DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST:

CHAUCER, JOHN GAY, AND

THE PECUNIARY ANUS
by Tiffany Beechy
The bawdiest of the Canterbury Tales have always been problematic for
the critics, as the responses documented by Peter Beidlerwhich range
from apologetics to effacement and outright dismissalattest.1 The fact
that someone has documented the reception of Chaucers scatology
does imply, however, that the door to this aspect of Chaucerian satire has
begun to open. Furthermore, that scatology has already become a legitimate domain in literary criticism of other periods is given witness by
such recent critical collections as Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature
and Art: Studies in Scatology.2 Although it is evident from the superabundance of dirty humor in medieval texts that medieval readers (readers
in the broad sense of cultural cryptographers) knew well how to parse
scatological figures, knowledge of the satiric functionthat is, the poeticsof scatology has to a great extent fallen away, particularly within the
academy. As Beidler shows in the case of the Millers Tale, taking
Chaucers dirty parts seriously restores them to their integral place
within the narrative and poetic framework and produces satisfying readings of individual tales that have been traditionally bowdlerized or
ignored.
One such tale is the Summoners Tale. Its fierce scatology has not, to my
knowledge, been approached in close study. The crudeness of this tale,
with its sustained meditation upon a fart, has received two main interpretations. The first recognizes the rivalries between the Canterbury pilgrims
and sees the Summoners awful joke as a low blow to the Friar, whose
tale has just targeted him. The second view interprets the farts scatology
insofar as it participates in the medieval fabliau tradition of bawdy humor
and inversion. It is not my goal to discount either interpretation, as both
offer insights into the complex ethos and generic tradition of the
Canterbury Tales.3 Still, neither a dramatic nor a historicist account explains
how the satirewith its (literally) fundamental scatologyworks. Why,
for instance, in a satire on greed, does the Summoner choose a fart to
THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2006.
Copyright 2006 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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humiliate the Friar? In what ways does the mock-Pentecostal divvying of

the fart in the second half of the tale construe the friars greed?4
Fortunately but not fortuitously, to address these questions we have
recourse to another scatological satire, John Gays An Answer to the
Sompners Prologue of Chaucer (1717). Usually remembered for his one
big hit, the perpetually adapted Beggars Opera, Gay wrote the Answer
imitating the style of Chaucer, whom the Augustans admired for his satiric
powers if not for his versification. Though it evinces his unique ability as a
parodic satirist,5 Gays poem has remained virtually invisible to two and a
half centuries of criticism. By comparing the ways the two texts reconfigure contemporary discourses of scatology and greed, I hope to shed light
on the internal logic of Chaucers scatological satire and begin to answer
the questions I have already posed: Why a fart? How does the fart function
in the text? How is the fart related to greed? I also seek to provide a preliminary account of Gays little-known satiric poem, since to my knowledge no substantial treatment of the Answer yet exists.
One reason Gays poem has been forgotten entirely and Chaucers
bawdy tale is often sanitized by exegesis is that both transgress categories of
decency in a way that Jonathan Goldberg describes as sodometric.6 Only
recently have critical apparatus emerged that are capable of dealing with
these operations. Goldbergs term, sodometries, draws on Foucaults observation that sodomy is a thoroughly confused category.7 Sometimes designating sex between men, sometimes anal sex between any two people,
many times a seeming host of practices and relations that might be
termed transgressive, sodomy, or as Goldberg queers the term,
sodometries (the plural most accurately describing the phenomenon),
specifies a subset of a cultures transgressive practices and relations. It
suggests not only that which is condemned as sodomitical, but also the
shifting cultural and symbolic processes that inscribe and inform
sodomy as a category.8 Mark Jordan has argued that Sodomy as a term
to head (sodometric) categories emerged as a theological expedient for
dealing with the very problem of desire, to isolate the erotic in its pure
state, where it could be described in frightening colors and condemned
without concession.9 Since human eroticism takes multiple, changeable, and elusive forms, it follows that a term invented to condemn
human eroticism will prove radically slippery in its significations.
Accordingly, Goldbergs analytic framework enables us to read the complex and somewhat mystifying sodomitic, specifically anal-scatologic
codes at work in and between Chaucers text and Gays as properly plural and always relationalthat is, as sodometric.
In Freudian understanding, the anus is the site of sexual organization
prior to the genital one, and thus a potential rival to dominant or
normative sexuality.10 Anality is both the ante- and antitype of genital

