Locating Authorial Ethics:

Abstract

Occurrences of the word male as ‘bag or pouch’ are curiously rare and distinctive in the Chaucerian canon. The term appears in only five instances, all of which are in the Canterbury Tales,2 where it seems to carry connotations different from the mundane meanings of its synonyms. In the Host's proclamation, “unbokeled is the male,” this physical object is configured as a conceptual analogue for Chaucer's incipient Canterbury storytelling project. In addition to this self-reflexive locus, Chaucer associates males with religious “authors” who present radically different attitudes toward, and radically different models of, authorship: the Pardoner (twice), the Parson, and the Canon. This article reads Chaucer's selective deployment of the signifier male as a strategic juxtaposition of certain figures and moments whose interrelation of sinful and salvific discourse interrogate authors' roles and the moral implications of their work. Male can mean not only ‘bag or pouch,’ but also ‘man, male gender, or genitals,’ ‘stomach,’ and ‘wrongdoing’—and the very inappropriateness of this polysemy is appropriate for the way in which Chaucer invests the word with an exploration of authorial ethics that partly concerns the scatological registers of his poetics, and in which he refuses to articulate a single verdict. In the second half of this article, the nature of this network of associations as a seemingly conscious—and consequential—wordplay is further contextualized by examining distinctions in use between male and its synonym objects in the Canterbury Tales, and by an analysis of related tropes in other Middle English poems. Chaucer seems to have been the first and, in certain respects, the only Middle English writer to employ the motif of the literary male. The final section of this article addresses how Chaucer's exploration of the problematic ethics of secular authorship through his use of male can productively inform our understanding of the place of an ending such as the Retraction—Chaucer's act of confession for his own authorship—as a textual utterance with a multiplicity of conflicting yet coexisting intentions.When Chaucerian males are read in dialogue with each other (a reading that their placement and attributes seem to invite), they present reflections upon the issues of being an (im)moral author. The first instance of the word occurs when the Host refers to the Canterbury Tales as a male in his expressed metanarrative assessment of the literary work-in-progress of which he is a part (I 3114–17), associating this project-inaugurating male with Chaucer and his literary undertakings. Here, Chaucer establishes the identity of a male as a container for texts. The authorial implications for this signifier are further solidifed through rhyme. Every time male appears in line-final position (I 3115, VI 920, and X 26, but not I 694 or VIII 566), it rhymes with tale, creating a thematically resonant collocation.3 Each Chaucerian male is imagined, moreover, as a material and metaphorical analogue for a literary locus, such as a book. Each also connects literature to, or serves as a reminder of, the authorial bodies who produce the tales, wearing a male attached to their persons—that is, the particular pilgrims who explicitly possess them within the frame, and also Chaucer as both pilgrim-narrator and external author.Yet male could signify more than something that can be attached to the author's body. It could signify that body itself, in whole and in parts. Male as ‘gender’ and male as ‘masculine genitals’ were both usages current in the late fourteenth century.4 Tison Pugh has argued that Harry Bailey's unbuckle the male phrase contains an “oblique reference to male genitalia and sexuality” that “powerfully link[s] manhood to narrative.”5 It is also worth observing that tale, as the common rhyme-word (and literary complement) for male, provides a sexual counterpart in its latent alternative meaning as ‘female genitals.’6 This makes the male/tale conjunction a particularly suitable lexicon for literature when that literature (as mentioned above, the Canterbury Tales contains all of Chaucer's uses of male as ‘bag’) includes such salaciously secular treatments of male/female relations as the Miller's Tale and the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. Moreover, male as an adjective could mean ‘evil,’ and as an adverb ‘infortuned.’7 The idea of wrongdoing or malfeasance is likewise relevant to this trope in which Chaucer considers the problematic moral valence of secular authorship. Intriguingly, the Middle English word male could also mean another body part, ‘belly