcane text is hard to explain.91 But the narrator's comment that he believes ("I trowe") the Pardoner to be a gelding is surely not meant as a description of a real (albeit invisible) physical condition, but rather as a snide slur on visible traits (the high voice, beardlessness) associated with unmanliness. The narrator of the General Prologue speaks of the Pardoner as a gelding not to imply that he is actually missing his testicles but in the nearly universal substitution of physical traits for ones of character. It is not difficult to think of analogous insults in our own culture: when we call someone an "asshole," we mean it not literally but metaphorically, as a transference of meaning.92

The narrator's other insult-that the Pardoner is a mare-seems to imply that he is the passive member in a homosexual relation, perhaps with the Summoner and his "stif burdoun" (I.673).93 This raises the very different matter of sodomy, because same-sex activity is a widespread human practice and we cannot even estimate its prevalence in late-medieval England. Accusations of sodomy were used against political opponents: in 1394 Walsingham revised his chronicle to imply that the relationship between Richard II and Robert de Vere was homosexual, and Adam of Usk states that the committee created to find reasons for deposing Rich- ard accused him of "unnatural crimes" (although the official record of the depo- sition makes no mention of them).94 One of the themes of reformist attack against the clergy, and especially the enclosed orders, was that they practiced sodomy: the accusation appears in The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards of 1395 and in the prologue to the later version of the Wyclif Bible, written in 1395-96.95 This form of anticlericalism is highly conventional and is almost never documented by spe-

91 Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2nd ed. (New York, 1960), pp. 54-70. 92 I have been helped to think this issue through by Stephen Barney, some of whose language I have

appropriated. 93 The interpretation of mare as the passive partner in same-sex intercourse seems plausible, but I

cannot support it with specific citations. But mare is used in Middle English to designate a loose woman, and the context here, as well as the commonplace linkage between sodomy and bestiality in medieval discussions, supports such an interpretation. For sodomy and bestiality, see, for example, Alain de Lille's Liber poenitentialis, which cites the statute of the Council of Ancyra that linked sodomy with bestiality, specifically with intercourse with a "mare, cow, or donkey" (cited by Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice, p. 34); the same statute is cited by Bartholomew of Exeter: see Dom Adrian Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, Bishop and Canonist: A Study in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1937), pp. 235-37. Peter Damien's Book of Gomorrah invokes both sodomy-as-eunuchry and sodomy-as-bestiality by citing Ps. 31(32).9: "Do not be like a horse or a mule, which is without understanding"-a citation that opens onto the larger question of the Pardoner's literalism: Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise against Clerical Homosexual Practices, trans. Pierre J. Payer (Waterloo, Ont., 1982), p. 62.

94 See George B. Stow, "Chronicles versus Records: The Character of Richard II," in J. S. Hamilton and Patricia J. Bradley, eds., Documenting the Past: Essays in Medieval History Presented to George Peddy Cuttino (Woodbridge, Eng., 1989), pp. 155-76; Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, Conn., 1997), p. 437; and Chris Given-Wilson, ed. and trans., Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397-1400: The Reign of Richard II (Manchester, Eng., 1993), p. 160.

95 For the Twelve Conclusions see Anne Hudson, Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cam- bridge, Eng., 1978), p. 25; the prologue to the Wyclif Bible is discussed by Elizabeth B. Keiser, Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and Its Contexts (New Haven, Conn., 1997), p. 148.

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cific charges.96 So too, virtually every penitential treatise includes a brief passage about sodomy, but these too are formulaic-although this lack of discussion may be an effect of the prescribed reticence that surrounds sodomy.97

Yet even when sodomy is discussed explicitly in late-medieval England, it is treated with a curious lack of specificity. Take, for instance, this passage from a reformist tract directed against the friars. The friars, we are told, "don be cursed synne of sodom wi1 hem self, and seyn to nyse wymmen bat it is lesse synne to trespase with hem pan with olere weddid men.... It seme1 be deuyl gedre1 siche lumpis of 3onge men, fatte and lykynge and ydyl, and byndiP hem fro wyues, pat men my3ten haue bi goddis lawe, to maken false heiris and to for-do be kynde of men and so make be er1e cursed of god and alle his seyntis."98 The point here is that the friars' lasciviousness is omnivorous; they commit the sins of fornication, adultery, and sodomy; they make false heirs and frustrate the natural process of generation. Again, reformist texts attack clerical celibacy for leading to a range of sexual excesses of which sodomy is only one: "For many prestis now kepen nei1er matrimonye ne charite, but defoulen wyues, maidenes, widewis & nunnes in eche manere of lecherie, & children ben mor1erid, & synne a3enst kynde is not clene fleed."99 Sodomy is a horrible sin, but it is to be understood less as something peculiarly damnable than as one form of lechery among many others.

In the legal world the pattern is slightly different and raises the question that England may be something of a special case. Thanks to the work of John Boswell, Michael Goodich, James Brundage, and John Baldwin, we have come to recognize that there was a relative tolerance in Europe toward same-sex relationships until the eleventh century and then, coincident with other forms of social control, in- cluding the imposition of clerical celibacy, a growing repressiveness.100 In Italy this

96 See Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: "In the popular mind sodomy became associated with the nobility and the clergy, and in northern Europe with Italian usurers and bankers.... Homosexuality was regarded primarily as a vice of the church and the nobility" (pp. 86-87). In her recent Getting Medieval Carolyn Dinshaw argues that late-medieval England was ubiquitously homophobic and het- erosexualist but nonetheless acknowledges that accusations of sodomy by Lollards against the enclosed orders and the clergy were "not all that frequent" and that the reverse accusation-orthodox clerics charging Lollards with sodomy-also "were not very common" (pp. 59, 66). Her further assertion that in calling enclosed religious men and women "private" Lollards were implying illicit goings-on is misleading. The Lollards disliked religious orders because they held themselves apart from the rest of Christians and therefore violated the universality of the Church: Lollard attitudes were determined not by sexual anxieties but by ecclesiology.

97 See, for instance, the Parson's Tale X.910-11. For reticence in penitential texts, see Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, p. 399 and passim, and Allen J. Frantzen, "The Disclosure of Sodomy in Cleanness," PMLA 111 (1996), 451-64, who stresses the exceptionality of its open discussion of homosexuality. The censorship of Arab medical texts, and especially those of Avicenna, that discuss homosexuality openly is described by Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton, N.J., 1988), pp. 155-56.

98 F. D. Matthew, ed., The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, EETS OS 74 (London, 1880), pp. 6-7. This work will subsequently be referred to as EWW.

99 EWW, p. 100; see also Thomas Arnold, ed., Select English Works of John Wyclif, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1869-71; henceforth referred to as SEWW): "and herefore bei fallen into lecherie in dyverse degrees, and in synne a3enst kynde" (3:190).

