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The Manciple’s Tale: Response Warren Ginsberg University of Oregon As an ensemble, these five papers on The Manciple’s Tale provide a snapshot of some of the ways we Chaucerians read today. Essays that investigate ways in which language is deployed in the tale also ponder the protocols of interchange between masters and servants in late fourteenth century England; essays that historicize the fable by invoking London’s guilds or the legal construction of homicide as contexts seem equally interested in assessing the effect of the Manciple’s performance on The Canterbury Tales as a whole. Even Peter Travis’s essay, which remains steadily focused on structures of language and the formation of subjectivity, implicitly sets its insights in dialogue with Louise Fradenburg ’s use of Lacan to discuss the negotiation of social identity in Richard II’s court.1 The intersection within a single paper of psychoanalytic, new historical , or rhetorical concerns is, I think, neither a sign of critical confusion nor an indication that methodological eclecticism is an emerging mode of Chaucerian interpretation. The proliferation of approaches seems to me a rejoinder to the annulments the Manciple attempts to enact both in his Prologue and in his Tale. Phoebus’s murdered wife and the excision of her corpse command Eve Salisbury’s attention, as befits a reading that advances its arguments by comparing the events in the narrative to the events the law required to establish a case of homicide. Stephanie Trigg sees in the crow’s impolitic revelation and subsequent punishment evidence that Chaucer challenged his audience to consider not only the diffident servility a subordinate needs to adopt when speaking to his superiors but also the associative parity that lets friends converse on equal terms. The lies Phoebus tells in the aftermath of his slaying under1 See Louise Fradenburg, ‘‘The Manciple’s Servant Tongue: Politics and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales,’’ ELH 52 (1985): 85–118. 331 ................. 10286$ CH14 11-01-10 13:54:39 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER writes Marianne Børch’s view that the tale’s negation of rhetoric positions it between the Knight’s and the Parson’s tales in Chaucer’s Canterbury poetics. For John Hines, the Manciple’s malfeasance, which we hear about in his portrait and which he half confirms in his exchange with Harry Bailly, licenses Chaucer’s incipient critique of the guilds. For Peter Travis, the Manciple’s mother’s (re)turn at the end of the tale lays bare the psychic mechanisms that transform his simple story into a terrifying etiology ‘‘about the origin of the self played out in the field of linguistic signs.’’ Face to face with a text whose moralitas insists we should ‘‘say nothing, nothing at all,’’ these authors, however else they differ, all say much that is ‘‘fructuous’’ in little space. Their unequivocal commitment to breadth seems something more than the reflex of scholars who know they have limited time to deliver their remarks. By expanding their scope in defiance of the Manciple’s exhortations to be silent, these critics assert their profession’s right to be by speaking as commentators. In so doing, they repeat Chaucer’s own response to his villicus iniquitatis. As readers of this journal know, I have argued that in the Manciple’s Prologue, and, by extension, in his tale as well, Chaucer reenacts the ineluctable, never-resolved battle that antiphrastic irony and allegorical polysemy wage to author figurative language.2 Even though the Manciple would leave the unhorsed Cook stuck and muddied in the mire, Hogge of Ware’s fall and rise outside Bobbe-up-and-doun restage Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Even though the Manciple would filch from the Cook a chance to do penance by telling a tale, his words evoke countervailing words from others, from Harry Bailly to the Parson to Chaucer himself. Even though the Manciple will conclude by contending that muteness, not truth-telling, is the better course, the beast fable he relates to make this point recalls the Nun’s Priest’s, whose final lesson is ‘‘Al that writen is, / To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis.’’ That Chaucer would array...
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