or entrails,’ as in the Proverbs of Hendyng's instruction, “Ʒef þou hauest bred & ale,/Ne put þou nout al in þy male.”8 As the MED attests, this intestinal meaning of male is the closest to the ‘bag or pouch’ meaning. By employing the visceral word male for this trope, then, Chaucer refuses to allow abstraction or narrowness of thought to govern his (or our) approach to the ethical concerns at hand. The values of the word, like that of the trope it enacts, are intellectual yet bodily, serious yet scatological, playfully incorporating the heterogeneous registers of the Canterbury Tales.The two instances of the word male that Chaucer associates with the Pardoner signify a concept comparable to that of a textual author's book by referring to the site that contains his texts, that is, his pardons, and especially his relics, a motley collection of “cloutes” (VI 348) or rags, “pigges bones” (I 700), and “a sholder-boon/Which that was of an hooly Jewes sheep” (VI 350–51)—or so the Pardoner claims. When the Pardoner displays his relics to his parishioner audiences, he fabricates narratives regarding their benefits to gullible men and women and their farm animals, thereby authoring these material objects as Chaucer authors his texts. In the General Prologue the narrator's selection of details concerning the Pardoner's relics focuses on their location and the ways in which they enter the Pardoner's discourse: in his male he hadde a pilwe-beer,Which that he seyde was Oure Lady veyl;He seyde he hadde a gobet of the seylThat Seint Peter hadde.(I 694–97; emphasis mine) This reiteration of the Pardoner's “saying” with regards to the relics emphasizes his methods of conceptually inscribing these pieces of cloth or bodies with his sinful authoring, his “feyned flaterye and japes” (I 705). The Pardoner himself reemphasizes his male as the site of his self-promoting authorship at the end of his tale when he remarks, “But, sires, o word forgat I in my tale:/I have relikes and pardoun in my male” (VI 919–20). From one perspective, the Pardoner is a “good” author: the stories he tells are entertaining and morally effective. However, in authoring them, he manifests his sinful bent: “For myn entente is nat but for to wynne,/And nothyng for correccioun of synne” (VI 403–4). The Pardoner's male, as the specific material locus of the objects that buttress his rhetorical authority, thus provides a focus for the reprehensibility of his modality of authorship, and for the expected damning consequences.Another male reference concerns the Canon, an enigmatic figure whose interrogation of the coherence of the Canterbury Tales' storytelling system shapes the significance of his male. When the Canon and his yeoman breach the bounds of the self-contained narrative frame, the narrator offers little description of the Canon beyond his ecclesiastical garments and heavy perspiration. The male, however, is a detail that Chaucer deems worthy of specification: “A male tweyfoold on his croper lay” (VIII 566). The portrait of the Canon in the Ellesmere manuscript, while offering a view partly obstructed by the Canon's sleeve, suggests that the Canon's male may have been a type of saddlebag draped across the horse's back with a pouch hanging down to either side.9 Alternatively, the Canon's “male tweyfoold” may refer to a double bag in the sense of being “folded over and hence almost empty.”10 Regardless of its spatial configuration (draped across or folded over), the visual and the linguistic evidence suggests that this male is doubled in some way, and if we are indeed to understand it as nearly empty, its insubstantiality resonates with the hollowness of the deceitful and guilt-ridden Canon as pilgrim and author. The Yeoman reveals the Canon's deceitful nature when alluding to his nefarious and unsuccessful alchemical attempts: To muchel folk we doon illusioun,And borwe gold, be it a pound or two,Or ten, or twelve, or manye sommes mo,And make hem wenen, at the leeste weye,That of a pound we koude make tweye.Yet is it fals.(VIII 673–78) This exposure pricks the Canon's guilty conscience (VIII 685–89). He admonishes his Yeoman to stop “sclaundr[ing] me heere in this compaignye” (VIII 696), but to no avail: whan this Chanon saugh it wolde nat bee,But his Yeman wolde telle his pryvetee,He fledde awey for verray sorwe and shame.