100 See Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality; Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice; Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society (while Brundage notes the increased legal attention

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repressiveness takes the form of civic statutes outlawing sodomy and prescribing severe penalties, usually burning. That the statutes were continually reinstituted, and that the record of executions is quite thin, suggests that the situation may have been more complicated than the legislative record indicates. But in England no civic statutes outlawing sodomy were enacted, and the records of the church courts-where sodomy cases would therefore have been tried-show a remark- able record of disregard. Richard Wunderli examined 21, 000 cases brought before the London church courts between 1470 and 1516; of those 21,000 cases, only one concerned sodomy, and the defendant was excommunicated for nonappear- ance.101 In his examination of the records of the church courts for Herefordshire

and Worcestershire, David Klausner did not find a single case of prosecution for sodomy.102 It is hard to avoid the conclusion that sodomy, as either social practice or ideological construct, was a minor presence in Chaucer's cultural world.103 So far as I know, there is no recognizable representation of sodomy or what we might call the "sodomitical personality" in the literature of the time-with the possible exception, of course, of the Pardoner.104 Whatever sexual acts may have been performed, whatever habits may have been formed, or whatever subcultures may have existed, sodomy seems not to have entered into the cultural discourse of late- medieval England so as to leave a mark on the legal record.

The upshot of these facts-for facts I believe them to be-is that the Pardoner's actual (by which of course I mean fictional) sexuality was, for Chaucer and his audience, likely to have been of far less psychological interest than it is to readers today. If neither castration nor sodomy seems to have mattered much as historical practices in fourteenth-century England, perhaps we should concentrate instead on what they might have meant symbolically. And the direction in which medieval

to sodomy in the Mediterranean countries from the eleventh century on, he presents evidence that challenges Boswell's assertions that the earlier tolerance was both widespread and substantial); and John W. Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago, 1994).

101 Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation, Specu- lum Anniversary Monographs 7 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 83-84.

102 David N. Klausner, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Herefordshire, Worcestershire (To- ronto, 1990). The absence of cases of sodomy was communicated to me personally by Professor Klausner.

103 Wunderli, London Church Courts, also notes that "we can never know for sure from the silence of the records. Perhaps such acts were considered serious enough to be handled in a higher church court or by the bishop personally" (p. 84). Wunderli concludes, however, that "a lack of defamations for sodomy does, I believe, argue for a probable low incidence of sodomy" (p. 84).

104 The other exception is Cleanness, which survives in a single manuscript and is often thought to be, as in Allen Frantzen's recent reading, addressed to the clergy: see above, n. 97. On the other hand, Elizabeth Keiser argues in Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia that the poem was written for an elite gentry audience, for whom the attack on sodomy was understandable within the context of a culture that valued heterosexual pleasure highly and in which "the realm of sensuality and its erotic refinements-still marked as feminine-are explicitly legitimated as essential components in the male's self-realization through love" (p. 139). Much the same argument can be made, I believe, about Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae, where heterosexual generation is also celebrated as a response to the Catharist heresy that Alain attacks in his De fide Catholica: see Roger French and Andrew Cunning- ham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars' Natural Philosophy (Aldershot, Eng., 1996), pp. 104-8.

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thought points is not toward psychological or linguistic absence but toward sym- bolic sterility. The medieval justification for proscribing sodomy is that it is non- productive. The central fact about the Pardoner, for Chaucer, is neither that he is physically maimed nor that his sexual habits make him a social outcast but that he is to be understood as spiritually sterile.

4. DISTINGUISHING SYSTEMS OF DESIRE

It happens that there was, in Chaucer's immediate environment, a powerful, subtle, and widespread discourse of spiritual or religious sterility that fits the Par- doner with surprising aptness. This discourse, sometimes labeled Wycliffite or Lollard, might better be called, more simply and broadly, "reformist." As histo- rians of late-medieval English religion recognize, the reformist impulses of the period expressed themselves in a wide range of ways, many of them entirely or- thodox.105 Some aspects of this reformist impulse were shared by both Langland and Chaucer, although doubtless neither would have described himself as Wycliff- ite or Lollard.106 Indeed, Chaucer makes it clear in the Man of Law's Epilogue, where his idealized Parson is accused of being a Lollard, that the term is used as a slur to stigmatize an earnest sincerity in religious matters. The extent to which Chaucer personally shared this sincerity is a matter of conjecture, but that it in- terested him as a topic for poetry-as did most things in his world-is undeniable.

In Chaucer's account of the Pardoner, the crucial issue from a reformist per- spective is the late-fourteenth-century debate about the nature of clerical service. This debate focused on two related issues, simony and preaching. For the reform- ists, simony meant not simply the buying of church offices but the selling of any spiritual good for a material reward. In other words-and this is central both to late-medieval English piety in general and to the Pardoner in particular-simony was a materialism that took the literal for the spiritual, the sign for the signified. As one reformist text put it, "to tak or 3ef temporal Ping for goostly Ding ... is symonye. 107

The grossest form of simony was exactly what the Pardoner does: the selling of indulgences. Merchandising indulgences is simoniacal for two reasons. First, it sells the spiritual benefit of pardon for money: "to take money for [pardons] is to selle goddis grace and so symonye, & pan bole parties ben cursed of god & man"';108 as another text says, with special relevance to the Pardoner, it is simony

105 According to Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), "'Conservative Lollardy' is sometimes very close to 'radical orthodoxy"' (p. 279).

106 This large topic cannot be adequately discussed here, but suggestive accounts may be found in Pamela Gradon, "Langland and the Ideology of Dissent," Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980), 179-205; Hudson, Premature Reformation, pp. 390-94; Alcuin Blamires, "The Wife of Bath and Lollardy," Medium Aevum 58 (1989), 224-42; and Lynn Staley, "Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity," in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, Pa., 1996), pp. 179-259.

107 James Henthorn Todd, ed., An Apology for Lollard Doctrines, Camden Society, Original Series, 20 (London, 1842), p. 52. The Apology later says that simoniacs "are sellars of dowuis [doves], for bei selle spiritual tingis" (p. 57).

108 EWW, p. 66.

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to sell "a plener indulgence 'a pena & a culpa.' "109 Second, since indulgences are merely outward signs, they are spiritually ineffective: the only form of pardon worth having is God's, which can be received only through grace and, especially, contrition. The reformist contempt for what is called "feyned indulgences or par- dons"110 is scathing and relentless: "men of lustis tellen . . . how her couetouse schriftfadris assoilen hem, as bei sey, of synne by a litil leed not weiynge a pound, hengid wi1 an hempyn prid at a litil gobet of a calfskyn, peyntid wi10 a fewe blacke drau3tis of enke, alle the synnes doon in manye 3eeris."111 To believe that a piece of paper can bring forgiveness is an empty formalism equivalent to that of the Pharisees who wore phylacteries on their heads: woe to those who "for a bulle purchasid of a fals pardener, 1oru a fals suggestion and symonye of seluer, and bei paie him 1anne a peny and leie hit on hire heuedes, [think that] bei beL asoiled of alle hire synnes."112

Moreover, the fourteenth-century reformists reinvoked, with special intensity, a traditional understanding that simony could be metaphorically expressed as sod- omy.113 The logic of this interpretation is given by one of the reformists' heroes, Richard FitzRalph, archbishop of Armagh, who argued that to substitute the ma- terial for the spiritual is a crime against the "law of Nature."114 Given this inter- pretation, reformists understood Christ's words in Matt. 10.15 as referring to simoniacs: "Amen I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city." Over and over again, this passage was applied to simoniacs, as in the following discussion: "For as iudas dide bei sillen be treu1e, and so crist bat is treu1e, for money or fleschly loue. And sil bei sillen treu1e bat is a spiritual good for money or worldely 1yng 1ei ben cursed symonyentis & so heretikis .... At be day of dom bere schal be lesse peyne to sodom & gomor, bat weren distroied for synne, ban to Do men bat wolen not resceyue cristis disciplis and his gospel, ne lyue after be techyng of cristis gospel."115 Noting as we go that Judas is here the first simoniac, we can see that sodomy

109 Lilian M. Swinburn, The Lanterne of Li3t, EETS OS 151 (London, 1917), p. 76. 10 EWW, p. 80. 11 Cited by Hudson, Premature Reformation, p. 300; see also EWW, p. 82. 112 Gloria Cigman, ed., Lollard Sermons, EETS OS 294 (Oxford, 1989), p. 113. For more on par-

doners as simoniacs, see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (Cambridge, Eng., 1933), p. 373 n. 3, and G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350-1450 (Cambridge, Eng., 1926), p. 105.