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eroticism in the symbolic order.11 Even in pre-psychoanalytic, high/low

models of human psychology, the anus often opposes the head: reason
and virtue have their seat in the higher region of the upper body, while
lust, meanness, and mortal flesh lurk down there.12 The anus is the primal locus, then, of evil, the antithesis to the thesis, the grave as opposed
to the birth portal.13 The most vivid and direct ways we have for describing one-hundred-and-eighty-degree wrongness, the opposite of proper
order, attest to this role of the anus: ass-backwards and backasswards;
arsy-versy; head-up-the-ass. Indeed, implicit in Goldbergs concept of
sodometries is the link between the physical act originally designated
by sodomy and the other transgressive practices that come under its
stigma. Thus, while the relationship is not to be taken as essential, in the
Western tradition the anus is often linked to transgressive sexuality and
from there to evil and abomination.
Chaucers text and Gays reply make use of the anus as the site of evil
and inversion, but also, more specifically, as the site of greed. In
medieval theology both greed and sodomitical behaviors were related to
luxuria, or excessive desire.14 The sin of Sodom and greedy practices
like usury were further linked because they violated the always tenuous
principle that desire must serve procreation. Sodomies of all kinds
(including masturbation, mutual fondling, and anal intercourse) violated the procreative purpose of sex. Usury and miserliness violated the
purpose of money and goods, which was, presumably, to aid human life.
Desiring too much to be productive is not the only vicious aspect of
greed, however. Excessive desire (which always threatens to include any
desire) turns the desired object itself into shit. In Chaucers text, in particular, the desired object is tainted in this way. Freuds explanation for
the ubiquitous human equation of money with filthfeces in particularinvokes the foundational role of feces as the first object of
exchange.15 It is the first thing of value to itself (because it is perceived
as part and product of itself) that the infant is asked to give up in
exchange for approval or some other reward. Every subsequent object of
exchangemoney especially, since the only value it has is exchange
valueretains the fecal association in the unconscious. Since the anal
stage is repudiated and its products are made filthy in later stages of symbolic organization and assimilation to a culture, things that retain association with feces in the unconscious also take on its filthiness and are
held, likewise, in an ambivalent state of repudiation as valuable but also
debasedhence the common moral impulse to eschew wealth as dirty
and evil: filthy lucre. The anal character, then, describes a subject
who has somehow failed to pass smoothly from the anal stage on to the
genital, and who thus exhibits tendencies toward miserliness, or anal
retention.

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Both Chaucers Summoners Tale and Gays Answer to the prologue

use the symbolic link between money and filth, and the moral-philosophical association of greed with sodomy, to satirize (in Chaucers case)
the abuse of ecclesiastical power and (in Gays) the inherent fraud of
speculative investment. Both poems, furthermore, employ literalizations (I use quotations because even material figurations are, of course,
figurative) of commonplace figurative language contemporary with the
authors. Chaucers Summoners Prologue and Tale make use of the allegorical tradition to associate literally the friars greed with anality in the
form of Satans erse and to assert the object of that greed, ultimately
money, as at once substanceless and excremental, in the form of a fart.
Gays poem employs Chaucers association of greed with the anus
along with the violent, punitive rhetoric of sodomy as it is coalescing on
the margins of increasingly capitalist eighteenth-century English cultureto critique the core value of that culture (financial greed), transposing Chaucers figure of the friars in the Devils anus in hell into the
most brutish of worldly just deserts. Gays chiasmic rematerialization of
Chaucers allegory (the airy nothing of the fart becomes the painful
something of Dan Sathanas) and his literalization of contemporary
financial metaphors highlight the prescience of Chaucers excremental
vision,16 which prefigures the end result of the process of reification he
witnessed beginning in the shift from barter to money economies and
the rise of the merchant classes.
Gay begins his poem by reminding us of the crucial elements of the
Summoners Prologue:
The Sompner leudly hath his Prologue told,
And saine on the Freers his Tale japing and bold;
How that in Hell they searchen near and wide,
And ne one Freer in all thilke place espyde,
But lo! the Devil turned his erse about,
And twenty thousand Freers wend in and out.
(16)17
As the speaker notes, the upshot of the Summoners Prologue is to appoint
the bowels of Satan, the lowest of the low, as the proper seat of friars:
By which in Jeoffrys rhiming it appears,
The Devils belly is the hive of Freers.
(78)