(VIII 700–702) Departing soon after he appears, the Canon takes both his lack of storytelling and his male with him. The use of the word male in connection with the Canon is more ambiguous than the others, but perhaps not without purpose. Chaucer's diagnosis of the Canon's guilty habits—“For Catoun seith that he that gilty is/Demeth alle thyng be spoke of hym, ywis” (VIII 688–89)—marks the Canon's sinfulness as person, prelate, and master, as the Canon's Yeoman's Tale will confirm. However, the “sorwe and shame” that induce the Canon to flee also reflect his relation to authorship, as Harry Bailey had invited the Canon to author secular stories by asking, “Can he oght telle a myrie tale or tweye,/With which he glade may this compaignye?” (VIII 597–98). Why should the Canon, initially talkative, refrain from saying another word, except to urge the Yeoman to stop telling his (the Canon's) story, as soon as Harry Bailey expresses his desire for this man in religious orders to tell “myrie” tales to “glade” the pilgrims? It is not for lack of ability, since the Yeoman affirms that the Canon is an excellent storyteller (VIII 599–601). Thus, it must be assumed that the Canon represses his storytelling abilities. Part of his guilt appears to be generated by the thought of authoring a tale.I suggest, then, that the characterization of this male as “tweyfoold,” as doubled or insubstantial, also comments upon its duplicitous nature as a particular model of authorship when connected to a capable author who eschews authorship. The Canon's bizarre, male-toting intervention is a performance of self-censorship, suggesting that notions of authorship that entail complete renunciation of any involvement in the production of secular literature are emphatically not permitted to remain within the frame's possible modes of authorship. It should be noted that the Canon and his male are not found in Hengwrt, though their omission from this early manuscript was likely circumstantial rather than authorially intended.11 Conversely, if, after writing this prologue and tale, Chaucer decided not to include them in his oeuvre—that is, if it is not merely the narrative but also the authoritative text that snubs the Canon—this rejection could further indicate the marginal nature of the Canon's unsatisfactory model of authorship. The Canon's choice not to produce a sinful, merry tale does not, of course, imply an abstention from sin in other aspects of his life. Chaucer may be asking which type of sin is worse: that produced in literature, or that produced in life? While the Canon's exit from the Canterbury Tales when Chaucer remains invested in them provides one answer, another is provided by the Retraction, which, as I will discuss, can be read as a textual parallel to the Canon's more physical attempt to renounce the Canterbury Tales project.The Parson's figurative male is likewise associated with censorship, but it carries more straightforwardly solemn implications for Chaucer's authorship. Just before the last tale is told, the Host again refers to telling stories as unbuckling a male in an utterance that transforms his first such comment. The Host directs the Parson, “Unbokele and shewe us what is in thy male” (X 26). The contents of this male do not have the same purpose as the tale-telling that has gone before, for the Parson announces that he will “telle a myrie tale in prose/To knytte up al this feeste and make an ende” (X 46–47). This male produces earnest preaching regarding the necessities of contrition and confession for one's sins. The Parson opens his moralizing site of authorship in order to seal shut the other male of the remainder of the Canterbury storytelling project, that is, the tales “that sownen into synne” (X 1086). The Parson's ethically intent “literature” stresses the way in which souls are jeopardized by the making of such literary works as cause Chaucer, in the Retraction, to beg for divine forgiveness.Hence, these three figures—the Pardoner, the Canon, and the Parson—serve as self-reflexive synecdoches for aspects of Chaucer's authorship, and they are connected to each other and to Chaucer by the male each one bears. As such, they raise a network of issues regarding the salvific consequences of sinfully producing literature: respectively, the worry of being sinful if one is a secular author, no matter how successful; the unattractiveness of not being an author at all; and the fact that the only truly doctrinally acceptable mode of authorship is one that is morally upright and spiritually focused. These three models present conflicting modes of authorship, all voiced by Chaucer and all in relation to which Chaucer must locate himself. The contours of the authorial dilemma that Chaucer explores in this trope can be clarified in comparison with the related but distinct authorial dilemma that Chaucer articulates in the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of Melibee. In presenting his “own” two tales, Chaucer juxtaposes