ENGL 251
Midterm Essay for 6/19/2000
Essay 5: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: The Pardoner’s Tale, 428-48.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale” seems very much like a fable embedded within a sermon, a fairly simple, straightforward morality play interspersed with the Pardoner’s thoughts and ruminations on (and warnings against) human vices such as gambling, gluttony, and blasphemy. Though its characters are human and thus not anthropomorphized animals, the tale of the three “riotoures” who end up killing each other over a quantity of gold cannot rightly be called a fable, but there are important moral lessons to be learned here, and one of the “teachers” is the old man whom they encounter at the start of their search for the human figure of Death (or, “Deeth,” in Middle English.) The old man, as a literary character in general, often represents wisdom; the experience, knowledge, and the understanding of both acquired by age. In mythology, as described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the old man is also a spiritual guide, often with supernatural powers (such as Teiresias in The Odyssey and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope). Chaucer’s old man, however, possesses none, but provides a counterpoint to the characters and intentions of the three young riotoures by attempting to show just what a needless and foolhardy quest they have embarked upon, and also by existing as a symbol of the moral and spiritual decay brought on by those aforementioned indulgent behaviours.
Overcoming death is something man has striven for since the dawn of history. We have endeavoured to prolong life, to develop medicines and treatments for diseases and protect ourselves from danger and injury, yet we are still mortal creatures; death, in whatever form one’s beliefs may envision it, claims us all eventually. The riotoures’ quest, therefore, is a futile one from the start, since they are actively seeking an adversary that cannot be overcome to begin with, in human form or otherwise. Indeed, a young boy cautions them to be wary of Death’s appearance (382-396), but in their arrogance they resolve to seek out and slay the creature (404-413). This resolution is symbolic of that innate human desire for immortality, to defeat Death and thus live forever, but it also demonstrates that such a desire is inherently arrogant, and this is part of the overlying sermon that the Pardoner imparts. He directly cautions against vices such as gambling, which defies God’s will by worshipping chance, and blasphemy, the taking of the Lord’s name in vain, but his allegorical tale further cautions against arrogance and sin; if it is true that the attempt to defeat Death is futile, as suggested above, then the riotoures are thus defying God’s will by, essentially, committing suicide, which is considered a sin in Judeo-Christian religion.
Of course, living forever does not mean staying young forever, though thoughts of immortality are seldom accompanied by thoughts of aging. This is where the old man comes in, encountered by the riotoures early in their journey. They notice his decrepit state and ask him how he has managed to live so long, and he replies that Death has simply not taken him yet. “Ne Deeth, allas, ne wol nat have my lif. / Thus walke I lik a restelees caitif [wretch]…Lo, how I vanisshe, flessh and blood and skin. / Allas, whan shal my bones been at reste?” (439-440, 444-445) He refers to the earth as his mother and expresses a yearning to return to “her,” knocking on the ground with his staff and begging to be let in; in essence, the old man wants to die, but has been denied the eternal rest that he seeks and acknowledges that he must remain thus “As longe time as it is Goddes wille.” (438) This desire provides a counterpoint to the riotoures’ ill-advised and misguided quest for immortality, not only in terms of deference to the will of the Almighty; You don’t want to defeat death, he tells them, because if you do, this is how you will end up. Given their intentions, these three riotoures surely do not want to die (the suicide assertion above notwithstanding), but the old man shows them just what living forever would mean: weakness, restlessness, pain, decay.
That last word brings us back once again to the Pardoner’s sermon, though in less direct fashion. Looking closely at the behaviours that the Pardoner denounces, including gambling, gluttony, drinking and blasphemy, we can see that they all have something in common: they involve indulging in emotional, often vain, impulses without thought of consequence. Today, these are considered vices, but they are also referred to by another descriptive: decadence. Decay and decadence are both derived from the Latin decadere, i.e., “to fall down;” in modern usage decay is taken to mean a physical deterioration while decadence is a moral one (it is also used to refer to the decline of society), but each can be symbolic of the other, and in the case of the old man in “The Pardoner’s Tale,” the old man’s physical decrepitude, which he uses as a warning to the riotoures about the “down side” of immortality, is symbolic of their own moral and spiritual downfall and of their eventual death; it also represents the moral and spiritual downfall we are all bound to suffer if we do not heed the Pardoner’s warnings about these reckless and self-indulgent behaviours; in effect, gambling, gluttony and blasphemy are Death.
Naturally, it seems, the riotoures neither see nor accept this warning, even going so far as to accuse the old man of being Death’s spy and ally (selling his soul to the devil?), so the old man, perhaps understanding this, directs them to the place where he claims to have last seen Death (ll. 473-477), but where the riotoures instead find the aforementioned treasure. It may seem curious that they would find a healthy amount of gold when they were told by the old man that they would find Death, but when we consider that that gold led all three of the young men to fatally conspire against one another, we see that the old man did, in fact, lead them right where they wanted to go; Death, it seems, comes in many forms. They found Death and were unable to defeat it, unable to overcome their own avarice, their own greed, their own moral and spiritual decay. In line with the suggestion made above, it follows therefore that avarice, like all indulgent behaviours, is Death.
The recurring refrain which the Pardoner preaches throughout the tale is the Latin “Radix malorum est cupiditas;” or, “Avarice is the root of evil.” That was certainly true for the three riotoures. The Pardoner uses the old man to symbolize himself in a way, showing us that if we do not heed his advice and engage in reckless, indulgent behaviour in defiance of God’s will, that we, like the three young riotoures, will come to a bad end.
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