113 This interpretation is present in William Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum, 2 vols. (Ant- werp, 1571), 2:34 and 2:74 (see John Wyclif, De simonia, ed. Dr. Herzberg-Frankel and Michael Henry Dziewicki [London, 1898], p. 8 n. 24), and is undoubtedly of long standing. The connection between Wyclif's treatise and the portrait of the Pardoner in the General Prologue was first made by Terrence A. McVeigh, "Chaucer's Portraits of the Pardoner and Summoner and Wyclif's Tractatus de simonia," Classical Folia 29 (1975), 54-58; see also George J. Engelhardt, "The Ecclesiastical Pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales: A Study in Ethology," Mediaeval Studies 37 (1975), 287-315; Melvin Storm, "The Pardoner's Invitation: Quaestor's Bag or Becket's Shrine?" PMLA 77 (1982), 810-18; Eugene Vance, "Chaucer's Pardoner: Relics, Discourse, and Frames of Propriety," New Literary History 20 (1989), 723-45; and Richard K. Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman, The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medi- eval Literature (Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 171-81.

114 Cited by Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 244. 115 EWW, p. 26; see also ibid., p. 248, and Wyclif, De simonia, pp. 8-9.

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exists in reformist literature far less as a sexual sin than as a sin against the church. In the Lanterne of Li3t, in a long list of those who dwell with the devil, the author first lists sexual sinners- "lecchours. fornicareris. avowtreris. incestours. bat is defoulears of her owene kyn. & alle vnclene men & wymmen bat ben wi1ynne ordir or professioun"-and then those who commit sins against the church: "Pere ben ypocritis. sodomitis. sacrilegers, & sellars of sacramentis."116 Here sodomites are included not among the carnally licentious but the spiritually corrupting.

We can now infer that the Pardoner may be thought to be a mare-a sodom- ite-because he is a simoniac. But why a gelding? While the selling of indulgences was the most prevalent form of simony in Chaucerian England, it was not con- sidered the worst. Reformist literature of the period repeats with relentless insis- tence that the cleric's-indeed, the Christian's-most important duty is preach- ing: "Po moste hye servise bat men have in erthe is to preche Gods worde" is an injunction endlessly repeated throughout this literature.117 For the reformists, false preaching is the worst form of simony. Moreover, false preaching is defined in terms that are relevant precisely to the Pardoner. Preaching can be corrupt in two related ways. The first is when it is used in order to extract money from the audience-in other words, as a prelude to begging. The other is when it strays from the strict exposition of the scriptural, and especially the Gospel, text, into what reformists call "cronyclis & poisies & newe fyndynges," "iapis & gabbin- gis," "dyuysiouns [and] rymes," or-most pointedly-"fablis [that] bimadden be puple."118 Indeed, preachers who lard their sermons with "cronyclis, wi10 poyses and [with] dremyngis & manye oLir helples talis bat ri3t nou3t availen ... waveren aboute in many fleischeli lustis": homiletic errancy entails sexual vagrancy.119 And this use of fables is seen as a way of preparing the audience for donations: false preachers "sewe fablis, cronyclis, & lesyngis for to robbe be pore peple aftir-

116 Lanterne, pp. 131-32. 117 SEWW, 3:143. The relation of the Pardoner to traditional prescriptions for preaching has been

explored by Alastair Minnis, "Chaucer's Pardoner and the 'Office of Preacher,"' in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds., Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe, Tiibinger Beitrage zur An- glistik 7 (Tiibingen, 1986), pp. 88-119; see also Alan J. Fletcher, "The Preaching of the Pardoner," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989), 15-35, and Gregory W. Gross, "Trade Secrets: Chaucer, the Pardoner, the Critics," Modern Language Studies 25/4 (1995), 1-36. Minnis touches on "Wycliffite" texts but does not deal with the material described here, while Fletcher dismisses Wycliffite material as irrelevant to the Pardoner's orthodox audience. The connection among sodomy, simony, and preach- ing is discussed by Monica Brzezinski Potkay, "Cleanness's Fecund and Barren Speech Acts," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995), 99-109, at pp. 106-9, although without mention of the Pardoner.

118 These passages derive from EWW, pp. 124, 438, and Anne Hudson, ed., Two Wycliffite Texts: The Sermon of William Taylor, 1406; the Testimony of William Thorpe, 1407, EETS OS 301 (Oxford, 1993), p. 19. Both of these objections-to using preaching as a prelude to begging and to the use of fables or exempla-are part of the traditional language of antifraternalism and go back at least to William of St. Amour in the mid-thirteenth century: see Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 53. But as is typical of the anticlericalism of the late fourteenth century described by Wendy Scase, "Piers Plowman" and the New Anticlericalism, Cam- bridge Studies in Medieval Literature 4 (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), these terms come to be applied to many kinds of clerics, including pardoners.

119 Lanterne, p. 55.

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ward," and they "preche fablis & flaterynge & lesyngis, . . . to disceyue be peple in feiPl & good lif & robbe hem of here worldly goodis."120

The same objection to a style of preaching trivialized by the use of exempla and fabulae is made by Chaucer's Parson, who cautions the Host that "Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me" (X.31). This Parson is described in the General Prologue in terms that invoke many of the central reformist values for the clergy-including the fact that he would "Cristes gospel trewely ... preche" and that "His paris- shens devoutly wolde he teche" (I.481-82)-and who, in the Man of Law's Ep- ilogue, is accused by the Host of being a Lollard for objecting to blasphemy.121 Like all reformist sermons, the Parson's sermonlike tale is in fact almost com- pletely devoid of exempla. But the Pardoner's sermon not only consists largely of an exemplum but is interspersed with brief exemplary narratives of Lot, Herod, Attila, "Stilboun," and Demetrius. As he says,

Thanne telle I hem ensamples many oon Of olde stories longe tyme agoon. For lewed peple loven tales olde; Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde.