minstrelism and prudential counsel, and he does so, as Lee Patterson has argued, in an attempt “to define, and to defend, the authorial identity that Chaucer, as composer of a comedy like the Canterbury Tales, has come to assume.”12 In Patterson's view, Chaucer espouses the former more than the latter, but ultimately “his poetry can be satisfactorily accommodated to the requirements of neither topicality nor indoctrination.”13 As a pioneer of a literary practice, Chaucer found no coherent social identity through which to articulate himself. In Thopas and Melibee, and in the pilgrim persona who voices them, we see Chaucer considering what the writer of the Canterbury Tales comedy might look like, socially and cognitively, as well as physically. It is important, from this perspective, that when Harry Bailey asks the pilgrim Chaucer “What man artow?” (VII 695), and describes him as well-shaped in the waist, “elvyssh” (VII 703), and a “popet” (VII 701), “this identification in terms of manner and body shape is a substitute for the identification in terms of vocation applied to the other pilgrims,” who “are identified by their social functions.”14By contrast, in the trope of the male, we see Chaucer considering what being the writer of the Canterbury Tales comedy might mean for his spiritual stature. That we are to see the authorial concerns raised by this trope as more religious than social is supported by the fact that the three pilgrims with whom Chaucer explicitly associates males are all preachers of religion who use (or refrain from using) their right to employ words and tell stories for sinful or salvific purposes. From this perspective, what is significant about the description of the pilgrim narrator that Chaucer has Harry Bailey pronounce is less its illegibility or incoherence than its mixture of the earthly and the ethereal: what Chaucer addresses with his males is a spiritual crisis about the secular, or a moral crisis about what actions are or are not ethical.15 Before analyzing how the symbolic nexus of the word male intersects with the Retraction, we must examine further how Chaucer deploys male and how it is used in other Middle English literature.Other words used to refer to bags or pouches in Chaucer's works do not carry the same metaphorical, ethical charge as does male, although they do sometimes carry a sexual charge. For instance, after the Pardoner informs his fellow pilgrims that he has relics and pardons in his authorizing male, he seeks money from the Host, telling him “Unbokele anon thy purs” (VI 945). The Pardoner's reference to the Host's “purs,” as much as the Host's virulent reply threatening violence to the Pardoner's “coillons” (VI 952), is genital.16 We are given to understand, however, that in its nonsexual sense, this purs contains solely money, not storytelling. Furthermore, in the General Prologue the Pardoner's bag is described twice as a “walet,” when its named contents are only a hood and pardons (I 681, 686). The signifier shifts to male, however, when the narrator refers to the container for his “authorial” relics (I 694).Elsewhere, literary purses as the explicit property of an author, such as in Chaucer's Complaint to His Purse and Thomas Hoccleve's purse-centric complaints, do not deal with the conscience or guilt of the author in the same way. While there has been, to my knowledge, no published assessment of Chaucer's male motif, criticism has been attentive to the significance of Chaucer's purse in Complaint to His Purse, focusing on how it interrelates the pecuniary and the political.17 The purses of both Chaucer and Hoccleve demonstrate a distinct lack of concern about the religious consequences of authorship. Hoccleve mentions purses most frequently for begging purposes in La Male Regle (lines 337–39, 409–12) and in The Regiment of Princes as part of the Old Man's lament (lines 676–86). Later in Regiment Hoccleve associates a pouch with authorial ability as well as with money, but only in order to wish that he had more of both (lines 5013–17).18Appearances of the male or book-bag in other Middle English poems bear implications of authorship or authority, but these implications resonate only partially with those of the Chaucerian males. The writer of the anonymous Mum and the Sothsegger seeks to enhance the effectiveness of the political polemic his poem conveys by recourse to a bag full of books: Now forto conseille the king vnknitte I a baggeWhere many a pryue poyse is preyntid withynneYn bokes vnbredid in balade-wise made.