Devil Take the Hindmost: Chaucer, John Gay, and the Pecuniary Anus

Abstract

The bawdiest of the Canterbury Tales have always been problematic for the critics, as the responses documented by Peter Beidler—which range from apologetics to effacement and outright dismissal—attest. 1 The fact that someone has documented the reception of Chaucer's scatology does imply, however, that the door to this aspect of Chaucerian satire has begun to open. Furthermore, that scatology has already become a legiti- mate domain in literary criticism of other periods is given witness by such recent critical collections as Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology. 2 Although it is evident from the superabun- dance of dirty humor in medieval texts that medieval readers (readers in the broad sense of cultural cryptographers) knew well how to parse scatological figures, knowledge of the satiric function—that is, the poet- ics—of scatology has to a great extent fallen away, particularly within the academy. As Beidler shows in the case of the Miller's Tale, taking Chaucer's dirty parts seriously restores them to their integral place within the narrative and poetic framework and produces satisfying read- ings of individual tales that have been traditionally bowdlerized or ignored. One such tale is the Summoner's Tale. Its fierce scatology has not, to my knowledge, been approached in close study. The crudeness of this tale, with its sustained meditation upon a fart, has received two main interpre- tations. The first recognizes the rivalries between the Canterbury pilgrims and sees the Summoner's awful joke as a low blow to the Friar, whose tale has just targeted him. The second view interprets the fart's scatology insofar as it participates in the medieval fabliau tradition of bawdy humor and inversion. It is not my goal to discount either interpretation, as both offer insights into the complex ethos and generic tradition of the Canterbury Tales. 3 Still, neither a dramatic nor a historicist account explains how the satire—with its (literally) fundamental scatology—works. Why, for instance, in a satire on greed, does the Summoner choose a fart to