(435-38)122

And all of his sermon rhetoric is designed to extract money from his audience, as he boasts: "For myn entente is nat but for to wynne" (403). He is evidently one of those who, as the reformists charged, have "done avoutrye wi1 Do lawe of God, and turnen hit oute of his kynde, to plese wi1 Do puple. And so wip beggyng, and pride of hor speche, bei sellen Gods worde, as who schulde selle an oxe."123

Similar definitions of the "gostely lecherie"124 of false preaching as an "un- kynde" offense against nature, a spiritual sodomy worse than bodily sodomy, appear throughout reformist texts. Preaching ought to be a way of begetting God's children with the seed of his word: "sil goddis word, bi whiche men schulden gostly be gendrid goddis sones, is betere lan bodely seed of man bi whiche be body of man schulde be gendred, & bes prelatis mysusen lis betere seed, 1anne bei don more synne lan diden be sodomytis bat wasted manus seed; for euere be betre bat a 1ing is be worse & be more abhominable is be mysusynge ber-of.... Siche prelatis bat leuen to preche bus cristis gospel ben more abhominable and enemys of god & his peple lan weren be cursed men of sodom & gomor."125 If the Freudian instrument of analysis that James Joyce called the "pudendascope"

120 EWW, pp. 105-6. 121 According to Margaret Aston, it is "wholly probable" that the description of the Parson in the

General Prologue would have identified him to a contemporary audience as having "Lollard inclina- tions" (Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion, History Series 22 [London, 1984], p. 16 and note).

122 On the Pardoner's use of exempla, see Siegfried Wenzel, "Chaucer and the Language of Contem- porary Preaching," Studies in Philology 73 (1976), 138-61.

123 SEWW, 3:123; emphasis added. 124 EWW, p. 10. 125 Ibid., p. 56. The designation of ineffective preaching as sodomitical is applied in one text even

to those who refuse to listen to a sermon with the proper attentiveness: see Cigman, ed., Lollard Sermons, p. 201.

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put these texts under its scrutiny, what might it discover?126 Certainly plenty of incest. But in what signifying system? Preachers should, the reformists say, "make childer in God, and bat is a werke of God, pat hafs weddid 1o Chirche."127 Where are these children to be begotten? Jesus Christ is our father, and his spouse is "oure modir holi Chirche"-an oft-repeated reformist formulation128-who "beriP in hir wombe soulis to be born to be blisse but neuere wiLouten be helpe & be grace of oure Lord Iesu Crist,"129 grace that is made possible through the spiritual seed of preaching. The sowing of this seed, in another text, takes place "in be feld of 1is Chirche," the church that is the "wyfe" of Jesus Christ and the mother of us all.130 These metaphors are surely relevant to the central scene of the Pardoner's Tale, where the Old Man knocks on his mother's gate with his staff and asks for entrance. But we have already found enough here to explain the relevance of the narrator's speculation on the gelding/mare possibility. As a simoniac who both sells spiritual goods and fails to sow God's seed in the field of holy mother church, the Pardoner would have been seen by a contemporary audience as impotent twice over.

Fourteenth-century reformist literature is not exclusively committed to sexual images of religious infertility. There are several other relevant topics found in this reformist literature. Both traditional and reformist texts use the parable of the withered fig tree to describe the false preacher. The fig tree cursed by Christ (Matt. 21.18-22, Luke 13.6-9, Mark 11.12-14) is typically understood throughout the Middle Ages as figuring the false preacher who displays abundant words but is empty of works.131 Preachers who feed their audience with fables are "heruest trees wiLoute fruyt, twyes deed, & le rootis ben drawen up.... & 1ei shulden bere gostliche fruyt as don oper trees in heruest, but Lei ben wiLoute fruyt, as was be fyge tree bat crist cursede, for neLer in prechyng ne good lyf bei profiten to be peplis soule. And bus Lei ben twyes dede, deed body & soule, deed in jiis world & in be oLer, deed in heere owen persone, deed in profityng to oLer men."132 Note the double death of damnation: dead in the body and dead in the soul.

False preachers are also represented as Judases who are, as one text puts it, "dede in hemself" as well as "slears of mennys soulis [and] more abomynable to God ... en to cursudde synne of Sodome, pat for hidouse synne sanke into helle."133 The connection between the simoniac and Judas, already noted above, is intimate: one reformist text says that priests who commit simony are not just like Judas--"lei sey wil Judas, Wat wil 3e 3eue me, and I gif him to o3w?"-but are actually worse than Judas: Judas sold Christ bodily; but in exchanging spiritual benefits-prayers, sermons, or pardons-for material goods, they are selling

126 Cited from Finnegans Wake by Robert Wilcocks, Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit (Totowa, N.J., 1994), p. 284.

127 SEWW, 3:143-44. 128 Ibid., 3:125, 3:144; Lanterne, pp. 95-96, 133. 129 Lanterne, p. 31. 130 SEWW, 1:95-96. 131I have discussed the exegesis of this metaphor, and its presence in the tale in the oak tree under

which the rioters find their deaths, in Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 404-5. 132 EWW, p. 307. 133 SEWW, 3:470; italics added.

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Christ spiritually.134 This knotting of simony, sodomy, and the figure of Judas is important for the Pardoner, for as we shall see, Judas provided Chaucer with a crucial model for the central symbolic event of his tale, the Old Man's knocking with his staff on his mother's womb.

The general reformist concern with churchmen defrauding the poor135 is often associated specifically with the depredations of pardoners-and even more spe- cifically with pardoners who carry false relics: "here comel a pardoner wil stollen bullis & false relekis, grauntynge mo 3eris of pardon lan comen bifore domes day for 3euynge of worldly catel to riche placis where is no nede .... & lis pardoner schalle telle of more power jlan euere crist grauntid to petir or poul or ony apostle, to drawe 1e almes fro pore bedrede nei3eboris bat ben knowen feble & pore, & to gete it to hem self & wasten it ful synfulli in ydelnesse & glotonye & lech- erie."136 Needless to say, relics, whether false or true, were themselves a target of reformist literature-although they are less often attacked in the vernacular texts (as opposed to Wyclif's Latin writings) than other observances that were seen as idolatry pure and simple.137

This brings me to the final and most important aspect of late-medieval English reformist thinking that can help us to understand the Pardoner in terms current in Chaucer's world: its insistence on the priority of the inner to the outer, of the meaning to the form, of the spirit to the letter, in every aspect of religious life. This concern lies behind and supports the entire reformist enterprise. It is ex- pressed in the most explicit way in the persistent interpretation of various late- medieval religious practices-pilgrimage, image worship, indulgences, auricular confession, almsgiving-as idolatry. In his treatise on the Ten Commandments Wyclif argued that the Second Commandment-forbidding the making and wor- ship of idols-is the most important because it forbids all sins and prescribes all theological and moral virtues.138 To worship something other than God as if it were God, whether it be money, food, or an image, is idolatry. As a vernacular text says: "Pe worschiping of cursid idols is jbe bikynning, cause, and ende of all iuel; ... for als mani idols hal a man, as he hal dedly synnis."139 Idolatry is to take the letter for the spirit, the sign for the signified. In a language almost as old as Christianity itself, idolatry is a kind of fornication; idolaters "tenten to signes as comune hooris."140 One reformist text, listing the sins caused by idolatry or "mawmetrie," asserts that it causes "speciali be foule and horrible synne of

134 Apology, p. 58; see also EWW, p. 167, SEWW, 3:471, and Lanterne, pp. 92-93. 135 EWW, pp. 130, 214. 136 Ibid., p. 154. For other examples of pardoners and relics, see Owst, Preaching in Medieval En-

gland, pp. 108-9, 109-10, and 110 n. 1; and above, n. 78. 137 See Hudson, Premature Reformation, pp. 304-5; J. F Davis, "Lollards, Reformers and St.

