Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies

Abstract

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 chapter is a contribution to that skepticism as it applies to literary interpretation, a philosophically much narrower terrain than Wittgenstein’s genial critique envisaged, but one in which fishy thinking is no less to be avoided. This chapter 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. Section II 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 Section III I use an apposite test case that almost irresistibly attracts psychoanalytic readings—Chaucer’s Pardoner and his Tale—to assess the usefulness or otherwise of psychoanalytic assumptions in literary interpretation. Sections IV and V 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 chapter concludes with some reflections on the place of theory—whether psychoanalytic or of some other variety—in medieval literary studies.