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Gay here takes up Chaucers description of the friars as bees in a hive,

swarming in and out of the infernal asshole. The image in Chaucer
seems to caricature fraternal sameness and inane group activity (the friars swarmen out [III 1693], all around hell, and home again with no
apparent purpose), consonant with mounting attacks against monastic
orders in the late fourteenth century. In Gays citation of the image,
however, the hive certainly also invokes the classical image of the busy
bee as a metaphor for industry (in the Aeneid, for example, describing
the building of Carthage), since this usage was standard in the early
eighteenth century. Contemporary writers employ the metaphor of the
bee almost as a trope when describing the burgeoning infrastructure,
economic complexity, and class differentiation in cities like London.
Invoking the hive establishes in the poem the ethos of a contemporary
urban economic reality that subtends the anachronism of the figure of
the friar (there were no friars in England, of course, by Gays day). We
are thus primed to receive satiric content relevant to early capitalist
urban England, despite the conceit of the friar and the faux-Chaucerian
form of the verse.
After summarizing the Summoners Prologue, Gays speaker begins his
story in answer, or reply: a friar from an abbey of Franciscans (grey
Freers), the most ascetic of the mendicant orders (though the abbey is
not poor but rather faire and rich [28]), decides to stay a night in a
vacant house that by local lore is purportedly haunted. He takes holy
water, beads, a book of saints lives, and a book of prayer for his stakeout
at the haunted house. He makes a cross on the keyhole of the door, and,
we are told,
Ne was there not a mouse hole in thilke place,
But he y-crossed hath by God his grace;
He crossed hath this, and eke he crossed that,
With benedicite and God knows what.
(4144)
The friar falls asleep half-dreaming of all the ways he might make a
profit from the house (hidden treasure, real estate speculation), upon
which Satan appears and flips the friar onto his face,
Displaying his nether cheeks ful broad and white.
Then quoth Dan Sathanas as he thwacked him sore,
Thou didst forget to guard thy postern door.
There is an hole which hath not crossed been:
Farewel, from whence I came I creepen in.
(6266)

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The verb creepen is another echo from the Summoners Prologue, for the
same word (crepten) in the prologue describes the friars reentry into
Satan (III 1698). As is typical in Gay, the echo takes on a darker tone
than in the original, for here creepwhich is almost charming, certainly unthreatening, in Chaucers realistic vision of bees crawling back
into the hivebecomes a sadistic euphemism for the Devils rape of the
friar. As the friars creep back into Satans erse, so Satan creeps back
into that of the friar, and indeed the poem elaborates this symmetry in
the last four lines:
Now plain it is ytellen in my verse,
If Devils in hell bear Freers in their erse,
On earth the Devil in Freers doth ydwell;
Were there no Freers, the Devil mought keep in hell.
(6770)
The moral of the story is clear: the site of evil in the world is friars, those
most strongly associated with imitatio Christi and the renunciation of
worldly vice, and thus the most damned by the sin of greed. The greedy
friar falls asleep with unwholesome thoughts of acquisition and is rudely
awakened to the poetic justice of the Devil creeping home to roost.
The Summoners Tale proper reveals that the symmetry between Gays
text and Chaucers in fact extends beyond the prologue. It elaborates,
through parody of medieval logic and allegoresis, the symbolic logic of
the friars greed. The sick layman Thomas (the name of the friar in Gays
poem), exhorted to give alms for the sake of his recovery, tells Friar John
he will indeed give a gift to the abbey on the condition that it be split
evenly among the brothers. He has the eager friar put his hand down his
back
and grope wel bihynde.
Bynethe my buttok there shaltow fynde
A thyng that I have hyd in pryvetee.
A! thoghte this frere, That shal go with me!
(III 214144)18
The friar in his greed for gold fails to suspect the impending scatological prank, and thus his greed makes him the deserving butt, so to speak,
of Thomass joke. The friars gift comes in fact as something of a relief
to the reader, who is expecting hard currency: Thomas lets a fart into
his hand.19 The friar thus receives a punch-line punishment analogous
to the thwacking of the friar in Gays poem. Friar John, too, indulges
in speculation about financial gain, wondering what Thomass gift will