Thomas of Canterbury," University of Birmingham Historical Journal 9 (1963), 1-15; and Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 89-90. There is even evidence that Lollards themselves engaged in their own form of relic collecting: when a Lollard was burned as a heretic in the early fifteenth century, his ashes were gathered by the faithful and preserved (Hudson, Premature Reformation, p. 172).

138 John Wyclif, De mandatis divinis, ed. Johann Loserth and F. D. Matthew (London, 1922), p. 162.

139 Apology, pp. 87-88. 140 Lanterne, p. 41.

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Sodom, of bope men and wymmen."141 The logic of this argument is, once again, that to take the sign as the thing signified rather than a signifier is to turn it from its natural purpose: like sodomy, it is a spiritually fruitless sin against nature.142 Not surprisingly, then, reformist biblical interpretation leans heavily toward what one text calls "be wit of allegory," just as reformist religious practices privilege "bne inward man."143 To be sure, reformists insist on the literal truth of the Bible, and they ferociously attack what they see as the self-serving glossing of the fri- ars.144 But reformist sermons are themselves relentlessly allegorical: the scriptural text is subjected to a variety of interpretive maneuvers in order to extract its spiritual fruit.145

In terms of the sacrament of penance, reformist texts vary on the legitimacy of auricular confession: some mount strong attacks; others offer perfectly orthodox accounts. But on one point the reformists are agreed: in the contemporary debate over whether the remission of sins is accomplished by the efficacy of the sacrament itself (ex opere operato) or by the contrition of the penitent (ex opere operantis), the reformists are unanimously and consistently contritionist. This is, at heart, the source of their objection to indulgences. Remission of sins is accomplished not by "bullis of pardon" but "verrey contricion": it is only when "a synnere habl in- wardly sorowe for his synnys [that] he schal be saue[d]."146 Indeed, one reformist text even discusses the difference between true contrition and an inadequate at- trition, a level of sophistication rare in contemporary vernacular discussions.147

In sum, then, we can see that Chaucer's Pardoner embodies a whole range of issues that are both central to the reformist piety of Chaucer's time and logically interdependent. He is a simoniac who sells spiritual goods; a false preacher who performs only for money and who relies on exempla rather than biblical exegesis; an exploiter of the poor, including widows; a man who offers pardon a poena et a culpa while ignoring the need for contrition. In short, he is a spiritual sodomite sunk in the gross commercialism and materialism that pervert religious truth. Does this mean that sodomy and castration as at least potentially literal characteristics of the Pardoner are irrelevant? On the contrary, in granting them an insinuated albeit uncertain existence Chaucer forces the reader to confront the problem upon which the prologue and tale turn-the relation of the material to the spiritual. Are we to read the Pardoner as a body or a soul, materially or spiritually, a person or a symbol? The answer, as always with Chaucer, is both. But what is important here is the fact that Chaucer aligns the process of interpretation with the content of that which is to be interpreted. We do not simply observe the Pardoner but

141 Lollard Sermons, p. 114. 142 A scriptural source for this connection between idolatry and sexual deviance is Rom. 1.21-27. 143 Lanterne, pp. 120-21. 144 For an instance of this common theme, see EWW, p. 340. 145 Reformists counter contemporary criticisms that they know only "be litteral sense of Scripture,

bat li3tly makep men erre," not by arguing that the literal sense is sufficient, but by asserting that they know the spiritual sense as well, as their sermons-addressed to "gostli men" -demonstrate (Lollard Sermons, pp. 51, 74).

146 EWW, p. 160. 147 Ibid., p. 339. For the theology of penance in the fourteenth century, and the rarity of discussions

of attrition, see Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 374-86.

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experience in our efforts at understanding him the central dilemma of his exis- tence.

5. THE SOURCES OF AN INNER LIFE

In the Pardoner, then, Chaucer is offering us not merely a more than usually sophisticated instance of religious satire that draws upon the most highly charged terms of religious discussion current at the time-an established symbolic termi- nology. His real brilliance is in psychologizing these religious issues. The Pardoner is not merely a poster child for religious abuses but a deliberate and self-conscious one, a man whose relation to that which he scorns is highly ambiguous. The Pardoner serves to demonstrate the truth of reformist criticisms about empty for- malism not merely by displaying them but by internalizing them, not merely by revealing the death of the soul that is brought about by literalism but by experi- encing it. Moreover, he is himself aware of his own dilemma, so that he becomes both an instance and a victim of institutional decadence: he is a religious person- ality who recognizes the inefficacy of the religious practices he promotes without being able to believe that those that are effective are available to him. He is there- fore not merely in danger of damnation but knows of his danger, indeed focuses upon it with obsessive anxiety. The Pardoner exemplifies and internalizes reformist piety: he is at once within and outside the church, demonstrating at once the need for reform and the relentlessness of its demands. As always, Chaucer explores the social realities of his world from within the perspective of the individual con- sciousness.

The very inclusion of a pardoner in the General Prologue is in all likelihood, as Jill Mann has shown, indebted to Langland's Piers Plowman.148 Both the way in which Langland may have inspired Chaucer and the difference between their po- etic interests can be seen by comparing Chaucer's Pardoner to the one Langland describes in B 5.634-42. In Langland's passage, after Piers has preached that grace to enter heaven is possible only through Mercy and Christ, the pardoner worries that he will not be known there, and so rushes off to "fecche my box wil my breuettes & a bulle with bisshopes lettres" (5.640).149 Here is a pardoner who wishes to be saved by the aid of his counterfeit documents, the fraud who lacks access to spiritual authenticity and so must fall back on that which he knows to be fraudulent. But this is as far as Langland goes: he delineates the spiritual di- lemma but declines to explore its psychological effects. Where Langland ends, however, is where Chaucer begins, and nowhere to more effect than in the tale the Pardoner tells.

The Pardoner's Tale, and especially the figure of the Old Man, is an irresistible temptation to Oedipal true believers. But once again there is a contemporary re- ligious discourse that provides us with evidence for a more plausible reading. The

148 Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, Eng., 1973), pp. 149, 208-12.

149 George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The B Version (London, 1975), pp. 346-47.

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ambivalence I have just described in the Pardoner himself is the condition known to medieval religious psychology as despair: the condition of yearning for salvation but remaining impenitent because one believes that one's sinfulness cannot be forgiven, of wanting to confess but being unable to confess. Despair is a particu- larly familiar condition in the context of any penitential theology that is contri- tionist rather than sacramentalist; and the reform movement of late-fourteenth- century England was profoundly contritionist.150

The essence of despair as a religious idea is most fully expressed in the Par- doner's Tale in the scene of the Old Man knocking on mother earth for admission. The Freudian possibilities, as I have said, may seem overpowering to the modern reader, as they once were to me. Yet Chaucer's source for this scene derives not from a universal unconscious common to all males at all times but to a very specific symbolic discourse of medieval religious culture. For in the Middle Ages the clas- sical figure of Oedipus became linked with the theological condition of despair, the agency of this linkage being the biblical figure of Judas. According to medieval exegetes, while Cain was the Old Testament type of desperatio, it was his New Testament fulfillment Judas who expressed in the most painful and uncompro- mising form the fatal economy of despair. As religious writers endlessly repeated, Judas sinned more in hanging himself-that is, in choosing an impenitent self- destruction-than he did in selling Christ. In order to explain such impenitence and yet to reaffirm the power of divine mercy, the Middle Ages provided Judas with a legendary history derived from the narrative of the Theban Oedipus but now rewritten in penitential terms. According to this legend, Judas was exposed as an infant by his parents in an effort to evade a prophecy that he would bring ruin to them and to his race. He became, however, the adoptive son of a foreign king and queen. But in an envious rage he killed their natural son, a Cain-like act of fratricide for which he was driven out. Becoming then the trusted servant of Pontius Pilate (or, in some versions, Herod), he stole some apples from an orchard, and in the course of this Adamic violation he killed the orchard's owner, who was (unbeknownst to him) his father. When he then married the man's widow, he completed the fatal Oedipal curse.

