This being December of a presidential election year, only weeks prior to the departure of the present Administration, the subject of official pardons (many sold for cold cash, without doubt) has become particularly pertinent. My undergraduate take on Chaucer and his "Pardoner's Tale" thus takes on new relevance.

Paul Strohm

My original MS is dated May 1, 1968, for L219 Prof. Anderson, but I'm quite certain I submitted it first to Dr. Paul Strohm, with whom I was able to stay in touch for some years, particularly to express our mutual enthusiasm for the works Thomas Pynchon. Since the last time we saw each other at IU's Ballentine Hall or his off-campus apartment, I now read that Prof. Strohm has risen to dizzying heights in the academic world: a long stint at the University of Oxford, and at present a chair at Columbia in New York. I'm set to read his recent essay, "The Man Who Insulted Shakespeare."

A work of pure imagination.

I wonder what Paul (not to mention Pynchon) is up to these days?

"Radix malorum est cupiditas," proclaims the Pardoner at the beginning of each of his sermons: avarice is the root of evil. But in an even larger sense than the Pardoner's sententious and cynically loaded references to avarice imply, the tale raises the question of the "root of evil" in a world which God called good at its creation. The Pardoner suggests that it is avarice and its-- and its counterparts glotonye, luxure, and hasardrye-- which is responsible, ultimately, for the sin of the world, and this explanation suffices in a cursory interpretation of his tale. Yet such an analysis seems to do no justice at all to the question posed by the tale and invites a deeper inquiry as to the significance of avarice and the location of evil within (and without) the context of the tale.

The Pardoner founds the substance of his sermon on this paradox of evil, the ironic ingratitude of man:

Allas, mankinde, how it may bitide
That to thy Creatour which that thee wrought,
And with his precious herte blood thee bought,
Thou art so fals and so unkind, allas.
(11. 572-5)

From this fundamental irony grows a multitude of smaller and more complex ironies. Not only the mechanism, but also the very substance and the surrounding context of "The Pardoner's Tale" is an artfully compounded irony and paradox: the Personification/ super naturalization of Death, the juxtaposition of the revelers and the old man, the significance and poignancy of everyday remarks, and, behind the scenes as it were, the Pardoner himself providing the living exemplum of avarice by manipulating the Christian desire for salvation to serve his pocket, using every sordid trick of his trade to prove that even a hypocrite-- again ironically-- can practice precisely what he preaches. The magnificently vital (and highly familiar) harangue against the sins of gluttony, lechery, and gambling is but a skillful ploy to gain our money. It is indeed avarice that provides the undoing of the Pardoner himself, as well as his three revelers, as it is specifically their unbridled greed which causes them to to pervert their respective moral missions, forget their respective susceptibility to sin and moral ruin, and meet destruction. The key episode in the tale of the revelers is the encounter with the old man, who himself seeks Death and realizes that sin and death come fully only to those who are unmindful of its omnipresence and who expect it least. Thus are the revelers led to forget their mission to destroy Death, and it is avarice that reverses the situation and pays them all in kind.

But it is this same episode with the old man that leads us to suspect that it is something other-- or, rather, something more-- than mere avarice that is responsible for the mind of the sinner and is, hence, the catalyst of his undoing. The old man recognizes something more than avarice in the revelers, something more explicitly integral to their nature, and that is the arrogance of their youth out of which they mock and humiliate him. Tho old man sees this arrogance, this pride, as the source of man's potential for sin:

But sires, to you it is no curteisye
To spaken to an old man vilainye
But he trespass in word or elles in deede.
In Holy Writ ye may yourself wel rede,
"Agains an old man, hoor upon his heed,
Ye shal arise." Wherefore I yive you reed,
Ne dooth unto an old man noon harm now,
Namore than that ye wolde men dide to you
In age, if that ye so longe abide.
And God be with you wher ye go or ride:
I moot go thider as I have to go.
(11. 411-21)

This pride, of course, is more than the rudeness youth shows to age. It appeared earlier in the tale in the manner of one of the revelers toward his servants, and in fact pervades the entire attitude of the revelers toward the Death they seek to kill; their pride makes them incapable of conceiving of Death as anything greater than a neighborhood bully who deserves a thrashing. And while the object of setting out to rid the world of death is a noble idea derived from an essentially Christian sentiment, it is also as arrogant as it is ignorant of the power of Death and the fallibility of man.

Thus it is a kind of hubris that leads the revelers to their destruction; indeed, had their motives been higher, their station more exalted, and their perception greater, they might have been participants in a tragedy à la Oedipus, instead of a mere exemplum of the sin of avarice. Avarice, within and without the tale, is indeed a sin; that is to say it is a result, an end-product of the flaw in human nature which permits man to sin. The Pardoner's Tale locates this flaw in man's pride, his proneness to overextend himself, his tendency to challenge those those things (e.g. Death) which are beyond challenge. In the same vein, the Pardoner exhibits pride in his cynical attitude toward both his subject and his listeners, the attitude that he alone is immune to punishment for the same sin he would have others eschew. Chaucer's epilogue to the tale gives us the satisfaction of seeing the Pardoner cut down to size.