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be, and it is on the heels of this speculation that he receives instead of

wealth a reward allegorizing the true scatological nature of the gold he
had desired.
After the infamous donation, the tale elaborates allegorically what
happens to (essentially scatological) money as its value is increasingly
reified within a social system. The friar addresses his complaint to the village lord, to whom he is confessor. His claim, however, is brushed aside,
and the problem of dividing something immaterial is addressed instead.
Whatever outrage exists around the lords table involves the posing of an
insoluble paradox. Upon hearing a squires bizarre but apparently satisfactory solution to the problem (offered on condition of a material
reward), involving a wagon wheel and a fart let onto the middle so that
both the sound and the stynk radiate along the spokes to the noses of
friars pressed against the ends, the lord pronounces Thomas a wit, ne
no demonyak (III 2292), and so ends the tale, as the Canterbury pilgrims are almoost at towne (III 2294). The deployment ad absurdum of
the tenets of scholastic logic enables the surreal effacement of the farts
scatology in favor of the ingeniousness of the squires solution. Once a
solution has been found to the paradox of the divided fart, the paradox
is seen not as a product of diabolical influence but as a reflection of high
intellectual order. Thomas is not only exonerated but praised for cleverness. The scatology of the fart, with its presumable filthiness and degradation (even sacrilege, since the fartee is a holy man), seems to be
invisible in the context of the quantitative problem within which
Thomas frames his gift. Thus the absurdity of the wagon-wheel solution,
logically arrived at and granted by common assent, suggests the absurdity of the reified value produced by social contract. This false value, of
course, eclipses real values of all kinds: the value of the metal of a coin,
the nourishment of the bread it might buy, the offensiveness of a fart.
Without these real values one may fall prey to humiliation like the
friars, to the most basic physical suffering of hunger, or, like John Gay
and thousands of fellow investors in the South Sea financial scheme, to
impoverishment in the event of a stock-market crash.
Gays adaptation of Chaucers allegory brings Chaucers critique of
unreal value into greater relief even as it responds to eighteenth-century
discursive and socioeconomic conditions. The greed in Gays poem
the speculative fever of market capitalismis quite different from the
greed of the friar in the Summoners Tale. In Chaucers poem the friar not
only wants gold; he asks the wife for rich food, and before he comes to
Thomass house he extorts all kinds of goodscloth, grain, meat, and
cheese, as well as moneyfrom the townspeople. Value in the
Summoners Tale moves in fact from greed for all kinds of goods as well as
money, to money with its basis in an abstraction, and, finally, to the

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premonitory idea (premonitory because it foretold things to come:

credit, bull markets, the bubble) of purely imaginary value. In Gay,
however, greed is entirely financial. In the beginning of the narrative, we
see that the vacant house is owned by
A Misere that had londs and tenement,
Who raketh from his villaines taxes and rent.
(1112)
There is no other apparent purpose for this detail except to situate the
greedy friar within the house of a greedy landlordto embed or frame
the central vice, embodied as it is in a figurative, anachronistic character, within a more familiar, contemporary character, the early modern
landowner. This familiar symbol of greed then serves as the backdrop
against which the new phenomenon of market capitalism appears. The
villagers stay away from the house because of rumors of all sorts of
ghosts, frightening noises, walking corpses, even a headless horseman,
many of which Gay features elsewhere as superstitions of country folk.20
They are kept away from the property, that is, on account of beliefs the
narrator clearly marks as insubstantial (shapes that feare createn to
itselfe), satirizing the wholly substanceless nature of speculative
investment:
The miller avoucheth, and all there about,
That they full oft hearen the hellish rout.
(1920)
One hears chains rattle; one sees a ghost; all fear collectively. The villagers are credulous, communally minded people, doomed to be the losers in the emerging market economy.
The villagers superstitious credulity is set against the steelier constitution of Friar Thomas, who, we are told at the outset, daren alone in
derke through churchyerds pass (30). The friar holds no stock, so to
speak, in baseless superstitions, and it is through his hard-headedness that
he hopes to gain an advantage over the others in the form of wealth. Friar
Thomass modern greed is more complex than that of the more traditional miser in the opening lines of the narrative, in that it is structured
by underlying transformations between immaterial and material values,
whereas the miser merely hoards money, the constant unit of material
exchange. We see these transformations schematically in the sequence of
the friars thoughts before he falls perilously asleep in the haunted
house. The friar wonders whether some murdere has occurred in the
house, and whether he will see a bloodye ghost, a reminder that