When Judas and his mother learned of their relationship, they sought forgive- ness from the new teacher, Jesus Christ. This request is meant to demonstrate God's capacity for forgiveness and renewal: Judas displayed, in the words of one text, "the condition, grief and tears of true penitence," and Jesus promised to save him from despair if he would "worthily repent." But the lure of his evil origin was too great, and with his betrayal of Christ and final despairing suicide a story that was designed to argue for the power of penitential conversion comes finally to illustrate a darker lesson about the compulsions of wickedness. As Oedipus was called back to his mother, so is Judas called back to his original nature; and the paternal injunction of penance-"you can be saved if you will worthily re- pent"-is rejected by him both now and forever. Despair is the inability to change: the man in despair cannot get rid of the self of illicit desires in order to assume

150 This and the next four paragraphs condense an account of the tale I first offered in Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 412-19. In the interests of brevity, I have omitted here the sources of my citations, which are available in the book.

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the reborn self of innocence, no more than the Pardoner's Old Man can find a young man who will exchange his youth for the Old Man's age, no more than the Old Man can exchange his own chest of worldly goods for the haircloth of penance.151

It is as a figure of despair driven by incestuous yearnings that the Old Man of the Pardoner's Tale invokes the figure of Judas. And he also invokes him, and his Old Testament prefiguration, Cain, in his condition of endless wandering. Cain must wander because the earth, having been polluted with his brother's blood, now refuses to receive him. As Augustine says, "He indeed sought for death, but no one would give to him what he had himself given to his brother." As for Judas, in hanging himself he reinvokes Cain's exclusion: according to the exegetes, he died suspended between earth and heaven because neither men nor angels would accept him. Hence, apparently, the Old Man's hopeless knocking on the earth with his staff-

And on the ground, which is my moodres gate, I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late, And seye "Leeve mooder, leet me in!"-

a gesture that is at once violent and pathetic. There is a literary (rather than psychological) logic to this representation of

Oedipus as a figure of despair, because it is in these terms that the Theban texts known to the Middle Ages present him. Statius's Thebaid opens with Oedipus locked within his subterranean cavern, "beating with blood-stained hands upon the hollow earth." At the outset of the Thebaid, Oedipus is described as having "endured a long and living death"; and at the end of the poem, burdened with "a savage desire for a bitter death," he is exiled to a life of wandering and departs "scorning pardon." Like the Oedipus of the Statian and medieval traditions, then, the Old Man continues his life of living death; as one medieval Oedipus says, prefiguring the Old Man's progressive yet inconclusive decomposition ("Lo how I vanysshe, flessh and blood and skyn!"), "I deteriorate through sorrow; O, if only I could be made nothing!" Just as Oedipus embodies a lesson about divine justice that his sons ignore, so does the Old Man in his relation to the rioters; and just as Oedipus curses his sons when they scorn his suffering, so does the Old Man condemn the rioters to a mutual betrayal and self-destruction. In thus directing them to death he is also like the simoniacal churchman who defrauds the faithful

by offering them mere matter in the place of God's spirit. The point for us, let me insist, is not that the Pardoner's Old Man-the fictional creation of a fictional creation-equals Judas, or Oedipus-as-despair, or even despair itself. Insofar as his meaning can be specified, he stands for the Pardoner himself. But the materials from which this scene is constructed were available to Chaucer through a very specific set of literary allusions-all of them to texts to which Chaucer not only had access but upon which he drew elsewhere, and all of them bearing a signifi-

151 This particular reading of the Old Man's speech-less the literary history of the Judas legend- was first provided by Robert P. Miller, "Chaucer's Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner's Tale," Speculum 30 (1955), 180-99.

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cance relevant not to the Pardoner's sexual condition (whatever that may be) but to his spiritual dilemma. This is, in short, a tale not about sex but about religion.

Also important to this scene is a strikingly apt biblical text whose relevance remains to be explored.152

And there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him: Rabbi, we know that thou art come a teacher from God; for no man can do these signs which thou dost, unless God be with him. Jesus answered and said to him: Amen, amen, I say to thee, unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith to him: How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be

born again? Jesus answered: Amen, amen, I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh: and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Wonder not that I said to thee: You must be born again. The Spirit breatheth where he will and thou hearest his voice: but thou knowest not whence he cometh and whither he goeth. So is every one that is born of the Spirit. Nicodemus answered and said to him: How can these things be done? Jesus answered and said to him: Art thou a master in Israel, and knowest not these things? Amen, amen, I say to thee that we speak what we know and we testify what we have seen: and you receive not our testimony. If I have spoken to you earthly things, and you believe not: how will you believe, if I shall speak to you heavenly things? (John 3.1-12)

For exegetes Nicodemus was an instance of the heretic or schismatic who longed to rejoin the Christian community but remained hesitant: hence the secret night- time visit. Although he was, as Augustine said, divided in his thought, his literal understanding was struggling toward the spiritual, his oldness yearning to put on youth.153 That Nicodemus is later, in John 19.39, described as bringing myrrh and aloes to anoint Christ's body is taken to indicate that indeed rebirth is possible, that there are no lost souls. Could any text better illustrate the Pardoner's spiritual condition?l54

152 I am indebted to a Yale undergraduate, Andrew Hongo, and his teacher David Quint, for bringing this allusion to my notice. Lawrence Besserman, Chaucer and the Bible: A Critical Review of Research, Indexes, and Bibliography, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 839 (New York, 1988), does indicate the possibility of this allusion, but adds a question mark; the only critic, to my knowledge, who notes the allusion, although without discussing its relevance, is Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London, 1985), p. 103. The source for this element of the scene is usually taken to be an elegy by Maximianus: see Riverside Chaucer, p. 909, note to lines 727-36.

153 Augustine, In Joannis Evangelium tractatus CXXIV (PL 35:1484). See also Bede, who follows Augustine in seeing this passage as referring to heretics and schismatics, and for whom the mother to be reentered is "Ecclesia mater, quae generat novit" (PL 94:198); John Scotus Erigena, who stresses the relation of the visible to the invisible, the letter to the spirit (PL 122:315-18); and Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica (PL 198:1560), who emphasizes Nicodemus's status as a learned man.