(lines 1343–45)19 The narrator proceeds to detail a collection of books that expose the sins of selected social groups. Alexandra Gillespie reads these books as serving a rhetorical objective designed “to maintain the power and self-interest of those who possess them,” and as being objects that “speak volumes about power and self-interest” in their entrances into the narrative.20 Of greater interest here, however, is the work performed by the bag itself as the realized physical locus containing and emitting these condemnatory books. In Mum the book-bag supports the authoritative presentation of its socially challenging contents not least by its diegetic materiality. As Helen Barr observes, the narrator's provision of a “bibliography of the bag's contents … gives fresh impetus to his exposure of contemporary corruption.”21 It is also worth noting that the bagge—not unlike the books—bolsters rhetorical authority by its conceived presence and “heft” as a focal point and prop. In the bagge's ontology and in its unknitting to substantiate an act of authorship, Mum manifests the motif in a way that parallels Chaucer's use of it. Yet the ethical queries that Mum's bagge raises have a different epistemology than that pertaining to the Chaucerian males. Investigations and exposures of culpability in Mum are directed outward, toward other controversial figures, rather than self-reflexively toward the authorial figure who has produced the poem containing the trope in question.The word male itself is used elsewhere in Middle English literature but without the same implications with which Chaucer invests the term. Other writers often used male in its mundane sense. For instance, in the thirteenth-century romance Havelok the Dane, the good king Athelwold's peaceful rule protects any merchant who travels with “red gold upon hiis bac,/In a male with or blac” (lines 47–48), and in the early fourteenth-century Bevis of Hampton, a friend provides a hungry Bevis with “Bred and flesc out of is male” (line 1297).22 Closer to Chaucer's time, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the description of Bertilak's men preparing for a day of hunting includes the detail that they “trussen her males” (line 1129), that is, pack their bags. And, later, Gawain seeks tactfully to refuse the lady's request that he give her a gift by explaining that he has “no men wyth no malez with menskful þingez” (line 1809) from which he could produce something worthy of her.23 The contents of these males, whether actually at hand or not, are all tangible, quotidian objects.While Chaucer likely encountered earlier French usages of the term as well as English ones, he may have been the first English writer to use male in its metaphorical sense as a tale-telling device. Male is a word of French origin, meaning ‘small case,’ ‘wooden box,’ ‘bag,’ ‘pack,’ ‘bundle,’ or ‘bale.’24 However, none of the Chaucerian or even pseudo-Chaucerian uses of the term have a direct source in French literature. The word male as ‘bag or pouch’ seems not to occur in Guillaume de Lorris' Roman de la Rose.25 In Romaunt of the Rose Chaucer, or pseudo-Chaucer, did not simply reproduce the term and its tale-telling idiom as a straightforward borrowing.Male occurs outside Chaucer's works as a tale-telling trope, but the textual spaces where it occurs suggest Chaucerian influence. In the pseudo-Chaucerian Interlude preceding the apocryphal Tale of Beryn, the anonymous author has the Host ask at the beginning of the return journey from Canterbury, “Who shall be the first that shall unlace his male/In confort of us all, and gyn som mery tale?” (lines 701–2).26 While here, as elsewhere outside of Chaucer, the focus on authorial ethics is lacking, the Beryn author clearly understood that a male could be a source of storytelling. He seems, moreover, to have perceived the phrase as a way to make his writing look more Chaucerian. References to males in the pseudo-Chaucerian Romaunt similarly suggest that the phrase was viewed as a Chaucerian marker.27 Another early fifteenth-century author, John Lydgate, appears to have associated the word with Chaucer, since, in his own attempt at the Canterbury genre, Lydgate uses the motif of the male to focus on authorial anxieties—although, again, not on authorial ethics.In the Siege of Thebes, Lydgate's desire to construct a Chaucerian frame and narrator for another “Canterbury tale” includes among its descriptive details a male both reminiscent of and distinct from the male in the Canon's Yeoman's Prologue. It is a critical commonplace to view Lydgate as a poet whose attempts to emulate Chaucer illustrate both an inability to match Chaucer's literary greatness and the anxieties arising from poetic inferiority.28 However, in A. C. Spearing's view, Lydgate's Siege