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whatever might be found of value in the house will by its nature be ill-gotten gains, entailing profit at the expense of someones misery. His mind
moves next to the idea of orphlines writings, which editors Vinton A.
Dearing and Charles E. Beckwith explain as documents revealing the
paternity of or conveying an inheritance to an orphan, someone bereft
of their watchful guardian.21 In the new financial world, indeed, there was
no one to watch over the hapless individual, whose fortune might be pilfered should the documents come into the wrong (or in the friars mind,
the right) hands:
Or that some orphlines writings here be stord,
Or pot of gold laine deep beneath a board:
Or thinketh hem, if he mought see no sprite,
The Abbaye mought buy this house cheape outright.
(5558)
Here the friars train of thought gathers momentum in his increasing
excitement over possible financial gains, as is apparent in the tumbling
Or . . . Or . . . Or repetition that structures the sequence of the Friars
final, most titillating ideas. Dearing and Beckwiths explanation makes
the orphlines writings form a neat bridge between the immaterial
apparition of the previous idea and the very material one that follows,
the pot of gold laine deep beneath a board. The documents of inheritance serve to guarantee wealth or identity, that is, they symbolize a value
other than that intrinsic to themselves. They are a paper currency. From
this mental trigger the friar is led to the idea of gold, material riches
intrinsically valuable. The thought of the gold leads him to cancel out
the very possibility of immaterial ghosts: if he mought see no sprite, /
The Abbaye mought buy this house cheape outright. All that exists for
him in this final idea is the solid, acquirable piece of property, nonetheless variable (read manipulable) in price, which he fantasizes about
buying cheape outright because of everyone elses immaterial belief
that it is haunted. He thinks of acquiring something for a price below its
intrinsic value, a price enabled by false beliefs: he imagines making a
solid investment. And that is just when Satan arrives:
As hem thus thinketh, anone asleep he lies,
Up starten Sathanas with saucer eyes.
(5960)
In Gays poem the friar is punished for a distinctly financial, early capitalist greed, in a way that mirrors Chaucers text while introducing the
element of (literal) sodomy. Paul Hammond traces a shift in the literary

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representation of male-male eroticism from Shakespeare to the early

eighteenth century, in which the code of courtly, platonic affection
ceased to be used, and male-male erotic relations were increasingly represented as sodomitical.22 At the same time, Hammond notes, sodomy
was narrowing to denote anal sex primarily, losing its former breadth of
meaning. Gays text recognizes the anality of greed and money, and,
exploiting their coincidence in this location (that is, the anus) with the
newly outed public discourse of buggery, renders the anal association between greed and sodomy literal in order to serve a pointed satire
to the early eighteenth century symbolic and economic orders of market capitalism.23
Gays allegorical materialism is consistent with the literary project of
opposing through satire the kind of [non-metaphorical, strictly referential] linguistic materialism that Swift and his fellow Scriblerians took to be
a defining characteristic of modern intellectual life,24 which was most
apparent in the publications and proceedings of the Royal Society. The
Scriblerians deplored the Societys use of language to convey uniformly
and without passion the findings of a mechanistic Scientific Method.
Satirizing the impossible dream of an unmetaphorical register of language involved finding ways to render strict referentiality absurd.
Literalism became the Scriblerians keenest satiric tool, as we see not only
in Gays reply to Chaucer but also in Swifts more famous Modest
Proposal.25 The satiric use of literal language forms a major point of
similarity between Gay and Chaucer, and Gays simultaneous engagement with both Chaucers allegory and the hip literalism of his own creative milieu sheds light on Chaucers satire and the theological significance
of its scatology.
The Scriblerians opposed the abuse of language and its essentially
metaphorical character by literalists like Francis Bacon. In the fourteenth
century, figures such as John Wycliffe and, more quietly, Geoffrey Chaucer
opposed the abuse of the spirit by the letter, in a reformist tradition
going back to Pauls mediation between Jewish law and the new dispensation in the early Christian Church. Seen in the light of a long history of
theological opposition to strict literalism, the fart, in its grotesque aping
of the Pentecostal Holy Spirit, does serious satirical work. The fart
provides not a gratuitous comic momentan example of inscrutable
medieval excessbut rather an allegorical embodiment of the degradation the spirit undergoes when it is overrun by the vice of greed, which
is literalism run amok, the substitution of the object for its value. The Holy
Spirit, as the epitome of real valuein medieval orthodoxy it was the
essential value as the precondition for salvationis aptly paired opposite
the greed-gotten fart because the fart, as we have seen, embodies
the opposite of value. It is at once the absolutely reified filthy object and