154 The only other vernacular text that I know in which an allusion to John 3.1-12 occurs is the Chevalier de la charrete by Chretien de Troyes. Two young knights warn Lancelot that to cross the sword bridge is no more possible "than for a man to enter the womb of his mother and be reborn" ("ne que li hom porroit antrer / el vantre sa mere et renestre"): Mario Roques, ed., Le Chevalier de la Charrete, Les Classiques Francais du Moyen Age 83 (Paris, 1963), lines 3056-57, p. 93. Given the religious implications of Lancelot's quest into "the land from which, once they have entered there, neither clerk nor noble ever returns" (lines 1904-6), the notion of spiritual rebirth has an evident appropriateness. The allusion disappears in the Prose Lancelot: see Norris J. Lacy, ed., Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, 3, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1878 (New York, 1995), pp. 14-20.

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Finally, the relics. Dinshaw argues that the relics are fetishes, partial objects that signify a desire for presence and yet an awareness of absence. Certainly if we take a fetish in the old anthropological sense as signifying an object endowed with magical powers, then medieval relics are fetishes.ss5 It is also the case that the Pardoner associates his relics with his sexuality: he carries them in a "male" or purse in his lap, and he offers them to the Host in a way that is clearly (and self- consciously) sexually challenging: come kiss my relics. It is also the case that the Host's riposte invokes a connection between testicles ("coillons" [952]) and relics. This passage derives its inspiration from a discussion in the Roman de la Rose where Reason and the Lover are debating whether the relation of sign to signified is natural or merely conventional: Reason says it is conventional (and therefore unstable) and uses as her example the fact that one could call the objects venerated in churches coilles rather than reliques.156 Clearly an association between relics and the sexual organs is present here. But are we then required to make the Freud- ian move and invoke the Oedipal fear of castration? Or the Lacanian/Derridean move and invoke the absence of the signified?

We are not. Instead we have the option of considering how relics were under- stood in late-medieval England. As scholars of medieval religion have pointed out, relics provided a living and immediate relationship between the believer and the holy. In the relic the holy was materially present. The relic was, as Margaret Aston has put it, "a special sort of bridge between the visible and the invisible."'57 It was in part because of this connection that the bread of the sacrament began to take on the quality of a relic.5s8 An unshakable faith that the material was imbued with the spiritual inspired Hugh of Lincoln when he bit off one of the fingers of the corpse of Mary Magdalene, explaining to the dismayed onlookers that this was not unusual since he ate the Host whenever he partook of the eucharist.159 So too, the efficacy of a relic could be tested by placing upon the reliquary a cloth (a brandea or palliola) and then weighing it afterward to measure the physical amount of spiritual power it had absorbed.'60 The point of the relic was not that it was a sign of holiness but that it was itself holy: it erased the line between the material and the spiritual. Moreover-and this is the most important point, bril-

155 The word is derived from the Portuguese word feitico, a term used in the exploration narratives of the fifteenth century where it designated a kind of magic practiced both by Africans and by the Portuguese themselves. For instance, Francisco Alvares in his Verdadeira informa(ao das terras do Preste Joao das Indias, ed. Augusto Reis Machado (Lisbon, 1943; repr. 1974), p. 78, describes how the Portuguese were credited by the Ethiopians with ridding the country of locusts, bringing forth from clerics in other regions the following explanation to the Ethiopians: "But they [the Portuguese] are sorcerers (feiticeiros) and it was through sorcery (feitifos) that they drove the locusts out; and because of the magic (feiticarias) that they practice, they don't fear lions or other animals." The original meaning of fetishism, then, is as a form of magic, so that its original, late-medieval meaning is sufficient to legitimize its application to magic-working relics quite apart from Freudian theorizing. I am indebted to Prof. Josiah Blackmore of the University of Toronto for this citation.

156 See above, n. 82. 157 Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts, 1: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988), p. 402. 158 See G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction,

Studies in the History of Christian Thought 63 (Leiden, 1995). 159 Ibid., p. 28.

160 Ibid., p. 13.

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liantly explained by Caroline Bynum-relics erased the line between material and spiritual in the most definitive way possible: their very existence confirmed the promise of the resurrection of the body.161 This is one of the meanings of the "likeness reliquaries" that emerged in the later Middle Ages: the jewel-encrusted golden container that modeled the arm or hand or finger it contained was itself a prefiguration of the resurrected body that all the saved would receive in heaven.'62

This powerful doctrine is deliberately mocked by the Pardoner with his fake relics. For him the line between the material and the spiritual can only be crossed parodically. In carrying his fake relics next to his genitals, he associates them with that which most fully represents corporeality-as Leo Steinberg has reminded us with his discussion of the representation of the genitals of the infant Jesus.'63 Finally, when the Host jokes that he will cut off the Pardoner's testicles and en- shrine them in a hog's turd (a gross parody of a likeness reliquary), his statement has at least three possible but incompatible meanings. One is that he is threatening to castrate the already effeminate Pardoner. A second is that he is threatening to turn the Pardoner into a eunuchus Dei, a castrate for Christ, and thus to prepare him for the sanctity that would then make his body parts appropriate objects for veneration. And third, the Host conspires with the Pardoner in mocking not merely the capacity of relics to bear spiritual power but the resurrection of the body itself: the Pardoner's body will be partitioned and fragmented, not with the promise of wholeness and transformation, but rather with the threat of corruption and decay. This last meaning is most likely, given the Host's acknowledgment of mutual gamesmanship: "I wol no lenger pleye / With thee, ne with noon oother angry man" (958-59). What the Host cannot understand, however, is that the Pardoner's mockery of the resurrection of the body is not merely cynical sport. Rather it expresses his frustration and pain at being unable to believe in what would save him. "Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7.24).164 Paul answered his own question with the statement about the resurrection of the body that became authoritative, and that (I believe) underwrites the Pardoner's performance, as the Pauline metaphor of sowing and the central theme of the overcoming of death suggest:

But some man will say: How do the dead rise again? or with what manner of body shall they come? Senseless man, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die first... So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it shall rise in incorrup-

161 Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, Lec- tures on the History of Religions, n.s., 15 (New York, 1995). The importance of the resurrection of the body as a warrant of eternal life is vividly illustrated by the medieval habit of burning heretics, as is explained by R. C. Finucane, "Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages," in Joachim Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London, 1981), pp. 40-60, at p. 58.

162 Ellert Dahl, "Heavenly Images: The Statue of St. Foy of Conques and the Signification of the Medieval 'Cult-Image' in the West," Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia, 8 (Rome, 1979), pp. 175-92.

163 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York, 1983).

164 Chaucer quotes this line in the Parson's Tale: "Who shal delivere me fro the prisoun of my caytyf body?" (X.344).

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tion. It is sown in dishonour, it shall rise in glory. It is sown in weakness, it shall rise in power. It is sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body.... Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall all indeed rise again: but we shall not all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall rise again incorruptible: and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption; and this mortal must put on immortality.... 0 death, where is thy victory? 0 death, where is thy sting? (1 Cor. 15.35-55)

The Host's joke mocks this great speech of consolation and confirms the Par- doner's worst fear-not the fear of exposure as a eunuch, nor of punishment as a sodomite, but rather the fear of the double death of the body and the soul. That this fear is expressed in terms of the Pardoner's body, his false relics, and the hog's turd is, we can now understand, all too appropriate. For it is the Pardoner's lit- eralism, his spiritual corporeality, that makes it impossible for him to read the spirit in the letter, to recognize his corruptible body as a mere prefiguration of that which is incorruptible and eternal. What motivates the Pardoner most powerfully is the one thing that all human beings have in common-not, as Freud and his disciples would have it, sexuality, but something equally basic and finally more important: mortality. The Pardoner is not an instance of "eunuch hermeneutics" but a victim of it. In him Chaucer demonstrates not the postmodern idea that behind the letter there is only an absence but the medieval belief, which is exactly the opposite, that the spirit is inescapable, that meaning is always present.

