accept a kind of transparency that they know to be false—even as they may wish that it were true. But this is not to say that the Pardoner is in some twisted way more “truthful” than the Parson. Instead it suggests that we must look again at the ideal, wholly simple Parson. In the General Prologue it is true that there is little to interrupt readers’ view of his transparent truthfulness.92 The Parson is an exemplar of holy duplicity, as the Prologue insists over and over: his words and deeds are in perfect harmony. And insofar as that appearance of perfection has been accepted, it has been notably unproductive of criticism about the Parson as a character precisely because there seems to be no one there who inflects the message. But this view can only be sustained if we limit ourselves to the third-person General Prologue portrait. Just as theoretical texts on preaching suggest, the image of a perfectly disembodied exemplar can only be sustained outside the context of performance. At the points where the Parson ceases to be a third-person figure characterized by the narrator and speaks in a voice of his own, he inevitably complicates—without necessarily invalidating—his own status as an ideal.
As Lee Patterson has noted, “the inclusion of the teller with the tale personalizes the meanings that emerge,” and the Parson’s Tale is not exempt from this phenomenon; the Parson’s embodiment, his status as a character, is sometimes regarded as undermining his message.93 Patterson sees the “personalization” of the tales as encouraging “a dramatic reading that discounts any authoritative significance” and suggests that the Parson’s Tale only escapes this limitation by transcending the frame narrative that produces it; it “takes its origin in the very dramatic and realistic context which it will dismiss.”94 As Peggy Knapp points out, however, such a view involves a paradox: “If [the Parson’s] doctrine is true, there need be no fictions, and yet he formulates this doctrine within a fiction—he is a fiction. Either the unchanging realm (from God’s vantage point) of the revealed Word swallows the flawed, historical, uncertain world of experience, or vice versa.”95 Knapp’s point about this paradox is well taken, but I would argue that there is more room for negotiation than she, or Patterson, allows. The figure of the Parson, in effect, shows that neither the unchanging realm of authority nor the fluctuating world of experience does swallow the other; instead, these realms coexist and interact, as they must do for every preacher.96 At the end of the Parson’s Tale the figure of the individual speaker fades into textuality—but only to give way to the voice of another speaker, of Chaucer in the Retractions, a reminder that while the origins of the voice are never guaranteed, it is always a voice that comes from someone. Preaching is precisely the attempt to bring the unchanging, revealed Word into the uncertain, human world, and the duplicity required of the preacher reflects that disparity. We need not regard Chaucer’s depiction of an idealized preacher as a mere setup for yet another anticlerical critique to argue that it does in the end acknowledge the impossibility of that single-minded ideal. If the Parson’s individuality to some extent diminishes his capacity to convey authority, that same individuality whatever its costs, is simultaneously essential to his existence and effectiveness as a preacher. We can see how physicality both gives and takes away authority in the Parson’s speech, the best available proxy for his embodied performance.97 It is as an audience of his textual speech that we imitate a sermon audience; it is only through language that these characters are present, and only through their speech, as distinguished from the narrator’s descriptions of them, that they take on a life of their own. We catch a first glimpse of the Parson as a person, not just an ecclesiastical model, in the General Prologue portrait’s question, “if gold ruste, what shal iren do?” and its reference to the shame of “a shiten shepherde and a clene sheep,” both of which allude to the priest’s duty to act as an example.98 As Jill Mann observes, in the passage as a whole “we realise that once again, it is the character himself who is speaking. It is not the moralist commentator who quotes from the gospel and adds the ‘figure’ about rusting gold; it is the Parson himself.”99 Such language begins to constitute the Parson as a personality distinct from the abstract ideal of the good priest.
Later instances of the Parson’s speech reinforce the hints of his individual character in the General Prologue. The epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale depicts the Parson’s objection to Harry Bailly’s swearing, which draws Harry’s jocular claim to “smelle a Lollere in the wynd.”100 The Parson’s rebuke—itself slightly jocular, reproving without being harsh, as the General Prologue had promised—increases our sense of him as an individual, and Harry’s mock-accusation points to the specificity of the Parson’s response, the way it makes him a potential participant in a recognizable political and religious debate.101 The Parson may or may not have heretical secrets, but Harry’s ability to imagine such a thing, based on the Parson’s conversation, is enough to remove the latter from his abstract portrait frame and put him into a world of human interactions. Both Harry and the modern critics who try to break down the Parson’s appearance of perfection could be accused of misreading, but in fact their suspicions are an entirely foreseeable response to the presentation of an idealized performer. By making that performer’s humanness clear through his individual voice, Chaucer makes it inevitable that such questions will be asked about the Parson, whatever their answers may be.
The Parson’s involvement in, and awareness of, a human context can also be seen in his self-presentation in the prologue to his tale. Usually it is his strictures against exempla and alliteration, his rejection of embodied forms, that draw attention here. Less noticed is his initial address to the pilgrims, which demonstrates a sensitivity to his audience:
Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest,
Whan I may sowen whete, if that me lest?
For which I seye, if that yow list to heere
Moralitee and vertuous mateere,
And thanne that ye wol yeve me audience,
I wol ful fayn, at Cristes reverence,
Do yow plesaunce leefful, as I kan.102
He begins with an image that personalizes a biblical injunction, the rhetorical question and first-person form making it almost conversational.103 The last five lines of this passage alternate between concern for the audience and concern for the text. The first and third lines address the audience’s willingness to hear; the second and fourth offer what the speaker can provide (virtuous doctrine, a good will, and reverence for Christ). The final line combines these areas into “plesaunce leefful,” the linking of what will please the audience with what will benefit them. The address as a whole is nothing other than a captatio benevolentiae, an astute rhetorical move that shows that the Parson is well aware of his need, as Alan of Lille put it, to “capture the good will of his audience by his own person through humility, and by the usefulness of the material he presents.”104 Without questioning the “truth” of his performance of virtue, we may acknowledge that it is inevitably a performance. By creating the Parson as an embodied character, however sketchily, and by giving him a voice of his own, Chaucer shows that though he makes very different choices, he is involved in and aware of the same network of audience and performance that the Pardoner manipulates so skillfully.
What Chaucer’s preachers seem at first to present, then, is a study in holy simplicity versus unholy duplicity, a black-and-white dichotomy, and on a certain abstract level it remains true that the Pardoner represents an immoral preacher, the Parson a virtuous one. The context of preaching theory suggests further possibilities: not just the holy duplicity that Chaucer’s General Prologue portrait of the Parson so insistently foregrounds, but unholy simplicity—the Pardoner’s single-minded pursuit of gain, so single that he seems at times to consist only of that quality.105 Ultimately, however, this opposition also proves too simple; the juxtaposition and the embodiment of polarized abstractions, and the frame in which they are set, help to show why such dichotomies are unsustainable. In giving his characters voices of their own, Chaucer disallows our reliance on the voice