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insubstantial absence. This figuration hearkens us back to Augustines

assertion that evil has no substance but exists only as the absence of
good as it evokes, respectively, our Freudian and Marxist conceptions of
anality and commodification. Thus, in the figure of the fart, Chaucer
asserts at once the orthodox notion of the evil of greed as nothingness,
and the filthy, degraded nature of the object of exchange, which substitutes for the single real value of the spirit.
Chaucers Summoners Prologue and Tale are particularly fitting choices
as interlocutors or parodic referents for Gays critique of greed in early
capitalist England, as Chaucers satire in fact prefigures the paradox of
value and money that was to become such an issue in the new socioeconomic order of Gays England. The Summoners friar in Chaucers
poem asks for money and receives foul air. The fart embodies the essential transformation involved in the shift from material value (as found in
barter economies) to the abstract value on which money economies are
based, even when based on the value of the metal of the coin (since the
metal is not useful; it is only rare). The fart at once asserts the filthiness
of the money the friar had expected and its useless immateriality. One
of the most common metaphors for market speculation during the heyday of investment in the South Sea Company was the bubble (a
metaphor still in use today), and those who doubted the whole financial
scheme frequently likened this to a fart. The eighteenth-century satirists
saw clearly the troubling transformation of substance into nothing, real
value into imagined value, and linked it symbolically (and quite naturally, according to psychoanalysis) to the scatological. In the squires
solution to the paradox of the divided fart, there are twelve spokes along
which the fart radiates to reach twelve waiting friars, suggesting an
answer to the friars earlier rhetorical question, What is a ferthyng
worth parted in twelve? (III 1967). While a physical coin (ferthyng)
divided is of course worthless, the new currency, the imaginary value
of a fart divided evenly along wheel spokes, is accepted by all the characters within the Summoners narrative. However, this form of credit
is for us, for Chaucer, for the Canterbury pilgrims, and for Gay (that is,
anyone outside the narrative frame) obviously ridiculous. The absurdity
of immaterial value, theoretically infinitely divisible in constant increments (that the sound and the smell of the fart must diminish in their
division and in their passage down the spokes of the wagon wheel is
expressly denied), is what Gay recognized as apt to the emerging investment craze in contemporary England. Chaucers prefiguration of the
commodification of imaginary value afforded Gay an opportunity to
rematerialize contemporary metaphors and associations (the fart and
bubble jokes) surrounding speculative investment as well as to adapt a
critique of greed presciently applicable to the early capitalist ethos.

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An anonymous Englishman remarked before the South Sea Bubble

burst in 1720:
The additional rise of this stock above the true capital will be only
imaginary . . . all the fictitious value must be a loss to some
persons or other, first or last. The only way to prevent it to oneself must be to sell out betimes, and so let the Devil take the
hindmost.26
In Gays satire of financial greed and speculative investment, this is quite
literally what happens. The greedy, speculative friar, to quote a vulgar
but all too apt colloquialism, takes it in the ass. Gays London was itself
sodomitical in several ways: market schemes left thousands penniless;
the rampant injustice of the judicial system tormented the poor and
ignored organized crime (as satirized in The Beggars Opera); literature
was degraded by hacks and bourgeois intellectuals. The world was arsyversy. Gay thus rendered the sodomy of his society as literal sodomy
in the punishment of the greedy friar. In Chaucers text we see schematized the process of abstraction by which what is really anal, filthy, and
diabolical comes to be considered valuable, or wholesome (heimlich)
within the social network. Everyone in the lords household accepts the
ingenuity of the absurd wagon wheel, ignoring the physical filthiness
and obvious disrespect of the fart in favor of an abstraction. Chaucers
imaginative fate for the friars, the dupes of this process of psychic money
laundering, is to occupy the most humiliating and most symbolically
appropriate seat in the infernal house, the anus of the Devil himself.
The friar in Gays poem comes in the end to embody both dupe and
Devil through the consummation of his anal rape. Thus the vanity of any
attempt at protecting ones assets, so to speak, is rendered savagely clear.
Gays adaptation highlights Chaucers complex and highly scatological use of allegory in several ways. As theological interpretations of the
Summoners Tale have suggested, the fart is aptly chosen to humiliate the
friar because the friar is a literalist who betrays the spirit. Likewise Gays
friar thinks his obsessive observation of ritual will protect him from the
spirits heparadoxicallydoesnt really fear. However, Gays text also
brings into relief the transformations the friars greed undergoes on the
way to its anal climax and highlights Chaucers concern with a crisis of
value that is broader than a strictly theological reading implies. The
friars displays of greed follow a trajectory of abstraction in which real
goods, such as the cloth he begs and the meal he does not refuse, give
way to coins, which are valuable only because they procure other things.
The coins are then doubly transformed: first into excrement (this stage,
though not depicted, is implied by logic and in our suspense while the