6. RESCUING PSYCHOLOGY FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS

The behavior of real human beings can be understood according to two pro- cedures. On the one hand is theoretical and/or scientific psychology, on the other what Steven Pinker has called "intuitive" or everyday psychology.165 Theoretical and scientific psychologies seek to provide a universalist account of the mind. In this program the computational model, the evolutionary developmental model, and the neurobiological model compete with, or are supported by, local studies that seek empirical data about how people actually think, feel, and make decisions. The Freudian system in all its permutations (Kleinian, Jungian, Lacanian) is a similarly universalist account, although it lacks the means (and the will) to acquire the evidentiary support the other models seek.

How should literary characters be analyzed? Literary critics have, since the beginning of the twentieth century, aspired to ever grander theories of what un- derwrites their practice and are therefore especially vulnerable to universalist ac- counts of human behavior-of which Freudianism has been the most seductive.

But were we to consider instead the merits of Pinker's intuitive psychology- without being frightened off by the oddly fashionable accusation of using common sense-we would realize that we already possess its tools and have long mastered its practices. The materials that literary critics have so assiduously studied, from the Iliad to the most recent novel, from manorial records to contemporary per- formance art, have provided us both with the full range of human feelings, desires,

165 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, 1997), pp. 329-33.

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beliefs, and thoughts and with the finely honed instruments to probe them. Are we concerned-as is Chaucer in the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale-with the ir- rationality of human behavior, its sad capacity to engage in acts that are self- defeating and self-destructive? So is Paul in Romans: "For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good, which I will; but the which I hate, that I do" (7.15)-an early statement of a theme that runs throughout medieval writing, from Augustine to Malory, from the Chanson de Roland to the Roman de la Rose, and on to Madame Bovary, Genet's Captif amoureux, Roth's Human Stain.

I do not mean to suggest that only literature provides a deep understanding of human psychology. But it is, or has been, a primary means by which literate per- sons negotiate their experience. And the cultural tradition in which literary critics are trained provides them with a privileged access to the representation of human psychology. One of the reasons we read literature is that it shows us different ways of being human in the world; one reason we continue to read books like the Canterbury Tales, from eras so distant from our own, is that they provide us with examples of living we find valuable. This rich psychological knowledge-gained both empirically in our lives and by demonstration in the books we read-must be protected from the various universalist models now on offer. Until such models can command universal scientific authority-and the Freudian model is heading fast in the opposite direction-their potential explanatory and descriptive value is far outweighed by their absolutism.

Every text is, among many other things, an act of communication. The problem, of course, is that a poem written over six hundred years ago was directed, not to us, but to an audience at whose composition, and interests, we can only guess. We are eavesdroppers on a conversation whose full range we must painstakingly try to reconstruct. Chaucer wrote the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale in order to transmit a meaning; and my interpretive effort in this essay has been to discover what that meaning might be. These seemingly self-evident remarks run counter to the postmodernist presumptions that constitute the secular catechism of the day. According to this catechism, authors are enmeshed in a web of social and psy- chological forces that render them blind to the meaning of their own activity; modern readers are equally enmeshed in a web of similar forces that drain from their interpretations any possibility of objectivity; all "knowledge" is socially and discursively constructed; and language is a medium so unreliable-since the sig- nified always escapes from the signifier-that the very notion of meaning is fragile to the point of evanescence. We should, then, talk not about the author and his intention but about "the text" and the way its conscious aspirations are inevitably undermined by a "textual unconscious" that it cannot acknowledge. But even with that epistemological shield, any attempt to understand a text "in its own terms" or "on the text's own ground" remains a positivist delusion.'66

But the claims of this postmodernist creed have been, to say the least, seriously underdemonstrated. Critics who reflexively accept this account of their practice

166 For an example of such a procedure in regard to the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, see Paul Strohm, "Chaucer's Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995), 23-42, an article from which several of the phrases in the previous two sentences are derived.

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would do well to consider the cogent critiques offered by, among others, Chris- topher Norris, Satya Mohanty, David Simpson, and Susan Haack.167 As we have seen in the case of psychoanalysis, the widespread adoption of a set of claims does not make them true. Nor is truth advanced by pushing arguments to extremes. To acknowledge that absolute objectivity is impossible does not mean that no interpretive procedures are more reliable than others. To say that one cannot read a medieval text "on its own ground" (a position with which virtually every scholar would agree) does not mean that one is entitled to ignore evidence of what that ground might have been. That authorial intention can only be deduced from com- plex textual evidence does not mean that one may efface the author entirely. Not even to inquire what Chaucer might plausibly be thought to have meant by the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, nor how a contemporary reader might plausibly have understood it, is-to adapt Robert Frost's comment on writing free verse- like playing tennis with the net down.168

Given the overheated atmosphere in which academic debate is currently con- ducted, it would be possible to misread this essay as arguing against "theory" in general. But I have tried here to understand theory in its etymological sense- theoria as an act of spectatorship, an observation from a synoptic perspective, a point of view that stands outside and above praxis. In common usage, theory designates the general principles that govern or oversee practice. The purpose of theory is to protect oneself from an unthinking routine, doing what comes natu- rally without realizing that the natural can become an unselfconscious submission to an ideology. Theory, then, should protect us from ourselves and our culture, allowing us to prise ourselves out of our diurnal activity, to become self-conscious about it, and to guide it to more satisfactory ends. Ideally at least, theory precedes practice. But as well as standing at the beginning of practice, theory can also stand at the end, as the higher perspective gained by trial and error, a point from which new practices may set out. My own readings of Chaucer's Pardoner and his tale have certainly consisted of trial and error-leading, one can hope, to a new, broader perspective.

This ideal is, necessarily, an ideal: scholars always find themselves in medias res, and no one can build up a methodology from first principles. Theory, properly understood, demands that we test our assumptions against different views and against the evidence, that we explore the presuppositions and implications of the positions we adopt. The point is not to abandon psychoanalytic theory, but to approach it with a full awareness of its own historicity, of its place in the current state of the fields of psychology and psychiatry, and of its intellectual coherence

167 Christopher Norris, What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Phi- losophy (New York, 1990); Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism (London, 1996); Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997); David Simpson, TheAcademic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago, 1995); Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford, 1993); and Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago, 1998).

168 Newsweek, January 30, 1956, p. 56.

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and (especially) evidentiary support. Our task, in short, is not to become less but more theoretical.

One final note. As both scholars and especially teachers, we must inform our- selves as fully and generously as we can of positions with which we find ourselves out of sympathy. The tedious jeremiads that have of late been declaiming on the "crisis of the humanities" too often mistake vigorous diversity for armed warfare, too often contrast current disagreements with a nostalgic lost consensus that never existed in the first place. But if critical vigor is to remain creative, if the fragmen- tation that the doomsters seem so eager to promote is to be avoided, adherents of every position must think through, with the scholarly thoroughness for which medieval studies has always been justly admired, both the critical practices they espouse and those they find unhelpful.

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