displays less “overt anxiety” about poetic influence than is typically found in his works. James Simpson, going further, asserts that Lydgate's response to Chaucer in Siege is “anything but anxious, infantile, and unsophisticated.”29 Lydgate's male offers added insight into how Siege responds to the Canterbury Tales. Whereas in the Canon's Yeoman's Prologue it is the master who carries the male, Lydgate's narrator refers to his servant as “My man toforn with a voide male” (line 76).30 By shifting the male from master to servant, Lydgate inverts the subversion that Chaucer had enacted by having the Yeoman tell a tale in the place of the one initially expected to (the Canon). Although Spearing views Lydgate's transposition of the male as the likely result of Lydgate being a “careless reader,”31 we might consider other possibilities that allow for an attentiveness on Lydgate's part. In attaching the male to servant rather than master, Lydgate in fact parallels Chaucer: he assigns the male to the one who does not tell a tale. Moreover, Lydgate describes this male as “voide,” which, by its connoted lack of poetic resources, does imply inferiority in relation to Chaucer, but not necessarily as a result of Lydgate's failure to read the relevant Chaucerian passage correctly.In Lydgate's repeated self-conscious literary references to his humble status in relation to Chaucer, he may have been alert to the two ways in which he alters the descriptive values of the Chaucerian male. Perhaps less likely than Chaucer to have embraced the unseemly meanings of male with zest, Lydgate may be introducing male in consciousness of the ethical implications with which Chaucer's Canterbury Tales had invested the term. Indeed, as Spearing remarks, “it is difficult to tell how far Lydgate grasped the ironic aspects of Chaucer's narratorial technique, a difficulty redoubled if we feel doubt (as I think we should) as to how securely we grasp them ourselves.”32 Yet Lydgate seems, in his appropriation of the trope, to display an awareness that there are aspects of Chaucerian authorship of which he is not capable, that is, in recycling Chaucer's male, Lydgate figures his poetry as inferior to Chaucer's but does so in a seemingly sophisticated fashion. Thus, while Lydgate's male and the book-bags of other writers support authoritative pronouncements and locate authorial influence, they also demonstrate the distinctiveness of Chaucer's male trope as a treatment of the personal ethics of authorship.The anxieties that Chaucer manifests in the trope of the male, regarding the type of author he ought to be, are especially perceptible in the Retraction, a passage with conflicting purposes that reflects on the dilemma posed by the nexus of authorial males in the Canterbury Tales. In the Retraction Chaucer performs a textual confession for having produced his secular literary works, “revoking” them in response to the penitential discourse of the Parson's Tale in the hope that he may receive salvation on Judgment Day (X 1092). Thus, as an act of confession instigated by the contents of the Parson's male, the Retraction expresses Chaucer's repentance for having produced the contents of another male—that is, the tales that the Host had earlier referred to as issuing from a male. Chaucer also draws attention to his intermittent authorial virtuousness as the writer of “the translacion of Boece de Consolacione, and othere bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun” (X 1088). The Retraction is, then, an instance of moralizing discourse about the sinfulness of producing secular literature, a discourse that censors further production of such literature. At the same time, it promotes the author's status by defining a Chaucerian canon of all the works it lists, allowing Chaucer to lay claim to their creation.33Moreover, the self-censoring implications of this act of repentance may not be as clear-cut as its position at the end of Chaucer's received literary canon intimates. It has been suggested that the Retraction was not the last literature Chaucer wrote but was instead an ending produced for a version of the work that predated Chaucer's conception of the full Canterbury storytelling project.34 Derek Pearsall accordingly contends that “Chaucer spent his last years or months, not working on the Parson's Tale and writing the Retraction, but revising and writing Fragment I.”35 The notion that Chaucer “reverted” to working on his secular literature after having produced the Retraction positions the latter as a temporally and ethically contingent witness to Chaucer's continued oscillation between the oppositional authorial stances that are symbolized