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friar gropes down Thomass behind) and then into excremental air. The
second half of the tale, centering on the paradox of the divided fart and
the squires solution, deploys the abstracted value of the fart in a process
of reification that renders the pretense of that value untenable even
while it satirizes a whole communitys acceptance of it.
Gays use of the Summoners Tale, in linking contemporary, financial
fart metaphors to the fart in the tale, and in extending the transformation sequence beyond imaginary value in a full circle back to the horribly materialized originary evil of Satan (whose anus in fact begins
Chaucers tale and Gays reply), thus enables us to see Chaucers scatology as grappling with fundamental issues of value and social relations
through the traditional mode of allegory. Further, unless we presume
that the eighteenth-century pamphleteers were all Chaucerian parodists, the remarkable coincidence of the fart metaphors describing the
South Sea Bubble and the Summoners pecuniary fart are further indications of the link between anal scatology and economics with its associated vice of greed, which thus far only psychoanalysis has addressed.
Certainly we can no longer dismiss the dirty parts in Chaucer as mere
abruptions of the medieval mind from proper literary decorum.
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon
beechy@post.harvard.edu
1. Peter Beidler, Art and Scatology in the Millers Tale, Chaucer Review 12 (1977):
90102, at 9091.
2. Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim, eds., Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art:
Studies in Scatology (Burlington, Vt., 2004).
3. Treatments of the fart as a gesture toward the Friar are surveyed in Linda
Georgianna, Lords, Churls, and Friars: The Return to Social Order in The Summoners
Tale, in Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Susanna Greer Fein,
David Raybin, and Peter C. Braeger (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1991), 14972, at 14950. See Roy
Peter Clark, Chaucer and Medieval Scatology (Ph.D. Diss., SUNY Stony Brook, 1974), for
an extensive treatment of the Summoners scatology as biblical parody. Clark cites two
works in this vein: Alan Levitan, The Parody of Pentecost in Chaucers Summoners Tale,
University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (1971): 23646; and Bernard Levy, Biblical Parody in the
Summoners Tale, Tennessee Studies in Literature 11 (1966): 4560. For another reading of the
fart as biblical parody, see Ian Lancashire, Moses, Elijah, and the Back Parts of God: Satiric
Scatology in Chaucers Summoners Tale, Mosaic 14 (1981): 1730.
4. For most of this essay I will be referring to the friar within SumT, not the Friar
whom the Summoner mocks by its telling.
5. I rely on the distinction drawn by Linda Hutcheon between parody and satire:
parody involves a text responding to another text, whereas satire involves a response to
something in the world outside written texts. Moreover, parody, unlike satire, is not necessarily hostile or derisive in its main approach to a text, whereas satire by definition criticizes and mocks. For a concise summary, see her A Theory of Parody (New York, 1985), 49.

