Present Panic in The Merchant’s Tale

Present Panic in The Merchant’s Tale Glenn Burger Queens College, CUNY Modern criticism of The Merchant’s Tale has remained curiously preoccupied with two related questions: first, how much the character of the newly wed and supposedly bitter Merchant in the tale’s prologue affects the tale, and second, the tale’s ‘‘apparent failure of decorum , its mixing of genres, styles, voices, and tones, of pagan and Christian elements, even of narrative levels.’’1 Originating with Kittredge and J. S. P. Tatlock and followed by G. G. Sedgewick, E. T. Donaldson, Norman T. Harrington and others, the prevailing critical tradition has seen the tale as a darkly reductive satire of marriage dominated by the bitterness and cynicism of the Merchant.2 This view has also led many readers of the tale to see the so-called ‘‘marriage encomium ’’ (IV.1267–1392) at its beginning not as January’s voice but as a direct intervention by the disgruntled Merchant into the marriage debate .3 Dissenting opinions have challenged a too-close identification of Merchant and January and focused instead on the tale’s comic features as a lighthearted satire of the ‘‘old lover’’ figure in the tradition of fabThis material was first published in Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2002); reproduced by permission of the University of Minnesota Press (copyright by the Regents of the University of Minnesota). 1 The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 885. 2 George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1915), 201–3; J. S. P. Tatlock, ‘‘Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale,’’ Modern Philology 33 (1936): 367–81, rpt. In Chaucer Criticism: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960); G. G. Sedgewick, ‘‘The Structure of The Merchant’s Tale,’’ University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (1948): 337–45; E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone Press, 1979; rpt. Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth Books, 1983), 30–45; Norman T. Harrington, ‘‘Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale: Another Swing of the Pendulum,’’ PMLA 86 (1971): 25–31. 3 For a survey of critical opinion, see Donald R. Benson, ‘‘The Marriage ‘Encomium’ in the Merchant’s Tale: A Chaucerian Crux,’’ Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 48–60. 49 ................. 9680$$ $CH2 11-01-10 12:34:07 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER liau and folktale.4 More recently, Lee Patterson has attempted to cut across this critical divide by attending to the complexities of the Merchant ’s class position as they relate to the subjectivity in the tale and account for the many apparent contradictions of the Merchant’s presentation of himself and his tale. For Patterson, The point is not that the Merchant nihilistically believes nothing but rather than [sic] he simultaneously does and does not believe everything. Teller of an almost perfectly self-canceling tale, the Merchant is revealed as searching for but unable to find a system of values, beliefs, and meanings—an ideology—by which to endow his world with meaning. . . . Moreover, and most brilliantly, he [Chaucer] shows us that what this instability of social identity precipitates is an ideology of the subject. Lacking a secure social identity, the Merchant is overwhelmed by an inner selfhood, what he calls at the outset the ‘‘soory herte’’ (1244) that his tale seeks to silence but everywhere expresses. Thus, for Patterson, the Merchant’s lack of a social identity and thus a secure prospect on the world drives him to focus ‘‘with obsessive attention upon the inner landscape of unsatisfied desire that is staged in his own failed marriage.’’5 And this deflection of the animating psychological dynamic of the tale from his social identity as merchant to his failed marriage accounts for the contradictions that the tale harbors.6 Patterson makes, I think, an extremely valuable intervention into the critical stalemate that has so often characterized critical approaches to 4 See, for example, Bertrand Bronson, In Search of Chaucer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), and ‘‘Afterthoughts on the Merchant’s Tale,’’ Studies in Philology 58 (1961): 583–96; Robert M. Jordan, ‘‘The Non-Dramatic Disunity of the Merchant...

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