Ernest into Game

I was interested by Euge's post below unpacking some of the eucharistic implications of the Canon Yeoman's Tale - another resonance of the theme of transmutation and changing one substance into another. In particular, this struck me because I had been thinking about the Manciple's Tale in exactly these terms.

I remember flipping through this book once as an undergraduate (it was a friend of mine, a philosophy major, who was actually reading it), and one of the points made therein is that whenever any characters in a story share food and drink, it's communion. Specifically, I have in mind the reconciliatory gesture made by the Manciple to the Cook:

And wite ye what? I have heer in a gourde
A draghte of wyn, ye, of a ripe grape,
And right anon ye shul seen a good jape.
The Cook shal drynke thereof, if I may,
Up peyne of deeth, he wol nat seye me nay (82-86).

This sharing of the "wyn...of a ripe grape" restores the communal bonds frayed by the Manciple's first abusive speech, an imperilment of the associational form that the Manciple himself will revisit at the end of his tale: "A tonge kutteth freendshipe al a-two" (342). As partaking of the eucharistic wine makes members of the Church into one body, so the Manciple's sharing of wine with the Cook reintegrates the two into the harmonious body of the pilgrimage. Indeed, the "good drynke" (96) (echoes of the miracle at Cana here too) works a transmutational miracle precisely like eucharistic transubstantiation, of the kind, moreover, that so conspicuously evaded the Canon and his Yeoman: it turns lead to gold, "rancour and disese," to "acord and love" (97-98).

Of course, the mystical solemnity of the Eucharist could not be farther from the mood of this scene, in which the Manciple, in the spirit of a "jape" (84), gets the already sodden Cook still more drunk. But this is precisely the point, too: "Bacus," besides turning the dross of communal discord into the gold of renewed "freendshipe," also "kanst turnen ernest into game," solemnity into a jape - sentence into solas? The Manciple's Tale works such a transmutation on its predecessor, turning the embittered declamations of the Yeoman into a general air of lighthearted japery. The narrative styles of the two speakers, for example, are both highly non-linear and digressive, but for opposite reasons: the Yeoman couldn't stick to his story and the Manciple, it seems, won't. Where the Yeoman tells his tale as he lives his life, methodically trying to conclude and perpetually unable to, with the Manciple we get a sense, as we did with such other consummate performers as the Wife of Bath or the Nun's Priest, of the sheer pleasure of tale-telling, the joys of delaying the conclusion and prolonging the "game." Where the Yeoman spoke "for noon oother cause" than to deliver his sentence about the impossibility of transmutation, the Manciple, I propose, subordinates sentence to solas and thereby effects a transmutation of the Yeoman's "ernest" into "game."

What clinches this, for me, is the manner in which the Manciple delivers his sentence at the end of his tale. He repeats, rephrases, and stretches out his moral in a way that I find impossible to take seriously. It's moral overkill, to a parodic extent. This highly overstated and overdramatized conclusion satirizes the Yeoman's failure to conclude, as the Manciple packs all of the Yeoman's repetitive restatements of his "poynt" into the kind of emphatic narrative and moral climax that eluded his predecessor.

It may seem difficult to square this interpretation of the Manciple as performer, a narrator who speaks more for the joy of narrating than to deliver any particular point through his narration, with the content of the tale itself. The story of the crow is an injunction against unguarded speech, a warning to "taketh kep what that ye seye" (310), and, in an important sense, a story about the end of story that sets the stage for the end of the Canterbury tale-telling itself. After the crow learns his lesson about the perils of unpragmatic speech, the rest, except for the Parson's very pragmatic and sentence-driven tale, is silence. I think it's important to note, though, that the crow only gets into trouble when he tries to deliver a message. It his attempt to convey a sentence to Phebus that ruins everyone - crow, Phebus, and Phebus' poor wife. When the crow is just singing - "Therwith in al this world no nyghtyngale / Ne koude, by an hondred thousand deel, / Syngen so wonder myrily and weel" (136-138) - there's no problem. What is more, when all it is doing is performing beautifully like this, the crow is described in terms altogether relevant to the Canterbury narrators: "And countrefete the speche of every man /He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale" (134-135). The crow here sounds, if anything, like Chaucer himself, counterfeiting the speech of twenty-eight different personae as he composes the Canterbury Tales. The point, I think, is that the point isn't everything. "Singing" should not simply be a means of delivering morals or messages: pleasure, beauty, solas, the joy of telling a tale for its own sake, matters as well.

The Manciple's Tale, in other words, close to the end of the pilgrimage and the collection, is still engaged in the debate over the proper roles and functions of narrative that has been going on since the beginning, when the Host requested "Tales of best sentence and moost solaas." The Manciple transmutes the Canon's Yeoman's sentence into solas, "ernest into game," and thereby demonstrates the ability to transmute that the Yeoman sought and never found. But it is surely significant that this miraculuous transmutation and the mock-eucharist that signals it takes place under the sign of "Bacus." Practically a stone's throw away from Canterbury, "worshipe and thank" is being offered not to Becket but to this pagan "deitee" (101). This implies that the narrative theory offered in the Manciple's Tale, as attractive and powerful as it may be (particularly compared to its predecessor), falls short in its own way, thereby setting us up for the Parson's Tale.