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6. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford,

1992).
7. See Goldberg, Sodometries, 1822, for his initial treatment of Foucault.
8. Goldberg explains that sodometrie was a synonym for sodomy in the
Renaissance, the focal period of his book: The word has been chosen . . . not only because
of its historical pertinence to the Renaissance texts to be discussed, but also for its nonceword suggestiveness, as if sodomy were a relational term, a measure whose geometry we do
not know, whose (a)symmetries we are to explore (xv).
9. Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997), 176.
10. See Sigmund Freud, Character and Anal Erotism, Complete Psychological Works,
ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1959), 16775.
11. Note that neither anality nor sodomy is synonymous with (male) homosexuality. The most basic task of Goldbergs book is to tease apart what has become in the modern era a vicious homophobic fusion.
12. The male/female binarism is often mapped onto this schema as well, the female
taking on all the associations of the flesh, sin, and mortality, while, needless to say, the male
assumes the traits of virtue, reason, and the immortal soul.
13. Jeffrey Masten, Is the Fundament a Grave?, in The Body in Parts, ed. David
Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York, 1997), 12945, discusses the opposition of the anus
to the vagina as procreative locale in dominant discourses of the Renaissance. The motif
linking sinners and sin not only with the anus and excrement but also with the very worst,
most filthy anus, that of Satan, is well attested throughout the medieval period. Numerous
paintings depict Satan excreting sinners into hell, and abundant cautionary tales involve
the Devil infiltrating the unwary mortal on the privy. See Martha Bayless, The Story of the
Fallen Jew and the Iconography of Jewish Unbelief, Viator 34 (2003): 14256, at 148.
14. For a full discussion of the theological implications of sodomy in the Middle
Ages, see Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 2944.
15. Psychoanalysis offers the only model I know of that explains the proliferation of
scatological images in these satires against greed. We might, alternatively, assert simply that
money is equated with feces everywhere, across cultures, and invoke the long-recognized
connection between greed and the anus encapsulated in the colloquial anal personality.
I also wish to make clear, in light of Lee Pattersons recent article (Chaucers Pardoner on
the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies, Speculum 76 [2001]: 63880), that
I use Freuds analytic models as I use those of Goldberg, which is to say, for their analytic
usefulness and aptness to particular representations, not for their real-world truth value.
Patterson seems not to acknowledge what has become a fundamental working distinction
and commonplace among literary critics: that Freud is useful and incisive as theorist and literary critic but frightfully problematic as medical professional and empirical scientist; that
the fact that he is problematic in one epistemological application does not negate his usefulness in another. From medieval hermeneutics to Victorian psychoanalysis to deconstruction, theory has always existed in minds, necessarily a product and producer of
representation. To insist upon empirical truth value in all literary scholarship is to misconstrue both its object (language and its artifacts) and its goal (a productively open question).
16. Norman Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New
York, 1959), credits this term to Middleton Murrays study of Jonathan Swift, one of Gays
close associates (179).
17. All quotations are from John Gay, An Answer to the Sompners Prologue of
Chaucer, in Vinton A. Dearing and Charles E. Beckwith, eds., John Gay: Poetry and Prose, 2
vols. (Oxford, 1974), 1:198200.
18. All quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn.
(Boston, 1987).

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19. In true Chaucerian style, with its Virgilian affection for detail, it is a very bad fart:
Ther nys no capul, drawynge in a cart, / That myghte have lete a fart of swich a soun (III
215051). This description, however, like the description of the fart in MilT as a thunderclap, serves also to foreshadow the final twist of the plot: the squires solution of the wagon
wheel (Beidler, Art and Scatology, 9697).
20. Dearing and Beckwith, eds., John Gay, 2:57879.
21. Dearing and Beckwith, eds., John Gay, 2:579.
22. Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford,
2002), 2128.
23. The interplay between Gays poem and Chaucers SumT suggests contours in the
history of sexuality. Chaucers literalizing satire makes use of the broad potential of
medieval sodometries, housing the friars in Satans anus, transposing money into a fart, in
a procession of grotesque inversions. Gays treatment of the same sodometric nexus involving greed, money, and the anus, coalesces squarely on the physical act of anal penetration,
suggesting that by the latter period the previously plural-transgressive sodomy has
become fixed as a singular transgressive act.
24. Brean Hammond, Scriblerian Self-Fashioning, Yearbook of English Studies 18
(1988): 10824, at 110.
25. The difference between literal and figurative, of course, lies in the social dynamics of the speech act. Visitors from Mars coming upon Swifts A Modest Proposal would
have no way of knowing whether eating babies were an absurd or an earnest suggestion,
or that it literalizes common figurative terms for ruthless exploitation (such as to eat
ones young or to prey upon). This social dependence is at the heart of some of the
knottiest conundrums in medieval scholarship. Without a key to the sociolinguistic
assumptions contemporary speakers share, it is often impossible to determine what a given
text means.
26. Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (New
York, 1999), 69.