by the males and their authorial bearers: sinful storytelling, complete self-censorship, and moral preaching. Both marginal and central to the Canterbury pilgrimage and its storytelling project, the characters of the Parson, the Canon, and the Pardoner (the last seen as the “one lost soul” on the pilgrimage36) seem insistently analogous to Chaucer, perhaps most especially when Chaucer expresses the anxious desire to “been oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved” (X 1092) without ever truly ceasing to obfuscate his “entente” (X 1083).Thus does the male motif become a meditation upon Chaucer's unresolved attitudes regarding his authorship. Indeed, following Pearsall's remark that Chaucer “may even have spent his last days on the unfinished Cook's Tale,” 37 we can consider how some other books and males may function as analogous witnesses to the author's troubled “entente.” In places where Chaucer draws attention to the material presence of the Canterbury Tales, his active sinful authoring is intertwined with uneasiness about this authorship. For instance, Chaucer instructs the squeamish reader to Turne over the leef and chese another tale;For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale,Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse,And eek moralitee and hoolynesse.(I 3177–80) Here we find support for Alistair Minnis's suspicion of “the presence of a very self-conscious author who was concerned to manipulate the conventions of compilatio for his own literary ends.”38 Chaucer expresses in this apology the desire to be put “out of blame” (I 3185), yet he also emphasizes his status as a writer and foregrounds the quality and variety of his literary production—not least by referencing its physicality as a book, with leaves to be turned. The vellum is inherently bodily, a reminder of the animal from which it was made. As Bruce Holsinger has observed, “the dead animal is the ‘con-text’ of medieval literary production in the most immediate way: that with which writing is joined or woven inseparably together in and as text.”39The physicality of the site of the Cook's Tale also reveals ruptured authorial intentions. The traces of Chaucer's conflicted production of this unfinished tale, which represents a sinful extreme of the Canterbury genre, are evinced in the presence of its absences. Based on an assessment of the manuscript tradition and authorial rubrics such as Hengwrt's “Of this cokes tale maked Chaucer na moore,” Stephen Partridge has argued that the blank spaces that sometimes occur after the Cook's Tale, such as an extra ink-free sheet of vellum at the end of the quire in which the tale is contained, might be “a Chaucerian aspect of the work.”40 This instance of Chaucer's sinful authorship is therefore connected to a physical space that draws attention to a possible authorial crisis. The embodied aspect of the book—its calfskin or sheepskin—here points outward, toward the ambivalent actions and agency of another body: that of the author.Chaucer's male references also serve as playful, yet tensional traces of his elusive and unresolved presence, not least in their embodied connotations. The males, as reified sites of storytelling, are connected to the bodies of their bearers, which sometimes contain (as in the case of the Pardoner and his relics) dismembered bits of bodies, and are themselves (like books) objects made of animal skins. Moreover, the genital connotations of male draw in the more bawdy registers of the poetry circumscribed by Chaucer's ethical concerns. And the visceral meaning of male is implicated in Chaucer's musings as to whether, figuratively speaking, he has the stomach for the type of writing he has been pursuing in the Canterbury Tales.The cultural availability of these related semantic implications marks the suitability of this signifier as a vehicle for Chaucer's motif of anxious authorship. Chaucer's wordplay also gestures toward the way in which we as readers feel the influence of the author where that influence is most conflicted—that is, those places where, as with the instances of male, the Retraction, and the Cook's Tale, final authorial stances are either irreducibly multifaceted or indecipherable. As a sophisticated, adaptable trope around which various concerns of authorship and authority accumulate, Chaucer's male motif deals with issues he seems not to have resolved by the time of his death, frustrating critical endeavors to do so. In seeking to interpret the entrails or inner workings of Chaucer's auctoritas, we can deepen our awareness of his ruminations upon the multiplicity of uneasily coexisting ends of his literary corpus.